The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

Virginia Satir, the world's most famous family therapist, came the following year. Pulling people one by one onto the stage from a crowded auditorium, she explained the most basic tenets of her approach, her belief in the fundamental goodness of every person: "I know he is a wonderful man. Why do I know this? Because he is a man at the station of life, and he is the only one exactly like him in the whole world."²⁰ Viktor Frankl came and lectured on existential therapy. The psychologists of Moscow were catching a glimpse of the twentieth century's professional conversation before the last of its great participants were gone. Rogers died in 1987; Satir in 1988; Frankl lived for another decade, but by the time he visited Moscow he was already in his eighties.

Arutyunyan tried to hear and learn all of it, all at once, before she came to the realization that to help a human being, she had to choose a single framework for understanding him. This was when she concluded that the flawed, complicated, and sometimes frightening human of psychoanalysis was her choice. It would be a while before she knew that psychoanalysis, too, had its different schools, each of which represented a different vision of the person.

gudkov's second invitation to work with Yuri Levada was twenty years in coming. After two decades of home-based seminars, Levada was reassembling his team as part of an official Soviet institution. In July 1987 the Central Committee decreed that "in order to study and deploy the public opinion of the Soviet population on the most pressing socioeconomic issues" a new center would be created under the auspices of the trade union authority and the labor ministry. This and subsequent documents made it clear that the future All-Union Public Opinion Research Center would not in fact be merely a research institution: it was expected to actively devise and implement strategies for shaping public opinion.²¹ The choice of overseeing agencies was logical: centrally controlled trade unions and the labor ministry were in charge of the human resource that was all the Soviet

people—who, the thinking went, would now be properly monitored and directed.

The new center began in chaos and confusion. The trade unions allocated half a million dollars—hard currency—to buy the latest computer equipment, and the sociologists were promptly swindled out of the entire sum by a con man posing as a Canadian technology supplier.²² On the bright side, there was the staffing: Levada knew exactly what needed to be studied, and he had all his people with him to conduct the research.

Levada's hypothesis, formed over the course of more than three decades working not only in the Soviet Union but also, in the 1950s, in newly communist China, was that every totalitarian regime forms a type of human being on whom it relies for its stability. The shaping of the New Man is the regime's explicit project, but its product is not so much a vessel for the regime's ideology as it is a person best equipped to survive in a given society. The regime, in turn, comes to depend on this newly shaped type of person for its continued survival.