The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

In the summers, Lyosha stayed in the village with his grandmother. Assorted cousins were sent there as well, and their parents floated in and out, sometimes spending a week or two and sometimes staying just the weekend. One day when he was five, his aunt said, "Let's go get baptized," and they all went to another village, where there stood a church in a profound state of decay that was only accentuated by some recent spot repairs. A man in a dress took Lyosha by the hair and dunked his face in a vat of water. At that moment Lyosha hated the man and his own aunt, but a few minutes later he liked the bread and the wine the man put on his tongue, and he loved the little cross the man put around his neck. When they got back to their own village, Lyosha ran up to his mother shouting, "Look what I have"—meaning the little cross. Galina took a step back, looking like she might faint. She later explained to him that she was an atheist, and what that meant.

Lyosha loved to hear Galina explain things, especially when they had to do with history. She had many history books at home, and Lyosha worshipped these, particularly the ones about the Great Patriotic War. He read The Wreath of Glory, a set of heavy books in red leatherette covers. The giant anthology collected works of fiction and nonfiction, with each volume devoted to one aspect of the war: a book on the defense of Moscow, a book on Leningrad, a book on victory itself.¹⁹ He listened to vinyl records of war songs—the great march songs calling on people to rise up, the lyrical ballads about missing loved ones and fighting for them, and the heartbreaking postwar songs about lost comrades. Lyosha was convinced that his birth date was no accident: he was not just born on Victory Day—he was born on the fortieth anniversary of the end of the greatest war ever fought. When relatives came over on his birthday, he would grill them on their knowledge of war history. Once he was older, he turned the ritual into a quiz, putting days into preparing questions about the great battles at Stalingrad and Kursk. He did his best to play war songs on the piano. One of his cousins had given him a collection of Great Patriotic War sheet music for one of his birthdays. Lyosha took lessons in playing accordion, not piano, but he could read music, and he had intense determination. He played using one finger.

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HOMO SOVIETICUS

perestroika was an impossible idea on the face of it. The Party was setting out to employ its structures of command to make the country, and itself, less command-driven. A system whose main afflictions were stagnation and inflexibility was setting out to change itself. Worst and probably intractable was the fact that people who had spent their lives securing power and individual leverage were expected to devise change that would dismantle the hierarchy of levers and might dislodge them. The system resisted change instinctively, and a great number of individuals plotted consciously to sabotage the change.

As the man appointed by Gorbachev to think through perestroika, to design it and guide it, Alexander Nikolaevich was confronted daily with the futility of the task. Much of the Party's leadership rejected change for fear of losing power. Those who appeared to welcome change, like, most notably, the head of the Moscow Party organization, Boris Yeltsin, were ultimately also driven by the desire for power, and this made them unreliable allies. The leaders of many of the Soviet Union's constituent republics were becoming lax in monitoring and containing nationalist forces: for decades the country had prosecuted local nationalist activists as enemies of the state, but perestroika loosened talk of self-determination in the Baltic republics, Ukraine, Georgia, and even in places that were nominally part of the Russian republic within the USSR. It was beginning to pull the country apart, creating tension and instability when the USSR could least afford it. The media, which were now—in large part thanks to Alexander Nikolaevich's efforts—granted greater freedom and even encouraged to tackle difficult subjects, were by turns too passive and too conservative, even reactionary. The public, to the extent that Alexander Nikolaevich could track what the public was thinking, also seemed torn between inappropriate passivity and equally inappropriate action: those who began speaking out seemed invariably to choose extreme positions, whether they were speaking in favor of democratization or in favor of cracking down to preserve the Soviet order. Alexander Nikolaevich took to calling all of them "extremists."