The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

For the first two years at the psychology department, Arutyunyan was in hell. Endless hours were devoted to a subject called Marxist- Leninist Philosophy. This was a clear case of propaganda masquerading as scholarship, and while the young Arutyunyan might not necessarily have phrased it this way, she cracked the propaganda code. She developed a simple matrix on which any philosophy could be placed and easily appraised. The matrix consisted of two axes on a cross. One ran from Materialism (good) to Idealism (bad) and the other from Dialectics (good) to Metaphysics (bad). The result was four quadrants. Philosophers who landed in the lower left quadrant, where Metaphysics met Idealism, were all bad. Kant was an example. Someone like Hegel—Dialectics meets Idealism—was better, but not all good. Philosophical perfection resided in the upper-right-hand corner of the graph, at the pinnacle of Dialectical Materialism.

Arutyunyan shared this matrix with several classmates, and now they had Marxist-Leninist Philosophy down.

History of the Party proved a much more difficult subject. "Look at yourself," the professor said to her derisively. He used a Russian word —taz—that could mean either "hips" or "basin." There was apparently something wrong with Arutyunyan's taz. She looked around, confused, wondering if she had somehow besoiled a laboratory basin in a History of the Party classroom. The professor, it turned out, was referring to her hips, which he deemed too narrow to produce quality Party progeny.

In addition to the various propaganda sciences, psychology department students received hands-on instruction in the natural sciences. They dissected frogs, and were expected to proceed to dissect rats, but Arutyunyan rebelled when it came to that and her group was, blessedly, exempted from having to kill mammals. There was a subject called Anthropology, but this area of study in its Western understanding was disallowed in the Soviet Union, so the course would more accurately have been called Theory of Evolution. It included the study of genetics, banned for decades but recently redeemed, and this was interesting.

Physiology of Higher Nervous Functioning featured human brains in formaldehyde, which were brought in for every class and set on each table. Arutyunyan was too squeamish to use her finger—gloves, in short supply all over the country, were not an option—so she stuck it with a pen, earning the professor's wrath. "You are damaging the brain!" he bellowed.

For the purpose of legitimizing their peculiar area of inquiry, psychology students were also required to undergo detailed and rigorous training in statistical and data analysis. As for the psyche, it was conspicuously absent. If Arutyunyan learned anything in her first couple of years at university, it was only the basic logic behind this absence.

Marxism in the Soviet Union had been boiled down to the understanding that people—Soviet citizens—were shaped entirely by their society and the material conditions of their lives. If the work of shaping the person was done correctly—and it had to have been, since by now Soviet society claimed to have substantially fulfilled the Marxist project by building what was called "socialism functioning in reality"—then the person had to emerge with a set of goals that coincided perfectly with the needs of the society that had produced him. Anomalies were possible, and they could fall into one of two categories: criminality or mental illness. Soviet society had institutions to handle both. No other kind of disharmony was conceivable. Inner conflict was not an option. There was really no reason to take up the subject of the psyche.