The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

by Masha Gessen

I spent my thirties and forties documenting the death of a Russian democracy that had never really come to be.

But I also wanted to tell about what did not happen: the story of freedom that was not embraced and democracy that was not desired.

By the time Masha enrolled in school, the Lenin Corner had lost some of its luster and the teachers had toned down some of their rhetoric, rarely roaring the word “Communists” at their charges. But the daily rations of caviar remained, in even starker contrast to the world outside, where food shortages were the determining factor of everyday life.

This bucktoothed blonde in aviator glasses could teach Soviet Jews to beat the antisemitic machine, and this kept Masha in caviar and disgusting Central Committee farina.

A mix of snow and rain is falling from a dim sky, laying dirty-white stains on the surface of something that I’m not sure deserves to be called “earth.”

Most often Moscow yielded processed meats, which had not been seen in Gorky in years. Moscow had shortages of its own, but compared with Gorky, where a store might be selling nothing but unidentifiable dark juice in three-liter glass jars with tin covers, Moscow was the land of promise if not of plenty.

One time Raisa returned with candy, a clear plastic bag full of sloppily wrapped grayish-brown cylinders. They were soy mixed with sugar, crushed peanuts, and a sprinkling of cocoa powder. Zhanna thought she had never tasted anything better.

“Science gradually yielded to propaganda, and as a result propaganda tended more and more to represent itself as science.”

The books passed the censors, who allowed a thousand copies out into the world, but once they were published, they were condemned for not relying on concepts of historical materialism in all their statements, and, worst of all, for “allowing for ambiguous interpretations”—in other words, for being the opposite of dogma, forcing listeners and readers to think.

He was too lyrical, too reckless, too human to be Soviet.

A state born of protest against inequality had created one of the most intricate and rigid systems of privilege that the world had ever seen.

The imagination painted a picture of the ultimate Soviet privilege: living in material comfort—and watching Hollywood films instead of listening to the leaders’ own propaganda.

In 1984, the year Galina became pregnant, there were nearly twice as many abortions in Russia as there were births.

Levada hypothesized a detailed portrait of Homo Sovieticus. The system had bred him over the course of decades by rewarding obedience, conformity, and subservience.

as the Soviet Union sealed itself off with the Iron Curtain, so did the Soviet citizen separate himself from everyone who was Other and therefore untrustworthy. Ideology supported these separations by stressing “class enmity,” but keeping one’s social circle small was also a sound survival strategy during the era of mass terror, when excessive trust could prove deadly.

Only members of the single largest ethnic group—the Russians—could occasionally forget who they were.

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.

Homo Sovieticus was caught in an infinite spiral of lies: pretending to be, pretending to have, pretending to believe, and pretending not to.

A 1937 editorial proclaimed: “In the center of the mighty family of peoples of the USSR stands the great Russian people, passionately loved by all the peoples of the USSR, the first among equals.”

Soviet Russia had once declared itself to be the world’s first multiethnic anti-imperial state, yet its practices were imperial. It was another of the games the Soviet state played, much like the “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us” game.

On August 23, 1989, as many as two million people formed a human chain connecting Vilnius, Riga, and Tallinn, the capitals of the three republics. If this count is correct, then one in four residents of the region participated in the peaceful protest, called the Baltic Way. The date was the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Hitler-Stalin pact that had granted the Baltics to the USSR. These people did not want to secede: they wanted an end to the occupation.

Alexander Nikolaevich had given perhaps the most difficult interview of his life: he told the Pravda that the pact, known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and the secret protocols that divided Europe, existed. The USSR had denied the existence of the protocol for five decades.

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

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 totalitarian ideology contains all of reality within itself.

The army did not respond to the hard-liners’ signals, but it did not pick up on signals from Yeltsin’s White House either, and did not side with the resistance: it simply did not act.

Compared with life in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, Russians were better off—but they felt poor.

Clearing the names of tens of millions of Soviet citizens was his volunteer job.

It eventually emerged that an earlier generation had greatly feared arrest and had devised a strategy of extreme mimicry: they would be more Soviet than the Soviets who might arrest them for not being Soviet enough.

ARUTYUNYAN WAS CERTAIN that wounds formed when something was missing, willfully unremembered.

The democratic revolution of 1991—the defeat of totalitarianism—was an event that existed in the sociologists’ minds but not in the minds of their respondents.

Respondents did not exactly want to return to the Soviet Union, from what Gudkov could tell: the memory of food shortages, poverty, and airlessness was still raw. What Russians wanted was certainty, a clear sense of who they were and what their country was.

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.

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.

Perestroika had seemed to begin as yet another period of a temporary loosening of the reins, but then the pendulum appeared to swing too far, bringing the entire edifice down. But what if that was not what happened? What if, in fact, it had swung just as far as it needed to go to maintain the cycles?

In the reimagined Soviet past, everyone got a piece of the pig.4

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.

“What do you think,” asked Yeltsin, addressing him in the familiar, as one might address a child. “Are these signatures for me or against me?” “If you stop the war, they will be for you, and if you don’t, they will be against you.”

If peace in Chechnya was a difficult goal, the other two—ending economic hardship and restoring Russian grandeur—were impossible.

GUDKOV’S AND HIS COLLEAGUES’ RESEARCH suggested that no message about the present and the future could capture the hearts and minds of Russians, who now had their eyes set firmly on the past.

He explained that these ideas, imported from the West, were wrong precisely because they were fundamentally foreign to Russians, whose ethnos developed in accordance with its own destiny and whose geography made it the natural enemy of the United States and Britain.

Russia has always had its official authorities, who had the job titles and the status, and its unofficial ones. There was, for example, Grishka Rasputin. Now we have a sort of group Rasputin.

Democratic procedure, which had seemed a revolution in itself, was now the political equivalent of the “virtual economy” described by Gaddy—a mask pulled over a structure that refused to change.

Elections became a popularity contest in a very small political field, where the leading candidates, by definition, agreed with one another.

What was felt as a void in the early 1990s had gradually been transformed into nostalgia, and now it could be focused on one person.

So this is what an authoritarian situation looks like, thought Lyosha. A checkerboard.

Here was a sterling example of Soviet-style doublethink: America was attractive and threatening at the same time, worth emulating and eminently hateable.

“Individualism and the independence of opinion are traits characteristic of Europe, where we don’t belong,” he said. “Obedience and love for one’s leader are the traits of the Russian people.”

It offered an alternative view of Russian history, in which a century and a half of Mongol-Tatar rule had been not an age of destruction but, on the contrary, a vital cultural infusion that set Russia on a special path, distinct from Europe’s.

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.

“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.”