The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

Every school of psychology has its own concept of the person. Carl Rogers's sees people as basically good but often unlucky: they must be tended to better. The cognitive behaviorists imagine imprints that interfere with the functioning of otherwise serviceable human beings. The human being of psychoanalysis is a complicated creature, a creature capable of reflection but doomed to make mistakes in the process of reflecting, a creature endowed with huge, destructive energies. It is by no means an innocent creature, born good and merely handicapped by external forces. This was the creature Arutyunyan wanted to study. It would be years before she was able to articulate this, but for now she was writing her thesis on cognitive dissonance, thereby creating her own little fortochka. It turned out you could do that—write about Soviet people as though they could contain contradictions and inner conflicts—as long as you framed the story in requisite meaningless phrases lifted from one of the approved textbooks.

GUDKOV

what was arutyunyan going to do with all the knowledge she was hoarding? Being able to apply one's theoretical expertise was an unimaginable luxury in the airless space—if one was a psychologist or social scientist, that is, rather than a rocket one. Intellectuals aspired to and prized luxuries of a different order: an unburdensome job in a nontoxic environment that left time for thinking and breathing some fortochka air. This was a lot to want, and getting it required luck, brains, and connections. Arutyunyan, both of whose parents were sociologists, got a job at the Institute of Sociology, and this was virtually a dream setup.

An odd feature of the time—most likely an intended result of the system's highly developed ability to suppress those with deep expertise or excessive passion—was that people often had to work in fields that ran parallel to their primary interests. Ten years before Arutyunyan graduated from the department of psychology and went to work at the Institute of Sociology, a young man who wanted nothing more than to be a sociologist was writing a term paper on Freud's concept of defense mechanisms. Lev Gudkov had set out to be a journalist like his own father. Two years in a row he tried to gain entrance to Moscow's exclusive Institute of Foreign Relations, which trained diplomats and foreign correspondents, a high percentage of them fated to work for intelligence services. Both times Gudkov failed the essay portion of the entrance exams, which was graded on a dual scale: one mark for form and one for content. Both years, his form was deemed excellent and his content got a failing grade. He was not well-versed enough in what he was supposed to think. A criticism that would haunt his early career was that he lacked "critical thinking"— meaning, he was not sufficiently critical of anything that diverged from the current Party line.

Gudkov gave up and enrolled as an evening student at the journalism department of Moscow State University. This was one of the university's least challenging branches, and evening students, especially, were left to their own devices. For many of them, the department offered a nearly painless way to obtain a university diploma after six years of attending some lectures after work (the program was longer than normal because of its light course load). Gudkov realized that if he did not seek out knowledge himself, it would never find him. He looked, and eventually stumbled upon an elective lecture course offered by sociologist Yuri Levada.