The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

by Masha Gessen

“Are you aware,” she asked, “that there are no lesbians in Russia?” “I’ve also heard,” said Lyosha, “that there was no sex in the Soviet Union. Yet you are here.”

the student rebellion “has every chance, come fall, to change the color of Red Square, turning it into an all-Russian rainbow ‘maidan.’”

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 message of the Munich speech was that Russia would no longer accept the post-Soviet, post–Warsaw Pact condition.

Fromm divided newfound freedom into two parts: “freedom to” and “freedom from.” If the former was positive, the latter could cause unbearable anxiety:

For her, too, the future was acquiring more definite contours—but she had never longed for this, and was only now realizing how much of an outsider this made her in Russian society.

Makarov was doomed as soon as he was first suspected, falsely, of having sexually abused his daughter. His attempts to fight the charges—he asked for further tests, mounted a thorough defense, and then appealed his sentence—only made the law-enforcement machine pursue him harder.

Seryozha imagined Putin saying, not in so many words, “All right, let’s see what we can do here. What do you say I keep my billions and you keep your lives as you know them?” Then the state would pull back where it had overstepped.

Tens of thousands of people were clicking “I’m going” on the social network pages created for the protest, and the activists felt it was important that they go to the right place and make the right demands. It was for their own good.

They liked to joke, and they loved a good funny banner, like I DIDN’T VOTE FOR THESE ASSHOLES, I VOTED FOR THE OTHER ASSHOLES, the runaway favorite among the many visual and textual gags held up on handwritten placards at Bolotnaya. The humor, Bikbov concluded, served a dual purpose. On the one hand, it defused the feeling of having been violated: one is less of a victim if one can laugh about it. It also signaled that the protesters were not dangerous.

He suggested that part of the answer lay in the ritual of elections, which had been painfully violated. In other words, it was precisely the obscene manner of the rigging, not the fact of it, that caused the outrage—like

She read the Constitution to riot police, got detained, gave interviews, got detained. Meanwhile, in the Kremlin, Putin was inaugurated for his official third presidential term.

Fourteen thousand men shouted “Hooray!” three times in perfect unison, and the Russian national anthem—the restored Soviet anthem—began playing.

Wars were almost as good as crackdowns because they discredited anyone who wanted to complicate things.

Constant flux was necessary for the system’s survival: “The totalitarian ruler must, at any price, prevent normalization from reaching the point where a new way of life could develop—one

“The point is that both Hitler and Stalin held out promises of stability in order to hide their intention of creating a state of permanent instability.”

The ruling elites of post-communist states most often hail from the old nomenklatura, be it Party or secret service. But to Magyar this was not the countries’ most important common feature: what mattered most was that some of these old groups evolved into structures centered around a single man who led them in wielding power.

A mafia state, in Magyar’s definition, was different from other states ruled by one person surrounded by a small elite. In a mafia state, the small powerful group was structured just like a family. The center of the family is the patriarch, who does not govern: “he disposes—of positions, wealth, statuses, persons.”25 The system works like a caricature of the Communist distribution economy.

One cannot leave the family voluntarily: one can only be kicked out, disowned and disinherited. Violence and ideology, the pillars of the totalitarian state, became, in the hands of the mafia state, mere instruments.

We must remember that we are Russian! That for thousands of years we protected our freedom and independence. We have spilled seas of blood, our own and other people’s, to make Russia great. And Russia will be great! Otherwise it will not exist at all. Russia is everything! All else is nothing!

The word “values” was new, and it was key. The fledgling ideology now had all its components: the nation, the past, traditional values, an external threat, and a fifth column.

These arrests served the same purpose as selective arrests had in the Soviet Union: they issued a warning. Bolotnoye inmates seemed chosen almost at random.

That is how terror works: the threat must be credible yet unpredictable.

What united these activists and groups, disparate as they were in conventional political terms, was their political opposition to Brussels and philosophical opposition to modernity.

Gudkov himself had once added poverty to the definition of totalitarianism: he had come to the conclusion that scarcity was essential for the survival of a totalitarian regime.

So this was how it worked. The famous got a bullet in the heart and the less famous got poison in their tea.

It had all been too much for them for years. Their anxiety had been intolerable: what Arutyunyan had experienced as “freedom from” the constraints of the totalitarian state, many of her clients experienced as “freedom to”—find a way, measure up, do as well as the others. When the first constraints began snapping back into place, to the beat of the “stability” drum, they had felt calmer.

One day, in February 2016, she stepped outside in the morning to discover that overnight all the low-rise commercial buildings on her street—the shops that sold flowers and bread and soda and cigarettes—had been torn down.

It was not just this client who was living in a state of constant anxiety: the entire country was. It was the oldest trick in the book—a constant state of low-level dread made people easy to control, because it robbed them of the sense that they could control anything themselves.

TRAUMA IS, as one American theorist has phrased it, “a historical experience of survival exceeding the grasp of the person who survives.”

A British analyst once said that he preferred depression brought on by big bad events to depression that was apparently spontaneous: tragedy increased the chances of recovery. Too bad this logic held only in cases when you could expect the big and bad to end.

He proposed forming an international antiterrorist coalition “like the anti-Hitler coalition.”13 The offer, in other words, was to join forces in fighting ISIS in exchange for Russia’s unhindered reign in Ukraine and elsewhere in the region—just like participation in the anti-Hitler coalition had allowed the Soviet Union to keep the spoils of its earlier alliance with Hitler.

Entire civilizations in history had ceased to exist. How had life in them felt in the last decades and days? Russia and the Russians had been dying for a century—in the wars, in the Gulag, and, most of all, in the daily disregard for human life. She had always thought of that disregard as negligence, but perhaps it should be understood as active desire. This country wanted to kill itself.

It wanted to die; life was a foreign agent.

In the spring of 2017, news came that gay men there were being rounded up, interned, tortured, and, in some cases, killed. Chechen and Russian officials laughed off questions about the disappearances.

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