Surviving Autocracy

by Masha Gessen

Totalitarian regimes use words to mean their opposite. In 1984, George Orwell imagined the Party dictating its slogans: “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” Real-life totalitarian regimes do not grant their subjects the clarity of juxtaposing a word with its antonym—they enforce order by applying words in ways that invert meaning. The Soviet Union, for example, had something that it called “elections,” usually referred to, as though more descriptively, as the “free expression of citizen will.” The process, which was mandatory, involved showing up at the so-called polling place, receiving a pre-filled ballot—each office had one name matched to it—and depositing it in the ballot box, out in the open. The “free expression of citizen will” was not at all free, it did not constitute expression, and it had no relationship to citizenship or will. Calling this ritual either an “election” or the “free expression of citizen will” had a dual effect: it eviscerated the words “election,” “free,” “expression,” “citizen,” and “will,” and it also left the thing itself undescribed. When something cannot be described, it does not become a fact of shared reality. Hundreds of millions of Soviet citizens had an experience of the thing that could not be described, but they did not consciously share that experience, because they had no language for doing so. At the same time, an experience that could be accurately described as, say, an “election,” or “free,” had been preemp...