The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

Levada hypothesized a detailed portrait of Homo Sovieticus. The system had bred him over the course of decades by rewarding obedience, conformity, and subservience.²³ The successful member of Soviet society, suggested Levada, believed in self-isolation, state paternalism, and what Levada called "hierarchical egalitarianism," and suffered from an "imperial syndrome."²⁴ Self-isolation was a key strategy for both the state and the individual: as the Soviet Union sealed itself off with the Iron Curtain, so did the Soviet citizen separate himself from everyone who was Other and therefore untrustworthy. Ideology supported these separations by stressing "class enmity," but keeping one's social circle small was also a sound survival strategy during the era of mass terror, when excessive trust could prove deadly.²⁵ The belief in a paternalistic state, and an utter dependence on it, were bred in Homo Sovieticus by the very nature of the Soviet state, which, Levada wrote, was not so much a complex of institutions, like the modern state, but rather a single superinstitution. He described it as a "universal institution of a premodern paternalistic type, which reaches into every corner of human existence."²⁶ The Soviet state was the ultimate parent: it fed, clothed, housed, and educated its citizen; it gave him a job and gave his life meaning; it rewarded him for doing good and punished him for doing wrong, no matter how small the transgression. "By its very design, the Soviet 'socialist' state is totalitarian because it must not leave the individual any independent space," wrote Levada.²⁷ This description of totalitarianism echoed Hannah Arendt's explanation of how totalitarian regimes employ terror: "It substitutes for the boundaries and channels of communication between men a band of iron which holds them so tightly together that it is as though their plurality had disappeared into One Man of gigantic dimensions."²⁸ Robbed of his individuality and therefore the ability to interact meaningfully with others, she wrote, man became profoundly lonely, which made him the perfect creature and subject of the totalitarian state.²⁹

Since the state controlled every thing and every person, Soviet society had a simple vertical structure, rendering the Soviet citizen's thinking fundamentally hierarchical. Even though the exact systems of rank and privilege were secret, the basic logic according to which the state doled out goods and comforts in exchange for valued services ruled every person's life. At the same time, official ideology extolled equality and the state punished those who had, or wanted to have, too much. For Homo Sovieticus this translated into the value of equality within groups—a strictly enforced conformity at one's station in life. This was what Levada termed "hierarchical egalitarianism."³⁰ This term was an example of what Levada called "antinomies"—a philosophical concept that refers to the contradiction between statements either of which appears reasonable. Homo Sovieticus's world, according to Levada, was shaped by pairs of antinomies. The most important of these may have been what Levada called "the imperial syndrome." On the one hand, the USSR, like the Russia that preceded it, was incontrovertibly an empire. Its strength, breadth, and size were all sources of citizen pride. Every schoolchild knew that the Soviet Union occupied the largest territory of any country in the world—one-sixth of the Earth's landmass.

Broad is my native land

Many there are forests, fields, and rivers.

I know of no other country

Where man breathes so freely

This was a popular patriotic song that clearly made the connection: the Soviet person's wonderful life was a function of the very size of his country. On the other hand, every Soviet citizen was constantly made aware of his ethnic origin, which was immutable and contained on every document that referred to him. Only members of the single largest ethnic group—the Russians—could occasionally forget who they were. "So Homo Sovieticus is by his very nature, genetically, frustrated, faced with the impossible choice between an ethnic and a superethnic identity," wrote Levada.³¹

The antinomies required Homo Sovieticus to fragment his consciousness to accommodate both of the contradictory positions. Levada borrowed George Orwell's term "doublethink." Homo Sovieticus, like the characters of 1984, could hold two contradictory beliefs at the same time. These beliefs ran on parallel tracks, and so long as the tracks indeed did not cross, they were not in conflict: depending on the situation, Homo Sovieticus could deploy one or the other statement in the antinomic pair, sometimes one after the other, in quick succession.