The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

Levada was frighteningly intelligent, unabashedly passionate, and most important, he had mastered the art of thinking out loud during a lecture. He suggested that the peculiarities of everyday life in the Soviet Union could be observed, examined, and understood. In one lecture, for example, he analyzed a short story in which collective- farm workers are sitting around waiting for a Party meeting to start, complaining about their unreasonably demanding bosses and terrible work conditions. Then the meeting commences and the workers take turns lauding their collective farm's accomplishments and boasting of their own contributions to the Soviet cause. Once the meeting is over, they go home, where they return to complaining of their senseless work and miserly pay. Levada showed that the public-private behavioral divide, instantly recognizable to all his listeners, could be understood not just as hypocrisy but as a social and cultural institution.²⁶

Fourth-year student Gudkov fell in love. Now he wanted to be a sociologist and work for Levada. There were no job openings, so he would wait. An assistant's position finally opened up in September 1970. Who knew that work could be so enjoyable? Everyone was constantly joking, telling stories, and everyone seemed to be in love with everyone else, through some sort of multiplier effect produced by everyone's crush on Levada himself.²⁷ The best part, though, were the discussions. Each staff member had an ongoing assignment to read a Western sociologist and prepare presentations and discussion questions for the rest of the group. Gudkov got Max Weber. He felt like an ugly duckling, not nearly as smart as his new colleagues, but the thrill and sense of privilege far outweighed his discomfort.

Within two years, it was all over. Levada's problems began after he published his university talks in two tiny books titled Lectures on Sociology. The books passed the censors, who allowed a thousand copies out into the world, but once they were published, they were condemned for not relying on concepts of historical materialism in all their statements, and, worst of all, for "allowing for ambiguous interpretations"—in other words, for being the opposite of dogma, forcing listeners and readers to think.²⁸ Levada publicly admitted his mistakes but was still stripped of one of his advanced degrees and eventually forced to resign from the Institute. All his staff lost their jobs.

Levada's people struggled to find work: being purged for ideological reasons and their very affiliation with Levada marked them as dangerous. Within a year, though, all had settled somewhere, but often doing nothing beyond the empty imitation of activity that Soviet academic institutions had become so good at producing. What mattered was that Levada assembled his group into a seminar that met every couple of weeks in the evenings. They met wherever Levada was working at the time, and even when they got kicked out and had to move to another institute and had to change the seminar's name (following especially acrimonious evictions), for the next quarter century they never stopped meeting²⁹ and their mode of work and mission remained constant. It was, as the participants put it, "to assimilate Western sociology." They read twentieth-century theory, talked, and wrote papers that could never be published. In order to write a dissertation that he could defend, Gudkov had to recast his reading of Weber as criticism of Weber, and still it took him years to get his doctorate—he was once again criticized for insufficiently critical thinking, as well as for "bourgeois objectivity," the thought crime of failing to recognize the inevitability of capitalism's demise.

western visitors to the Soviet Union who lucked into Moscow's insular intellectual circles were usually taken with the luxurious sense of timelessness in which they existed. With careers almost entirely lateral and ambitions, if they ever existed, generally shelved, people like Arutyunyan, Gudkov, and even Dugin seemed to study solely for the sake of learning, rarely even entertaining the possibility that theory could be put to work in any way. But in 1984 Arutyunyan learned that the government was launching psychological "consultation" services, to provide something like family therapy. They were to be called Family and Marriage Centers, and their task was to try to stem the tide of divorces. Party committees had apparently despaired of their ability to manage and shore up the Soviet family: in the 1970s the number of divorces in the country had nearly doubled while the number of marriages barely grew.³⁰