The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

by Masha Gessen

Homo Sovieticus was not indoctrinated. In fact, Homo Sovieticus did not seem to hold particularly strong opinions of any sort. His inner world consisted of antinomies, his objective was survival, and his strategy was constant negotiation—the endless circulation of games of doublethink. But the researchers saw hope. Younger people seemed less “Soviet.” Asked to define a festive occasion, for example, respondents over the age of fifty were most likely to name official holidays, beginning with the days of military glory (Soviet Army Day and Victory Day) while the younger ones would say, “when you’ve gotten lucky” or “when you can get together with friends and have a drink.” Asked to describe their greatest fear, the older people would say “war” while the younger ones said “humiliation.” Asked to name the most significant event of the twentieth century, the older respondents most often said “victory in the Great Patriotic War” while the younger ones mentioned Stalinist Terror more often than anything else.