The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

by Masha Gessen

In the three years since his gay life began, Lyosha had had sex with one man, loved two, and had explored the entire range of options available to him: the closet and the gutter. Or at least those were the options available to his gay body and his gay heart. His gay mind could still soar. He decided that he would be gay in the academy. The following year Lyosha defended his senior thesis, titled “Sexual Minorities as a Political Issue.” Getting the topic approved by the department was difficult, but he managed, and then went to Moscow for research. At the Russian State Library, which everyone still called by its old name, the Lenin Library, the repository of every periodical ever legally published in the country, Lyosha saw gay and lesbian magazines from the early 1990s. It turned out that there had once been people who wrote in Russian about gay rights, the movement, legislation, a political agenda. They sounded freer and better-informed than anyone Lyosha knew now. They seemed to inhabit a public space that Lyosha could barely imagine, to be connected to efforts that trusted their own importance—this was particularly true of a woman named Evgenia Debryanskaya, a lesbian activist so outspoken the whole country seemed to have heard of her back when Lyosha was in first grade. She was now an entrepreneur, like several other activists of old; others had left the country, and a couple had died.

Sitting in any intractable, impossible situation it is always best to hit those books.

There was a caveat: Lyosha had to broaden his subject. He could, for example, include other minority groups in his research. He had to agree, especially because the entire class was fretting about its future: in previous years graduates had found work as political technologists, but with the withering of public politics, demand had plummeted. Still, during his first year Lyosha proposed the following research topic: “Sexual Minorities in Political Discourse.” “I like it very much,” his adviser said. “But you must understand that our academic council is very conservative, some members are very religious, so I’m afraid they won’t allow you to dissertate on this topic.” She spoke in jargon to him, because he was now a member of the academic club. They finally settled on “Minority discourse in public politics.” Lyosha would be looking at sexual and ethnic minorities, and at women as a minority group in politics. Lyosha started teaching, helping a slightly older friend who taught the university’s lone seminar on gender theory. He started publishing: the department’s annual included his paper on women as a political minority. His research was exhilarating. He discovered the word “queer,” wrote a paper on the evolution of the concept, and decided that it applied to him.

In the end, his adviser’s demand that he broaden his topic had served a subversive purpose she hardly could have intended: Lyosha wrote about different minority groups as though they were equal to one another. He did point out that homosexuals in Russia had been granted only the bare minimum of legal rights—the right not to be treated as criminals—and had not yet reached full equality with the majority. Still, he wrote about gay people the same way that he wrote about women and ethnic minorities and his dissertation stressed the assumption that he was describing a process of inexorable legitimation and institutionalization of the various groups, all of which would eventually realize their potential to become not only the objects but also the subjects of politics.

Yep. If even one is oppressed, oppresses everybody. And the degree and impact across marginalized groups cam be quite different. But they are still being excluded because of a difference -- and that is very galvanizing.

“Are you aware that homosexuality is a taboo topic in our country?” asked one. “But it exists,” responded Lyosha. This was the only question that concerned Lyosha’s actual topic. A lone committee member, whom Lyosha thought to be a closeted gay man, made a helpful suggestion on sources. The rest were anxious free-association queries. Members of the committee sounded angry with Lyosha, so angry that they could not or would not bring themselves to engage with his work. Their comments showed that they did not think a study like this should exist. “I just attended a conference in St. Petersburg where they said that gender was no more,” said one. “What are ‘minority groups’ anyway?” asked another. Lyosha sweated and used every trick he could think of to keep his rage from showing. A few weeks later, he heard that the professor who had been helpful during the defense had been seen waving a copy of Lyosha’s dissertation summary booklet during his own seminar, shouting in outrage, “This is ideological propaganda! This is propaganda of sodomy!” Lyosha was almost shocked a few weeks later to learn that the committee had cleared him for his defense. The defense was, by all accounts, brilliant. The vote was unanimous.

In 2008, Putin had handed the presidency to Dmitry Medvedev. Putin had served the two consecutive terms the Russian constitution allowed, and did what authoritarian rulers the world over do in such situations: he ceded the post without ceding the power. Putin became prime minister, and Dmitry Medvedev, a longtime member of his staff, became the country’s nominal president. The center of power shifted to the cabinet, now run by Putin. Overnight, the president’s office became ceremonial: Medvedev had only a tiny staff and no practical means to wield the power that was granted to him by the constitution. Still, Medvedev’s office obliged him to maintain a public presence. “For Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev, Russian citizens are not voters, but an audience,” Russian journalist Maxim Trudolyubov wrote in 2009. “The big difference between Mr. Putin and Mr. Medvedev is that they work with different audiences.” Putin played to the majority: middle-aged and older, middle-income and poorer, the broad audience of the television channels. Medvedev addressed the better-educated, better-off minority that had been largely ignored during Putin’s two terms.5 Starved for attention, this audience responded to Medvedev’s overtures with enthusiasm ranging from cautious to ecstatic. They quickly dubbed the new era “the Thaw.”

The term “Thaw” now betrayed low expectations: the original Thaw had not brought about fundamental change—it had merely made the system somewhat less brutal. It had also been followed by the Brezhnev freeze, which did not return the terror of Stalinism but which put an end to any civic initiatives and, more important, any hope for change. The term “Thaw” reflected the belief that the Putin system of one-party rule and ever-shrinking space for civil society, media, and protest was entrenched. That made whatever short-term opportunities the new Thaw did present all the more precious.

Federal reform undertaken by Putin during his first term deprived Russia’s constituent regions not only of much of their political independence but also of their money. A resource-rich region like Perm was handing an ever-increasing share of its tax revenues to Moscow. Quality of life, as a result, dragged far behind regional economic growth. When Garry Kasparov first went on a speaking tour as a politician, this issue—the center’s sucking the regions dry—was a major part of his message. But Chirkunov was not looking for a way to confront Putin: he was looking for a way to improve Perm’s quality of life and create an alternative source of income without confrontation with Moscow.

Putin’s new system, in which all high-level regional officials were appointed rather than elected, lent itself to these kinds of transactions. Chirkunov could give Gordeev power, at least symbolically, and influence, in exchange for his investment in the Perm project. Gordeev never lived in Perm or even learned much about it: when he visited the city, he stayed at a hotel. One night, four years into his senate term, he spent four hours wandering the city because he could not get his bearings and could not hail a cab either, for all he had in his wallet were five hundred-euro notes.8 Still, he promoted Perm faithfully and showed up for high-profile events in the city.

It was as if the entire city was, without changing location, transported from its eerie everyday identity as a former military-industrial city closed to outsiders to some shiny Europe of the imagination. In exchange, Europe would someday put Perm on its map—as a capital, no less. This frantic ambition was contagious, especially because Chirkunov and his people made it clear that their vision reached beyond the arts: the governor promised to forge a new “economy of the intellect, where we will create not with our hands but with our heads.”10 The university, too, developed a vision of itself as a European institution. Lyosha knew that he fit in it well. His own vision was that he would soon be running Russia’s only LGBT Studies program. For now, he and Darya, the friend who had been teaching the one gender studies course, launched a gender studies center. It helped that Darya’s father was the dean of another department at the university. Darya and Lyosha got some funding for hosting conferences and publishing the proceedings. Their publications had no official status in the university, but this meant that they did not have to face an academic-review board. Lyosha was lucky. He had heard that a legal scholar in Novosibirsk had not been allowed to defend her dissertation on LGBT rights.11 In 2010, Lyosha presented at a conference at Moscow State University. His paper was titled “Gender Gaps in Political Science.” Only one person—a professor from St. Petersburg—had a question f...

A chapter in his book on the Russian population crisis is titled “Russia’s Ominous Patterns of Mortality and Morbidity: Pioneering New and Modern Pathways to Poor Health and Premature Death.” He showed that no modern country had ever seen people die at the same rate in peacetime. According to 2006 figures, wrote Eberstadt, male life expectancy at age fifteen in Russia compared unfavorably with that in Ethiopia, Gambia, and Somalia. Two things appeared to be killing Russians disproportionately: diseases of the cardiovascular system, and external causes, such as injuries and poisoning, including suicide.

Another scholar of Russian demographics, American anthropologist Michelle Parsons, suggested an explanation for the apparent vodka paradox: for what it is worth, alcohol may help people adapt to realities that otherwise make them want to curl up and die. Parsons, who called her book Dying Unneeded, argued that Russians were dying early because they had nothing and no one to live for. Eberstadt also ultimately concluded that the explanation had to do with mental health. He used longer-term statistics to demonstrate that what Russians were calling a “demographic crisis” had in fact been going on for decades—birthrates and life expectancy had been falling for most of the second half of the twentieth century. Only two periods stood out as exceptions to this trend: Khrushchev’s Thaw and Gorbachev’s perestroika, the brief spells when Russians anticipated a better future. The rest of the time, it seemed, Russians had been dying for lack of hope.

Seems like a lot of legwork to justify this, but it is an important idea none the less.

In his 2006 state-of-the-federation address, Putin called depopulation the country’s most pressing problem. “I am going to speak about the most important thing now,” he said. “What’s the most important thing? At the defense ministry they know what it is.” In Putin’s language of macho humor, the phrase was supposed to signal that he was about to speak about something that soldiers—real men—think about all the time. Yes, I am indeed going to talk about love, about women and children. About the family. And about contemporary Russia’s most acute problem: demographics. . . . You know that our country’s population shrinks, on average, by seven hundred thousand people a year. We have talked about the issue many times, but have yet to do anything of substance about it.17 Putin proposed a financial solution: more money to National Project Health (the one where Masha was facilitating the payment of 80-to-90-percent kickbacks), more money for birthing clinics, and, most important, more money for mothers. He instituted a onetime payment of the equivalent of over $8,000 to any woman who gave birth to a second child (Russian women were having an average of 1.3 children18). The “maternal capital,” as it became known, would remain an act of unparalleled generosity on the part of the Russian state toward its citizens, showing just how highly the president valued his subjects’ willingness to reproduce.

Tarter Paul Ryan, is that you?

BACK AT THE SOCIOLOGY DEPARTMENT at Moscow State, students received a steady diet of ultraconservative rhetoric—and nothing else. “As a graduate of the department, I can tell, based on my own experience, that the education students received there could never stand up to either academic or practical scrutiny,” a 1996 graduate said in a 2007 interview. The graduate, Alexandre Bikbov, did what Moscow State students had done back in the Soviet period if they wanted to learn: he educated himself, as Gudkov and Arutyunyan had done one or two generations earlier. “Back then it was possible to go to the library or to another department in the university in order to compensate for the lack of knowledge that the sociology department systematically produced,” said Bikbov, speaking about the 1990s. “And then, at the crucial moment of the exam, I could almost always count on unassailability if I could demonstrate that I knew the subject well.” In the 2000s, though, said Bikbov, things deteriorated. “Now there is open anti-intellectual censorship at exams: when students show that they ‘know too much,’ they get lower grades and are threatened with more severe punishment. The same thing happens during seminars, when some faculty tell students not to read [French sociologist Pierre] Bourdieu or when they cut off any and all discussion in the most demeaning manner.”

He taught himself French and translated Bourdieu’s Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, a classic of modern sociology, into Russian. He started publishing internationally. He became a professor—not at the sociology department of Moscow State, which was no place for someone like him, but in the philosophy department of Russian Humanities University, a much smaller and far younger institution that did not have its own department of sociology. There he launched his own standing seminar, which, like Levada’s seminar in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, served to give young sociologists access to knowledge they were not getting through official channels. Dozens of Moscow State University sociology department students who figured out, soon after matriculating, that the department was, in Bikbov’s words, “a commercial enterprise with an extremism complex,” came to Bikbov’s seminar to learn.

In 2006, Bikbov organized a conference on the sociology of prisons. Two prominent French academics presented, as did Bikbov’s seminar participants and several young people who volunteered at Memorial, the organization founded in the 1980s to tell the story of the Gulag. The combination of the subject matter and academics and students and activists in one room proved combustible. The students resolved to demand change at Moscow State’s sociology department.23 For a semester in 2007, students staged a series of protests. “Education at the department is a lie!” proclaimed their first flyer. The flyer claimed that staff faculty were forbidden to do original research: instead, they had to use multivolume textbooks written by the dean, Vladimir Dobrenkov, as the basis for all instruction.

All students were required to read a brochure distributed by the dean’s office. Titled “Why Are Russian Lands Being Cleansed,” it accused the Freemasons of “starting world wars and initiating the creation of the atomic bomb” and claimed that “the Zionist lobby . . . determined the foreign policies of the United States and Great Britain, holds in its hands the world financial system, including the printing of dollars, practically controls all the leading mass media and means of communication.” Russia is called a “righteous nation” and America a “beastly nation” and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is quoted earnestly, as a reliable source.

A group called the Union of Orthodox Citizens, which counted several well-known politicians among its leaders,26 issued a manifesto in defense of the sociology department: “There is no doubt that a concerted effort to foment an ‘orange revolution’ at Russia’s most important university is what stands behind the actions of radical youths and the students they have conscripted,” they wrote. Indeed, the sociology department was to provide a “training ground for a youth ‘maidan’”—Ukrainian for “square” but referring specifically to Kiev’s Independence Square, the geographic center of the Orange Revolution. This maidan would then spread to other institutions of higher learning. Along with Marches of the Dissenters, and, the manifesto added, “parades of sodomites,” the student rebellion “has every chance, come fall, to change the color of Red Square, turning it into an all-Russian rainbow ‘maidan.’”27 The statement was perfectly in keeping with the improbable assertion Lyosha had made in his thesis: a chasm was opening up in Russian society along the lines of sexual identity. The specter of gay liberation had emerged as a bogeyman much like the Freemasons, the Zionists, and the American financiers.

The following June, the department hosted an international conference titled “Societal Norms and the Possibilities of Societal Development.” Dean Dobrenkov opened the conference by warning against the dangers of homosexuality: Issues of virtue and morality have to be at the forefront today. Without that, Russia has no future. . . . How can we talk about the rights of homosexuals and lesbians in light of this? All these attempts to organize gay parades, the introduction of sex education in schools—all of this aims to defile our young people, and we must say a clear and definitive “no” to that! Otherwise, we will lose Russia.29 “All these attempts” referred to a single effort, by a young Moscow lawyer, to force a public conversation on LGBT rights by applying for a permit to hold a Pride march in Moscow. The permit was denied, and the lawyer was taking his case through the courts. The handful of people who showed up for Pride in Moscow in May 2007 were first beaten and then arrested; among the detainees was an Italian member of the European Parliament who had come to lend his support.

“It is the homosexuals who are bringing about a demographic catastrophe,” he said. They cause huge and immeasurable harm to society. According to our data, one third of inmates in the state of Illinois are sexual predators or their victims. And twenty to forty percent are homosexuals or their victims. . . . According to official data, thirty to fifty percent of Illinois residents have had sexual relations with children, primarily as a result of their homosexual proclivities. Twenty percent of such crimes take place in adoptive families. Cameron was citing Illinois because it was his home state and, he pointed out, the home state of then presidential candidate Barack Obama. Russia has every chance to avoid the sad fate of Western countries, which have accepted homosexuality as morally normal, and to choose its own traditions and moral values. I want to ask you: Do you want to be as stupid as we have been?

This fucking guy. 😪

In September 2008, the sociology department inaugurated a new research project, to be headed by a new member of the permanent faculty: Alexander Dugin would run the Center for Conservative Studies. Launching the center, Dugin explained what it was not: “It is not a liberal intellectual group, but also not a Soviet-Marxist one.” Both the Soviet idea and the liberal idea that had followed it in Russia had failed, he explained. “And yet there is no conservative intellectual or academic center in Russia in the American or the European sense of the word. This despite the fact that both the people and the regime feel conservatively.” Now the country’s most important university would take on the mission of generating ideas to fit those feelings: The goal of the Center for Conservative Studies is to become the center of development of conservative ideology in Russia. . . . We also need to train a conservatively minded academic and government elite, there is no reason to hide this fact. They must be conservative ideologues. And we must place people in power and in positions of authority in the academy.

What a bunch of jokers.

He was alone only in his epiphany: unlike him, the other participants—Brits, Americans, and Ukrainians—lived and worked with others who were like them. Ukraine, he learned, had thirty-seven registered LGBT groups. The number boggled his mind. He had always thought of Ukraine as Russia’s simple provincial cousin, but this country had gender studies and queer studies theorists at several of its universities. And they were not revolutionary explorers like Lyosha: they had teachers. Lyosha had Darya, who was just a couple of years older—a peer, and a friend supportive enough that he sometimes forgot that she was the daughter of a dean, and straight. But then he remembered. The people here had mentors who had studied in the West in the 1990s. Lyosha felt not unlike Arutyunyan had felt nearly twenty years earlier, when she attended the training seminar abroad that delivered her “narcissistic blow.” Like her, he saw people standing on the shoulders of their predecessors who stood on the shoulders of their predecessors who stood on the shoulders of giants—while Lyosha stood all alone.

“I’m glad you are going to these seminars,” his department chair told him. “It’s like a retreat for you. But when you come back, you should be mindful of where you are.” This was her way of broaching the subject of Lyosha needing to refocus his research. The 2012 department annual would not include his paper otherwise. “There is no future here,” Lyosha said to himself. He was not sure what this meant he needed to do now, but he knew that the phrase was true.

The Orange Revolution had not brought the change that the revolutionaries had demanded—indeed, Viktor Yanukovych, the once failed pro-Moscow candidate, had finally been elected president in 2010—but nevertheless, Ukraine had left the Soviet Union. Farther west, all three Baltic states had joined both NATO and the European Union in 2004. Several other post-Soviet states, including Ukraine and Georgia, were negotiating with these international organizations with an eye to possible ascension. Russia was moving in the opposite direction. In his state-of-the-federation address in April 2005, Putin stressed that Russia had to “first of all acknowledge that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century. . . . Tens of millions of our countrymen ended up outside our country’s borders.” The rest of that speech was a mishmash of familiar rhetoric—including the assertion that Russia was a European country that valued human rights and civil society—but the statement of grand regret framed the speech, and Putin’s politics.

Speaking in Munich at an international security conference in February 2007, Putin said: The format of the conference enables me to avoid superfluous politesse, the need to speak in smooth, pleasant, and empty diplomatic clichés. The format of the conference allows me to say what I really think about international security issues.37 Conference participants, who included German chancellor Angela Merkel and U.S. defense secretary Robert Gates, were taken by surprise: it seemed no one had expected a confrontation.38 Putin railed against NATO’s acceptance of new members: I think it’s obvious: the process of NATO enlargement has nothing to do with the modernization of the alliance itself or with raising the level of security in Europe. Just the opposite: it is a seriously inflammatory factor that lowers the level of mutual trust. And we have a justified right to ask openly: Who is NATO enlarging against? And what happened to the assurances given by Western partners after the Warsaw Pact was dissolved? What happened to those declarations? No one even remembers them. But I will dare remind the audience of what was said. I’d like to quote from NATO Secretary-General Wörner’s speech in Brussels on May 17, 1990. He said then: “The very fact that we are ready not to deploy NATO troops beyond the territory of the Federal Republic [of Germany] gives the Soviet Union firm security guarantees.” Whatever happened to those guarantees?39 The quote indeed came from a speech by NATO Secretary...

Russia was now separated from Germany by a double belt: a ring of former Soviet constituent republics—Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic states—and then a ring of former Warsaw Pact countries—Poland, Slovakia, Czech Republic, and others. A clear majority of these countries had, in the intervening years, explicitly asked—and sometimes begged and pleaded—for NATO protection.

The Soviet Union wanted to see Germany neutral—part of neither NATO nor the Warsaw Pact; NATO and the new German government, elected after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, wanted to see Germany a full NATO member. In the final agreement, Germany became—or, some might say, remained—a NATO member but former East German territory remained free of NATO military presence. Wörner’s statement, like the negotiations from which it stemmed, had nothing to do with the issue of NATO expansion to former Warsaw Pact countries, because the participants assumed at the time that the Warsaw Pact would continue to exist (it dissolved a year and a half later, in March 1991).40 Putin, who was a KGB officer serving in East Germany at the time of reunification talks, probably understood the contract well, but in his recollection the negotiations were the beginning of “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century”—and were part of the story of Western treachery. The message of the Munich speech was that Russia would no longer accept the post-Soviet, post–Warsaw Pact condition.

Estonia based its post-Soviet laws and policies on the premise that the country had been illegally occupied between the years of 1940 and 1991—first by the USSR in accordance with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, then by Nazi Germany, and then by the USSR again. Among other things, this meant that only people who had been Estonian citizens before 1940 and their descendants automatically became citizens of independent Estonia; all others—presumed occupiers and their descendants—would have to pass Estonian language and history exams to become citizens. Even though the noncitizens were treated just like citizens for the purposes of public benefits and even had the right to vote in local elections, most of the country’s sizable Russian-speaking minority—about a quarter of the population—considered the citizenship law discriminatory. The disagreement was fundamental: the Russian speakers did not and would not see themselves as occupiers, so to them the difference in treatment appeared based on ethnicity.

Oh boy. 😒

In addition to the riots and the embassy siege, a novel sort of attack took place: a cyber one. A flood of electronic requests designed to paralyze servers—a DDoS attack—shut down all Estonian government ministries, two banks, and several political parties, blocked all credit card transactions, and impaired the functioning of parliament. NATO and European Commission investigators could not definitively trace the attacks to Russia,43 but two years later Nashi claimed credit for the act of cyberwarfare, which the movement said had been carried out by a mass of volunteers armed with computers.44 The attacks had hit Estonia’s point of particular pride—it was arguably the most computerized society in the world—and transformed it into a vulnerability, showing that the small nation, no matter how modern it had become and how well integrated into Western international organizations, could still be trampled by the large one, with its myriad soldiers.

If the president says that Russia’s friendly regions represent a zone of privileged interest, that means that this zone is under Russian control. And anyone who tries to challenge that is challenging not only that specific country but Russia, with all its nuclear arms. Dugin claimed to be interpreting and forecasting Russia’s foreign policy, and his claim was now credible. That summer, he had gone to South Ossetia and posed in front of a tank with a Kalashnikov in his hands. That summer had also marked the first time he had seen one of his slogans catch on and go entirely mainstream, repeated on television and reproduced on bumper stickers. The slogan was, “Tanks to Tbilisi!”* Dugin had written, “Those who do not support the slogan ‘Tanks to Tbilisi!’ are not Russians. . . . ‘Tanks to Tbilisi!’ should be written on every Russian’s forehead.”49 The slogans, and the war, worked: according to Levada Center polls, Putin’s popularity rating shot up to 88 percent, its highest point ever. Medvedev’s hit 83 percent, also unprecedented.

Yikes.

“Look,” he said, “there was no fraud here. I did get a discount for buying twenty rides at once, but I am not profiting from it and I saved everyone time and trouble—including the cashier!” “The resale of tickets is illegal,” said the lieutenant. “I wasn’t reselling them.” “You could have gotten the cashier in trouble. She could get fired.” “Why would she get fired? She did nothing wrong! No one did anything wrong.” “What do you think you are, God?” Something changed right then. Seryozha felt a calm and clarity. The word “zen” floated into his mind, followed by a perfectly formed phrase: “This man’s mind works in a way that I will never be able to understand.” “I understand,” said Seryozha, and walked away from the policeman.

He took his ballot and stopped short of entering a booth. The first name and bio on the ballot were: BOGDANOV, ANDREI VLADIMIROVICH. Born in 1970, resident of Moscow. Place of work: Democratic Party of Russia, political party. Job title: Central Committee Chairman. Place of work: Solntsevo Municipal Council, City of Moscow. Job title: Deputy, part-time. Nominated by: self. Registered on the basis of voter signatures. Party affiliation: Democratic Party of Russia, party leader.1 This made Seryozha mad as the lieutenant had not, and his sweaty-headed boss had not, and all their made-up rules had not. This was outright mockery. An independent candidate—one who was not already a member of parliament—was required by new Putin-era laws to submit two million voter signatures in order to be registered as a candidate, with no more than fifty thousand signatures coming from any one region of the country.2 This demanded either a lot of money or a large nationwide grassroots network of activists—preferably both. Many people had tried that year. Garry Kasparov could not even convene the required public meeting of an initial group of supporters, because no one would rent him space for such a meeting, for any amount of money. Boris Nemtsov had dropped out of the race to help another candidate, former prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov, but Kasyanov’s signatures were arbitrarily thrown out.

But here was some guy named Bogdanov, whom no one had ever heard of, who was ostensibly representing a party that had in fact been dormant since the early 1990s, whose political experience consisted of being a part-time member of a tiny powerless municipal council, and even this was probably fake—and Seryozha was supposed to pretend to believe that this clown had collected two million signatures? This felt just like the time when Seryozha thought everyone was crazy suddenly to accept that nobody, Putin, as the president-apparent. Except this felt worse. It was even more of an offense to human intelligence than the spectacle of Putin handing the presidency over to Medvedev like it was his to lend. Seryozha dropped his blank ballot into one of the bins and walked out. He took a cab back to the airport.

BOTH OF THE THINGS that happened to Seryozha that day were examples of what Yuri Levada had once termed “collective hostage-taking,” what was once known as krugovaya poruka—literally, “circular bail.” For centuries, entire communities could be held responsible for taxes owed or crimes committed by any individual. If a resident failed to pay taxes, the property of any of his neighbors could be seized. The threat transformed all members of a given community into enforcers, but not in accordance with codified law—they had to devise their own means of ensuring compliance.

During the Great Terror, colleagues and family had to publicly denounce those arrested as “enemies of the people” in order to avoid arrest themselves. Conspiracies conjured by Stalin’s prosecutors were always based on the ostensible culprits’ social and professional networks, making associations as such suspect. As the range of behavior deemed risky or suspicious broadened, citizens grew ever more likely to act as enforcers. Krugovaia poruka, which is often translated as “solidarity,” is, to the Russian ear, a neutral or even positive term, used to urge Soviet children to study harder and be better little Communists. This may be why Levada chose the more jarring term “collective hostage-taking” to refer to one of “the most potent instruments of coercion and intimidation used by the Soviet state.”

“A moral predicament in which reasonable action runs counter to the well-being of ‘one’s own kind’ is in itself unreasonable and immoral,” wrote Levada. “This predicament was cultivated, and reproduced thousands upon thousands of times.” In the case of the Metro queue, the police officer instinctively sensed that it was his job to ensure that all passengers remain in a state of equal misery, and to prevent any attempt at self-organization. At the polling place, the ballot—with the absurd, almost virtual candidate in first place—turned every voter into a co-conspirator. By casting a ballot one affirmed the legitimacy of the exercise. By voting for Medvedev in the absence of a believable alternative, one agreed to pretend to be an active supporter, symbolically entering the circle—krug in Russian—on which the system of “circular guarantees” is based. (In previous years the ballot had included the option of voting “against all candidates,” but a 2006 law eliminated this option.)

Gudkov had decided that he needed to take time out of analyzing survey results to write about something else: a concept. The concept was totalitarianism. The word had not been used much in the last decade. It had been thrilling, in the late 1980s, to hear Soviet leaders—first Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev and then Gorbachev himself—start using the word to describe the Soviet system. These had been moments of epic honesty and openness. But then, after the Soviet regime appeared to have collapsed into a pile of dust, the word became instantly irrelevant: totalitarianism had ended, and the topics of the day were reforms, the economy, and the new system Russia was assumed to be building. Even the few people who stubbornly insisted on reckoning with the past generally chose to focus on one specific period in Soviet history—Stalinism—and one element of the Soviet system: state terror. But since the Levada studies continued to show that Homo Sovieticus was thriving and reproducing and the initial hypothesis about the withering of Soviet institutions had long been debunked, it seemed like a good idea to return to thinking about the nature of the system that had produced the institutions and the man.

At the beginning it was simply descriptive, used by both opponents and supporters of regimes that aimed to totally transform societies, as did the Soviet, Italian, and later German leaders. In fact, the first person to use the phrase “totalitarian state” may have been Benito Mussolini, in a 1925 speech in which he extolled the virtues of concentrating all of society in a single state entity. At that point, “totalitarian state” was a vision rather than a system, but it was a vision clearly opposed to Western democratic arrangements, which it saw as weak. By implied definition, a totalitarian state would draw its strength from concentrating all power—including the power of every individual’s support for the regime—into a single whole. Both the Germans and the Italians saw the Soviet Union as a successful model of achieving such concentration.