The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

by Masha Gessen

Homo Sovieticus was caught in an infinite spiral of lies: pretending to be, pretending to have, pretending to believe, and pretending not to. The fakery concerned the most basic of facts and the most fundamental of values, and what lay at the bottom of the spiral was an absence: “even to understand the word ‘doublethink’ involved the use of doublethink.” The system destroyed the individual and the fabric of society: nothing was possible in the absence of everything, resulting, wrote Levada, in “the falling standards of education, culture, morality, in the degradation of all of society.” If the Soviet person was ultimately an absence, then he could not reproduce. “Therefore we can view the Homo Sovieticus as a transient historical event,” concluded Levada. The Soviet man would go extinct, and so would the USSR.

Gorbachev, though he may not have followed Alexander Nikolaevich’s recommendations precisely, had been doing nothing but looking for a way out instead of solutions.

Ha. I know the type.

The only way forward was to stop Gorbachev’s incessant political zigzagging. If Gorbachev was not going to lead decisive political and economic reform, then Alexander Nikolaevich would try to do it himself. “I must be, I absolutely must be honest before my country, before my people, before my self!” he wrote. “I shall seek dignified ways to fight incipient fascism and the Party’s reactionism, to fight for the democratic transformation of our society. I don’t have that much time left.”29 Alexander Nikolaevich was speaking not so much about the time he personally had left—he was sixty-eight, just eight years older than both Gorbachev and Yeltsin—as about the country, where, he felt, the window of opportunity for change had nearly closed.

On July 20, 1991, he delivered an inspired speech at the founding congress of his new movement. He spoke of the painful discoveries that he had made, most of them in the six years since perestroika began: We have fallen two epochs behind. We have missed the postindustrial era and the information era. As a result, our society is deeply ill. Our souls are permanently empty. We have grown to presume everyone guilty at all times, thus creating hundreds of thousands of guards watching over our morality, conscience, purity of world view, compliance with the wishes of the authorities. We have turned truth into a crime. We have robbed nature to within a breath of its life. We have created crime, queues, rudeness, corruption that goes all the way up from a store’s truck unloader to a government minister. We have ostracized intellectualism and fostered a regime of the ignorant. . . . Today we are living as though in two worlds at once. The old Stalinist world does not want to leave, and it is holding on to everything that can still prop it up. The new world is struggling to stay afloat within the old structures and often begins to act in accordance with their rules. . . . Over the last seventy years the Communist Party of the Soviet Union has been not a party but an organization of administrative command, integrated into the structures of state as its primary Legislator, Distributor, Controller, and Monopolist on the Truth. . . . None of this is said by way of reproach. These are le...

Tatiana and Masha had its two rooms and a kitchen all to themselves, but now Tatiana was being harassed by the reketiry—a new Russian word that meant “racketeers”—a mafia in the making that was trying to ride on the coattails of private enterprise in the making. Most of these guys ran primitive protection rackets, promising to be the krysha—cover—that would shield you from others like them. Lately they had established a permanent post outside Tatiana’s apartment door. She did not want to go there with her child, so they went to Tatiana’s parents’ apartment instead.

The evolution of post-Soviet Russian into a "mobocracy", expressed here at the ground level.

That afternoon Gorbachev held a press conference in which he said, “I have come back to a different country.” He said that there had been an attempt to return the country to a totalitarian state and it had failed. At some point, Gorbachev had started using the word “totalitarian” to describe the regime that now seemed, finally, to have toppled. With that out of the way, he said, he would now press ahead with a new union treaty. He had already appointed ministers to replace the rebels in the Soviet government.

But what country was this? “Does the Soviet Union still exist?” became the conversation opener of the day, the week, and the autumn. The Soviet Union seemed to exist, but its form was elusive. Yeltsin’s Russian Republic summarily subsumed some of the Union’s governing mechanisms. Yeltsin also plainly strong-armed Gorbachev into canceling some of his first post-coup appointments. Most important, he made Gorbachev appoint an outsider of Yeltsin’s choosing to run the Soviet KGB and then added the dismantling of the agency to the man’s job description.43 On August 23 and August 25, Yeltsin signed decrees that suspended the activities of both the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Russian Republic’s own Communist Party. On August 27—five days after the coup—Yeltsin appointed Boris Nemtsov, Zhanna’s father, to run the Nizhny Novgorod region. Only three of Russia’s eighty-nine regions had leaders who had been elected, their posts newly created during perestroika: the mayors of Moscow and Leningrad and the president of Tatarstan. The rest of the regions were still run by Party structures, which were now literally, physically being abandoned.

Less than two weeks later, on December 25, Gorbachev addressed his countrymen as president for the last time: “In light of what’s happened, with the foundation of the Commonwealth of Independent States, I am resigning my post as president of the USSR.”46 The Soviet Union ceased to exist.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, who predicted the Soviet collapse—and the 1991 coup—wrote that a basic paradox would bring the country down: its economy had dead-ended, and to survive economically it would have to reform politically, which would inevitably destroy the state’s entire system. But if, he posited, the country wanted to preserve its political system, it would fail economically.

Princeton historian Stephen Kotkin wrote the story of the Soviet collapse as precipitated by Gorbachev himself, by oscillating between pursuing reform and not, constantly trying to fight a process he had set in motion.

University of California at Berkeley anthropologist Alexei Yurchak has also written that the Soviet Union was brought down by its own paradoxes, falling into the gap between the governing ideology and lived reality—a gap that exists and can produce a crisis in any society.

Soviet society had been forbidden to know itself, and had no native language to describe and define what had happened. The occasional fortochkas that opened up the possibility of self-examination were usually too small to allow scholars to adjust and adapt imported models, or to invent their own. Yurchak, who grew up in the Soviet Union but received his graduate education in the United States in the 1990s, provides probably the most obvious example of the ill fit of foreign models. He lacks the tools to explore the ways in which the gaps between ideology and reality in the Soviet Union differed from the gaps in Western countries, for which his model was devised. In functioning democracies the contradictions between avowed ideals and reality can be and often are called out, causing social and political change. That does not eliminate the built-in gap, but it has a way of making societies a little more democratic and a little less unequal, in spurts. Totalitarian ideology allows no such correction. Hannah Arendt maintained that any ideology can become totalitarian, but for that to happen it needs to be reduced to a single simple idea, which is then turned into a single simple idea from which the ostensible “laws of history” are derived—and enforced through terror.5 What distinguishes a totalitarian ideology is its utterly insular quality. It purports to explain the entire world and everything in it. There is no gap between totalitarian ideology and reality because totalitari...

This is important.

Kotkin’s explanation for the disintegration of the Soviet state is, essentially, mismanagement: Gorbachev flailed until nothing worked. Kotkin’s is a view from the top of the process of institutional collapse that Levada had predicted from the bottom. But neither man focused on the connections between persons and institutions, the glue that holds societies together. When the word “totalitarianism” is used in casual Western speech, it conjures the image of a monstrous society in which force is applied to every person at all times. Of course, that would be impossibly inefficient, even for an extremely inefficient state such as the Soviet Union. The economy of force in totalitarian societies is achieved through terror. Totalitarianism establishes its own social contract, in which most people will be safe from violence most of the time, provided they stay within certain boundaries and shoulder some of the responsibility for keeping other citizens within the same boundaries. The boundaries are ever-shifting—Arendt described totalitarian societies as producing a state of constant flux and inconsistency6—and this requires the population to be ever-vigilant in order to stay abreast of the shifts. A hypersensitivity to signals is essential for survival.

Right after the 1917 Revolution, marriage was abandoned and the family was willed to wither away. Less than twenty years later, the family was officially redeemed and even consecrated as the “nucleus of Soviet society.”7 In the years immediately following the Revolution, homosexuality was tolerated (but, contrary to myth, not celebrated or even really accepted), but in 1934 it was recriminalized.8 As the pendulum swung back, divorce was made prohibitively difficult, and abortion, legal and common in the 1920s, was outlawed.9 Faced with a crisis of depopulation after the Second World War, the Soviet Union first made divorce even more difficult and then reversed direction, taking measures, instead, to encourage single motherhood by legitimizing, in effect, multiple relationships.10 In the mid-1950s, however, abortion was again legalized.

In March 1991, Gorbachev used tanks in the streets of Moscow to signal his resolve to put an end to pro-Yeltsin demonstrations—and hundreds of thousands of Muscovites ignored this signal. That month, as the country prepared for the referendum on the Union, Central Committee functionaries were frantically trying to keep the country in check. They banned a women’s forum planned in Dubna, a nuclear-science town a couple of hours outside Moscow, after a newspaper reported that among the young academics now hungrily cramming gender theory, older dissidents who had been publishing underground feminist journals, labor activists focusing on women’s rights, and a dozen foreign dignitaries, there would be two out lesbians from the United States. But one of the foreign guests—Colette Shulman, a New York journalist and academic who had long cultivated relationships among the Soviet elite—intervened, and the organizers’ arrangements were reinstated even though the newspaper, and the lesbians, rejected the request for a retraction.

Four months after the women’s forum, the two American lesbian activists and their Soviet partners held a gay and lesbian film festival and a series of workshops, first in Leningrad and then in Moscow. Mindful of the feminists’ experience, they made backup arrangements in case they lost their venues. But the festival proceeded without incident, in a centrally located “house of culture” in Leningrad and a similarly central movie theater in Moscow. Both venues belonged to the state, but by now they could be rented for a few hundred dollars. The organizers were able to bring into the country reels with gay-themed films, though neither censorship nor criminal penalties for homosexual conduct had been abolished. At the end of the festival, they even rented a restaurant in central Moscow and held the country’s first nonclandestine gay party. By this time, Moscow had a few “cooperative” restaurants—a perestroika-era euphemism for newly legalized private businesses—but this was not one of them: the gay party was held at the Central House of the Workers of the Arts, which for six decades had served the elite who serviced the ideology.

The August coup looked like only one in a chain of important events from at least one other vantage point: that of Yeltsin. He spent all that year waging his war for Russia. He was fighting on at least two fronts simultaneously, against the Party conservatives, who opposed all reform, and against Gorbachev, who wished to rein in Russia’s and Yeltsin’s own political ambitions. Yeltsin won several battles that year: in March he defeated Gorbachev in the battle for the streets of Moscow; in June, when Russia declared sovereignty, he won a battle against both of his opponents—a battle for the hearts of Russians. When Yeltsin triumphed over the coup in August, he eliminated one of the fronts in his war. With hard-liners no longer a force, it was just him against Gorbachev. On this front, victory was virtually assured.

In the intelligentsia’s mythology, 1991 was the year of Russia’s bloodless revolution. But it was not bloodless: its victims included the three men who died in Moscow in August and the nineteen people killed in Vilnius and Riga in January, and the hundreds who had died in Azerbaijan since 1988 and during the brutal breakup of a demonstration in Tbilisi, Georgia, in 1989.15 Nor was it a revolution. For the remainder of 1991 Yeltsin focused not on destroying the institutions of the Soviet state but on taking them over. He claimed, for his newly independent Russia, the army, the central bank, and the Soviet seat in the United Nations. Wisdom in the West was that this was a good thing: most of the Soviet nuclear arsenal would be in one place, and Russia would not renege on its predecessor’s foreign debt, as the Bolsheviks had done in 1917.

The forces pulling at Russia now were eerily similar to those that had torn apart the Soviet Union. There were also new, confounding problems. Russia was a country nearing economic ruin, surrounded by other countries nearing economic ruin. It shared a currency with them and its borders with them were porous, yet Russia held next to no political sway over them.

Yeltsin asked Gaidar to figure out how the country was going to survive. Gaidar was the thirty-five-year-old scion of a privileged Soviet family, grandson of two of the country’s most venerated writers and husband of the daughter of a third.* Save for a short stint as an editor, he had worked only at research institutions. He assembled a team of like-minded economists, starting with half a dozen and later adding a few more. All of them were roughly the same age and came from academia. They had no experience in government or administration of any sort, and with the exception of a few recent short trips to the West, they had never seen a market economy outside of a textbook.

Sounds like a recipe for success. 😶

In the first few weeks they learned that the situation was even more dire than they had imagined. The country had no currency or gold reserves—most had been spent and the rest appeared to have been plundered. Because consumer goods had been in short supply for years, and also because prices for all goods were set by the government without regard for cost or demand, people had accumulated a lot of unspent rubles—there was no telling exactly how many. Between that and the inability of the Russian government to control the supply of rubles in the economy—because the neighbors could print them too—there was little to no hope of being able to stem inflation if consumer goods became available and price controls were lifted. But the only way to make consumer goods available seemed to be to lift price controls. “It became clear that the situation was mercilessly dictating only one option: the most conflict-ridden and riskiest scenario of starting reform,” wrote Gaidar.

Russian politics had returned to its pre-coup state: the president and his cabinet, hardly a united front, were in an all-out war with the Congress. The hastily patched and repatched old Soviet-Russian constitution made matters worse because it did not delineate the responsibilities and powers of the branches of government. As large industrial plants began privatizing, corruption became a major force once again, with officials scrambling to apportion property, whether or not they had the right to do so.27 With the president and Congress at war, there was no chance of adopting a new constitution. Instead, the Congress began to discuss, ad nauseam, impeaching Yeltsin.

In the evening of October 3, Muscovites began coming out into the streets. The cabinet was mobilizing civilians because it could not be sure that the armed services would side with it: there was no law and no force that could compel them to do so. This time, though, the military chose sides, and it picked Yeltsin. By the morning of October 4, tanks had pulled up to the White House. At seven, they began firing, aiming at the upper floors, apparently to provide the people’s deputies and their supporters the option of evacuating the building. Still, when soldiers finally forced their way in, they found about forty bodies. Twenty military men died during the storm. The White House burned into the night, visible for miles around: it was by far the tallest building in the neighborhood. In the morning, it looked like a giant decayed tooth. The casualty total was 146 dead, over a thousand injured, and at least two thousand arrested.

This is an astounding thought: Tanks are firing on a building of senior officials of the State.

Yeltsin had been able to resort to force stemmed from a new understanding in Russian society, though the nature of that understanding could not be clear to anyone in the immediate aftermath of what became known as “the Execution of the White House.”

Yeah. That's nuts.

ARUTYUNYAN NOTICED THAT very soon after the Execution of the White House people began conflating the events of 1991 and 1993. The two sets of barricades, two sets of politicians holed up in the White House, two television gray-outs, and two sets of deaths and arrests melded into one. All of it settled in memory as “politics,” and the charred remains of the White House stuck out in the Moscow landscape as a daily reminder that in politics, anything is possible. Looking at it, one wanted to stay as far away from politics as possible.

The same year, Lyosha saw something he had never seen before: a chicken that consisted only of legs and thighs. Until then, “buying a chicken” meant bringing home a bluish rubbery-looking thing that Galina held over the flame of the gas stove to singe the copious remnants of feathers before cooking. Now she brought home leg quarters, each of them nearly as large as a whole chicken. She said that these were “Legs of Bush” and then explained that Bush was the name of the American president and he and Gorbachev had struck an agreement to send to Russia the dark-meat parts of chickens, which Americans happened to dislike. This was the story generally told about “Legs of Bush,” and it was only slightly inaccurate.

It is worth listening to the NPR segment on these chickens from last year. The fuller story of this is amazing.

December 1990 President Bush arranged for loans to the Soviet Union, and this ensured that the dark meat of chickens, in Russia, bore his name for years after his presidency ended.7 “Legs of Bush” signaled the beginning of a better time.

They had seen something more devastating than the fact that some of their compatriots were better off: they saw that, beyond the country’s western borders, virtually everyone was better off than virtually everyone in Russia. They had felt themselves to be not just poor individuals but people from a poor country. As this self-perception solidified, so did some of the results of Gudkov’s surveys: the gap between answers to the questions “How much do you earn?” and “How much do you need to earn to survive?” closed. This did not mean that people felt like they had enough; they felt like things could hardly get worse. Their idea of how much they needed to live well continued to be out of reach.

Who is living well and happily in Russia?”—continued to elicit a stock, Soviet-era answer: crooks, con men, bureaucrats, criminals, and entrepreneurs. Happiness and wealth belonged to the Other.

“TO LEARN ABOUT ONESELF is the toughest among the challenges of learning,” wrote Alexander Etkind, one of the most perceptive scholars of the post-Soviet cultural experience. He was writing about the particular horror of the Soviet legacy: Victims and perpetrators were mixed together in the same families, ethnic groups, and lines of descent. . . . If the Nazi Holocaust exterminated the Other, the Soviet terror was suicidal. The self-inflicted nature of Soviet terror has complicated the circulation of three energies that structure the postcatastrophic world: a cognitive striving to learn about the catastrophe; an emotional desire to mourn for its victims; and an active desire to find justice and take revenge on the perpetrators. . . . The suicidal nature of the Soviet atrocities made revenge all but impossible, and even learning very difficult.

Lidiya Chukovskaya, a writer whose husband, a physicist, was executed in 1938 at the age of thirty-one, raged against this habit of attempting to make sense of the absurd: The truth was too primitive and too bloody. The regime had attacked its citizens for no imaginable reason and was beating them, torturing them, and executing them. How were we to understand the reason for such whimsy? If you let it sink in that there is no reason, that they were doing it “just because,” that killers killed just because it is their job to kill, then your heart, though no bullet has pierced it, will be torn apart, and your mind, in its intact shell of a head, will grow shaky. Looking at the truth would have been akin to staring down the barrel of a gun, so one tried to steal oneself away.

Alexander Nikolaevich ultimately concluded that the terror could not be understood. The explanations offered by his colleagues and any number of historians—that Stalin was mentally ill, that he suffered from paranoid delusions—explained nothing. The tyrant had had any number of his relatives, and the relatives of his wives, executed. One time, Alexander Nikolaevich discovered, Stalin invited an old friend back in Georgia to Moscow for a reunion. They dined and drank—Stalin took pride in his hospitality and his menus, which he personally curated.7 Later the same night, the friend was arrested in his hotel room. He was executed before dawn. This could not be explained with any words or ideas available to man.8 Alexander Nikolaevich could not understand it, but he could try to describe it. The Soviet state was based on punishment. As Young Pioneers, children were taught to criticize one another and themselves in a group setting, reveling in the details of their shortcomings, the intricacies of blame, the ecstasy of repentance, and the imagined precision of the penalties.

In 1989, its first year in existence, the Rehabilitation Commission reviewed about 280,000 court cases and cleared 367,690 names.10 This was, by Alexander Nikolaevich’s estimate, about 2 percent of the job. From what he could tell now that he had full access to existing documents, casualties of mass terror numbered about twenty million. That was just Stalin’s part of it: more people had died in the collectivization campaign that preceded his rise to power, and the punishment machine had continued to work, albeit at a greatly reduced pace, after Stalin’s death.11 Even if the group continued to review cases at the same rate as in its first year, it would not complete the job in Alexander Nikolaevich’s lifetime.

He decided to ensure that the documents to which he had access were at least published. He planned to put together volumes on the secret police and on Stalin’s chief henchmen, and a series on the Party’s foreign activities, including a book on the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968. If everyone had access to the facts on paper, it would be harder to lie about history, he reasoned. The documents might also make it possible to tell the truth—if anyone ever did find a way to begin making sense of the past. He assembled a team of ten people, if you counted the administrative assistant, the accountant, and the typist, and began the work of sorting, verifying, and cross-referencing.12 The first volume, on a failed 1921 military rebellion against Bolshevik rule, was published in 1997.

Maya got out a volume of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, a tome in blue-black cloth. This was volume five, which began and ended with perfectly incomprehensible words: “Berezna” and “Botokudy.” Maya opened the book to a full-page portrait of a middle-aged, mostly bald man with a round face, perfectly thin lips, and a pince-nez with round rimless lenses. This was Lavrentiy Beria, whom the accompanying four-page article described as “one of the most outstanding leaders of the All-Soviet Communist Party of Bolsheviks and of the Soviet state, a loyal student and comrade of J. V. Stalin,” and so forth. This was not Arutyunyan’s grandfather—this was Stalin’s chief executioner. After he himself was executed, subscribers to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia received a letter that Maya was now showing her: The state scholarly publishing house of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia recommends that pages 21, 22, 23, and 24, as well as the portrait bound in between pages 22 and 23, be removed and replaced with new pages, enclosed with this letter. Use scissors or a razor blade to remove the above-mentioned pages, taking care to retain inner margins to which new pages are to be glued. The replacement pages contained an article on the Bering Strait.23 “You see, this is the sort of thing that would happen,” explained Maya. “And if it was a close relative, you had to be really careful.”

Arutyunyan read A Steep Road,* a memoir by a woman, a historian and a loyal Party member, who was falsely accused of being a Trotskyist and spent a decade in the Gulag, followed by another in internal exile. The book was a clear-eyed catalog of human suffering: When I was young, I liked to repeat the phrase, “I think, therefore I am.” Now I could say, “I hurt, therefore I am.” . . . Back in 1937, when I first admitted my share of responsibility for all that had happened, I dreamed of redemption through pain. By 1949, I knew that pain works only for a time. When it stretches for decades and becomes a part of the everyday, it is no longer redemptive. It is simply something that turns you into a block of wood. Physical suffering drowns out the pain of inner torment. This is a horror theater in which some of the actors have been assigned to play victims and others, the executioners. The latter have it worse.

By the end of the poem it becomes clear that the heroine survived—and, in spite of all that happened to her, remained a true believer. The author despairs of reasoning with her. You gave it all to the fight, including that which cannot be given. All of it: the ability to love, to think, and to feel. All of you, nothing spared— But how do you live without your self?

A German friend had come along. “Long live great Russia!” chanted the crowd, and Gudkov sensed his friend tensing up. He noted that Germans are hypersensitive to expressions of nationalism, but Gudkov himself was unconcerned about the crowd’s sentiment. Now he wondered if he should have paid more attention to the tone, and to the linguistic sleight of hand of the slogan. It had started as “Long live democratic Russia,” but in the course of a few hours the word “democratic” had been dropped in favor of “great.” Had the ideas of freedom and democracy really been forgotten no sooner than they had apparently won?

All individuals and societies define themselves, to some extent, in opposition to others, and for the Russians in 1994 this jumping-off image was a generalized stereotype of the European. This imaginary person was rational, cultivated, active—and Other. Russia was coming off a period of concerted self-denigration, when society was processing the shock of seeing firsthand what it had been told was the “rotten West.” It had turned out to be shiny, happy, and also ordinary and law-based. For years, newspapers had used the phrase “the civilized world” to refer to that which Russia was not. Now Russians were distinctly tired of thinking of themselves, and their country, as inferior. So what did they see as the innate positive qualities of Russians? This open question elicited, on the basis of 2,957 surveys, three leading qualities: “open,” “simple,” and “patient.” The ideal Russian, it seemed, was a person without qualities. It was clear to Gudkov that this was the blank mirror of the hostile and violent regimes under which Russians had long lived.

A majority of respondents agreed with the following statement: “Over the seventy-five years of the Soviet regime our people have become different from people of the West, and it is too late to change that.” A slightly larger majority agreed with the statement “Sooner or later Russia will follow the path that is common for all civilized countries.” Most people agreed with both statements at the same time, and the fact that they did seemed to affirm the former and make the latter seem vanishingly unlikely.

In the film’s most bizarre moment, a man and a woman huddle in a tiny rowboat. “Do you know why your feet are so adorable?” he asks her. “I do,” she responds. “It is because our Soviet regime is so wonderful.” “That’s correct,” he says, and rises from kissing her feet to kissing her face—or so we assume, for the camera shyly pans away. The scene referenced Soviet-era spoofs of Soviet propaganda, which ascribed to the regime both unlimited powers and boundless magnanimity. But if the Soviet-era spoofs, which circulated in samizdat or simply as jokes, were edgy, this spoof of a spoof was soft and rounded. At the end of the film the entire cast, including the “rocker,” the bourgeois, and the convict, gather around a giant table at the center of which sits one of the unique edible symbols of Soviet privilege, a roast suckling pig just like the ones Zhanna’s father started receiving on New Year’s Eve once he became governor. In the reimagined Soviet past, everyone got a piece of the pig.4 Created by two men who were about to become the most influential people in Russian television,* Old Songs was a huge hit.

Haha. I love this. It is an important observation: a certain kind of honeydew storytelling that feels uncanny, strange, and played completely straight.

There would be sequels: Old Songs About the Most Important Things 2, 3, and 4. The following year, the other major federal broadcast channel resurrected The Blue Flame, the Soviet New Year’s Eve show, to compete for what was turning out to be a giant nostalgia audience. Once cable and satellite television took hold a few years later, an entire channel was launched to show Soviet television twenty-four hours a day. It was called Nostalgia, and its logo, shown in a corner of the screen, contained a red hammer and sickle.

Oh shit. 🙅

Russians had grown tired of thinking about the future. They were drawing their sense of identity from the past, and they were imbuing this past with an additional air of wholesome conservatism.

Yep. That's pretty concerning.

THE “OPEN,” “SIMPLE” quality-less Russian outsourced his agency to something or someone more powerful. An element of the nostalgia that was becoming evident by the end of 1995 was the longing for a strong leader, capable of exerting the force for which Homo Sovieticus was ever prepared.

It was the eightieth anniversary of the day when Czar Nicholas II, his wife, Alexandra, their five children, and four other people had been executed in the basement of a house in Yekaterinburg, where they had been held for several months. After the execution, the house had served as a museum of the Revolution, and later as a minor administrative building. Details of what had happened to Nicholas and his family were never made public. No one knew where they were buried. Soviet schoolchildren learned only that the last Russian czar had abdicated and the October Revolution had triumphed. To ensure that all memory of the execution was erased, in the 1970s the Party ordered the house razed, and Yeltsin, then the local Party boss, made sure the order was carried out. Local lore maintained an uncertain memory of the execution, however, and in 1991 remains that were thought to belong to the czar and his family were exhumed. Genetic analysis took seven years—the science of testing remains was just then coming into being—but in the end the remains were positively identified as belonging to the czar, his wife, and three of the five children. Now they would receive a proper Russian Orthodox burial. Yeltsin entered a St. Petersburg cathedral, flanked by the local governor and Nemtsov, who had last chaired the government commission on identifying the remains. “Esteemed countrymen,” said Yeltsin, today is a historic day for Russia. It has been eighty years since the day the last Russian ...

I don't know if page length restrictions will apply to this section, but it is a really important part of this story. Do seek out this book and pay close attention to this passage.

Lyosha was thirteen when the czar and his family were reinterred. Four years earlier, he had read a book about the family and the execution and had decided that he hated the Bolsheviks for killing children.

This. Don't fuck with kids; and certainly don't kill them. This is a lesson a good many folks seem to have trouble with.

In a book published in 2000—barely two years after the ceremony—Yeltsin quoted his own speech at the reburial as follows: For many years we concealed this horrific crime, but the time has come to tell the truth. The Yekaterinburg massacre is one of the most shameful pages of our history. As we bury the remains of these innocent victims, we seek redemption for the sins of our fathers. The blame belongs with those who committed this act of violence and with those who, for decades, justified their actions. . . . I bow my head before the victims of merciless killing. . . . Any attempt to change our life through violence is doomed.18 In this version of the speech, blame was entirely externalized. The theme of shared responsibility, as well as the idea of the historic significance of the moment, was omitted. Both sets of omissions—Nemtsov’s and Yeltsin’s—showed the extent to which, for both politicians, the symbolic sphere took a backseat to the material. Yeltsin’s elisions also suggested that he had thought better of his one attempt to accept, on behalf of his nation, the weight of responsibility for its “century of blood and lawlessness.”

Reading survey responses, Gudkov imagined this war as an ideal vehicle. The vehicle had headlights, which illuminated the Soviet Union’s future as a superpower. The vehicle also had rear lights, which cast a beatifying glow on the crimes of the regime that preceded the war. The vehicle’s heft conveniently obscured the outsize losses of the Soviet military and the disregard for human life that had made them, and the Soviet victory, possible. What Gudkov could not yet quite imagine were people like Lyosha, born in the year perestroika began but identified entirely with a war that had ended forty years to the day before he was born.

Gumilev’s intellectual quest could be seen as the essence—or as a caricature—of the fate of the social sciences in the Soviet Union: decades spent working in a hostile environment, isolated from the ideas of others, struggling to invent the wheel in the dark. Working on his own, Gumilev had had to create his own theory of the universe, complete with radiation from outer space. The totality of his theory and its scientific sheen had to appeal to post-Soviet minds, which had just lost another totalizing explanation of the world. Ethnos entered everyday Russian speech, as did other concepts of Gumilev’s coinage, such as passionarnost’, a measure of the degree to which an ethnos was initially receptive to radiation and eventually possessed of ethnos-specific powers. Other schools of thought that offered totality and scientific language were also gaining a foothold in Russia. Scientology, for example, was particularly popular among small-business men and bureaucrats in smaller cities. But two attributes made Gumilev’s ideas perfect for the historical moment. His insistence on the essential nature of ethnic groups helped explain the agony of the empire. His geographic determinism fit well with the idea of Russia’s unique destiny, which the Levada survey had shown to be so important for Russians.

This section, more than anything, reminds me of Paul Thomas Anderson's "The Master." There was a wave of religious acceptance post World Was II as the returning population -- something like 30% of all Americans had been directly trained and deployed for the war effort -- came back and had to process those experiences. Churches were packed. "New Age" spirituality gained a lot of oxygen. A marriage of Atomic Age, science, and outer space symbols took on spiritual dimensions. "The Master" plays on the wholesomeness imagery of the time period (white WASPyness, in particular); with shattered internal lives; and men filling out the rest of their time after history has nothing left to do with them. The movie doesn't tip its hand on any of these things. That it choses to observe a niche movement, and a marginal figure's deeply personal relationship with the leader of the (growing) cult, as means into the cultural space of the 50s, I think is important. The movie sits in the honeydew glow of the time period but isn't awash in nostalgia for the place. It mostly spends time making direct and earthy observations of human interactions. Some of those humans happen to be talking very earnestly about time travel, fetal retention of experiences, immortal soul knowledge, and intergalactic infiltration. It is really very funny, and it is really very good.

Masha’s mother objected. She chose a different all-encompassing revisionist theory, one invented by Anatoli Fomenko, a mathematician who claimed that his calculations recast all of world history. In his story, history was shorter and more accessible: in the Middle Ages, the world was a giant empire with Russia at its center; before that, there was hardly anything. Conventional history was fiction, concocted by the Russians-who-ruled-the-world for their own entertainment. Fomenko was a classic conspiracy theorist: he proved his assertions by way of relentlessly logical constructions based on random mathematical assumptions, and he dismissed all contrary evidence as falsification by his enemies. Fomenko was particularly popular with the exact-sciences crowd, including the chess champion Garry Kasparov, who for a time became a vocal adherent.

Haha. This is amazing.