The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

by Masha Gessen

This is all nothing but strange games, an imitation of democracy. The candidates are copying each other’s platforms. You can tell ahead of time what they are going to say. What they are really doing is creating a one-party system, which is the road to authoritarianism. We’ll probably see parties that will pretend they are the opposition, or the quasi-opposition, and they will by turn kowtow to the government and criticize it. But their true function will be to prop up the one-party system. If the Bolsheviks had been smarter, they would have done this themselves—created a dozen such little bedbugs that will run up and down the body of society. ALEXANDER NIKOLAEVICH YAKOVLEV had never before let himself sound so testy in public. But in April 2005 he had just finished a lecture tour that had taken him across Russia, sapping his will and his wish to sound civil. “We are laying down a nationalist future for ourselves,” he told a journalist. The word “nationalist” remained one of the most damning in his vocabulary. “I am seeing Stalin’s mug displayed everywhere, every day, and people are eating it up. It is the face of a nationalist, a chauvinist, a murderer. But we are being told that if we look into it, he wasn’t so bad.”