The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

by Masha Gessen

without a central unifying set of beliefs, the country, pulled in opposite directions by social groups with different desires, would eventually self-destruct.

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.

Hannah Arendt had written about the way totalitarianism robs people of the ability to form opinions, to define themselves as distinct from other members of society or from the regime itself.

Igor Nikolaev, from remote Yakutia, spelled out the Eurasian self-perception more clearly in his presentation, which he said had started out as a high school essay. “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.”

“The Eurasianists will continue to oppose the West as long as the West persists in its pretensions to the universality of its own values, in forcing those values onto people, and in attempting to dominate, whether by means of colonization or by means of neo-colonization, which is what globalization is.”

Perhaps terror was necessary for the establishment of a totalitarian regime, but once established could it be maintained by institutions that carried within them the memory of terror?

Periods of great social and economic upheaval had the ability to make the authoritarian character dominant in society and to carry an authoritarian character to the top.

All that had gone wrong, Alexander Nikolaevich believed, had been the result of drastic action taken without forethought. Good change could be only gradual and intentional.

Like if your teenage daughter has not come home—by morning you have run out of logical explanations, you can no longer calm yourself by pretending that she might have missed the last Metro train and spent the night at a friend’s house and her phone battery had died, and you are left alone with your fear. You can no longer sit still or reason. You regress, and after a while the only thing you can do is scream, like a helpless terrified baby. You need an adult, a figure of authority. Almost anyone willing to take charge will do. And then, if that someone wants to remain in charge, he will have to make sure that you continue to feel helpless.

In cases where the trauma was extended in time—as with ongoing oppression or state terror—change, even apparently positive change, wrought further trauma. When familiar social structures stopped functioning, it could be as traumatic as when physical structures collapsed in the case of a natural disaster.