The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

The results of this part of the questionnaire surprised the group. Homo Sovieticus was clearly opening up to the world, feeling reasonably peaceful toward even the most deviant of groups, like the homosexuals: fully 10 percent believed that homosexuals should be "left to their own devices," another 6 percent thought they should be "helped" (the questionnaire did not specify what kind of help they should receive), and a third thought that homosexuals should be "liquidated."³² Considering that homosexual conduct was a crime punishable by up to three years in prison, Gudkov thought this level of aggression was low. More than 20 percent of respondents wanted to "liquidate" rockers, and nearly 8 percent wanted to "liquidate" alcoholics. But then a whopping 27 percent wanted rockers to be left alone, and more than 50 percent wanted to see alcoholics get help. In the absence of any data that could be used as reference, the researchers concluded that these results reflected a trend toward greater tolerance. The highest proportion of those who wanted to "liquidate" homosexuals was found in respondents older than fifty and younger than twenty: adults of working age were markedly less aggressive.³³

There was a lot of other good news. First, Levada's Homo Sovieticus hypothesis was largely borne out. The survey found the traits Levada had described, and it fleshed out the way Soviet

doublethink functioned in daily life. Orwell had described doublethink as follows:

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word "doublethink" involved the use of

doublethink.³⁴

The study showed how doublethink kept doubling back on itself. What Soviet people were required to believe and proclaim was counterfactual, and the requirement itself was but a mechanism of control, precisely because it contained its own negation. Homo Sovieticus lived a life of constant negotiation with the omnipotent state, and the negotiation itself was both the individual's sole survival strategy and an instrument of control. The sociologists identified several key areas of negotiation that they called "games."

There was a game called "Work," and one of the most-often- repeated Soviet jokes described it perfectly: "We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us." There was a game called "Care," in which "they"—the state—pretended to take care of the citizenry, which pretended to be grateful. What made this simple-sounding game instantly complicated was that it was not all pretense: the state indeed controlled the citizen's fate, and the citizen could be said to owe his continued survival to the state. In this sense, the game of "Complicity" was similar: Homo Sovieticus pretended to participate in the affairs of the state, and this made him complicit in everything the state did. The game of "Agreement," on the other hand, was a straightforward negotiation: pledging support for the state bought the citizen a modicum of privacy (and privacy was often the first thing dissidents were forced to sacrifice). The game of "Consensus" was a corollary of "Agreement": it allowed Homo Sovieticus's private self to be indifferent to and even dismissive of the state—as long as the public, collective citizenry demonstrated its loyalty to and enthusiastic support for the state.³⁵

The group administered its hundred-question survey to 2,700 people of various ages and backgrounds in different parts of the USSR, and here is what they did not find: people who believed in a radiant communist future, true Marxists, ideologues. The survey provided many opportunities for a true believer to manifest his convictions. But when answering the question "Where do you think a person can find answers to questions that concern him?" only 5.6 percent chose "In the teachings of Marx and Lenin," which would have been the "correct" answer in a different setting. About half chose the option "My own common sense." Asked whether they would prefer a supervisor who was a member of the Party, only 10.3 percent said yes, 21.5 percent said they would prefer to report to someone who was not a member of the Party, and the rest said they did not care.³⁶