The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

Homo Sovieticus was not indoctrinated. In fact, Homo Sovieticus did not seem to hold particularly strong opinions of any sort. His inner world consisted of antinomies, his objective was survival, and his strategy was constant negotiation—the endless circulation of games of doublethink.

But the researchers saw hope. Younger people seemed less "Soviet." Asked to define a festive occasion, for example, respondents over the age of fifty were most likely to name official holidays, beginning with the days of military glory (Soviet Army Day and Victory Day) while the younger ones would say, "when you've gotten lucky" or "when you can get together with friends and have a drink." Asked to describe their greatest fear, the older people would say "war" while the younger ones said "humiliation." Asked to name the most significant event of the twentieth century, the older respondents most often said "victory in the Great Patriotic War" while the younger ones mentioned Stalinist Terror more often than anything else.³⁷

Levada concluded that the second part of his hypothesis, which held that Homo Sovieticus was dying off, was correct, and that this was inevitable. "One of the outcomes of these deals with the devil," he wrote, referring to the constant "games" Homo Sovieticus played, "is the disintegration of the structure of personality itself." Homo Sovieticus was caught in an infinite spiral of lies: pretending to be, pretending to have, pretending to believe, and pretending not to. The fakery concerned the most basic of facts and the most fundamental of values, and what lay at the bottom of the spiral was an absence: "even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink." The system destroyed the individual and the fabric of society: nothing was possible in the absence of everything, resulting, wrote Levada, in "the falling standards of education, culture, morality, in the degradation of all of society." If the Soviet person was ultimately an absence, then he could not reproduce. "Therefore we can view the Homo Sovieticus as a transient historical event," concluded Levada. The Soviet man would go extinct, and so would the USSR.

PART TWO

REVOLUTION

five

SWAN LAKE

in late December 1991, Masha was on a train with her mother. They were going to spend New Year's in Poland. Tatiana had been going there for a couple of years: since the stores in Moscow had emptied out completely and tutoring could no longer buy them a semblance of comfort, she had become one of Russia's first chelnoki—"shuttles," people who made their living by importing goods in quantities small enough to be carried as personal luggage. Tatiana trafficked in wares that had just last year been exotic but were now consumer goods: feminine pads, erotic magazines, and other intimate items everyone needed and no one had. The journey from Moscow to Warsaw took twenty-one comfortable hours: the train left in the afternoon and arrived the following morning. A few hours after pulling out of Moscow's Belorussky Station, the train crossed an invisible border.

"Belorussia," said Tatiana. "Here it is. Yesterday it was still ours. Today, it's a separate country."

Masha, who was in second grade, was not sure what this meant.

"Is Poland still ours?" she asked.

"Shush," snapped Tatiana, and looked at the two Polish women who shared their compartment, to make sure they had not been paying attention.

That discussion was over. On other occasions that year, Tatiana had tried to explain things to her daughter, generally confounding her further each time. In January, she told Masha that they would never again travel to Lithuania, where they had spent the previous August at the Baltic seaside resort of Palanga. Now, she said, "we" had done

something terrible there and the people of Lithuania would forever hate Russians. Masha had never really thought of herself as a part of some "we" who were Russians. At the Central Committee preschool the teachers had talked of "us" being "the Soviet people." The Soviet people had, for example, defeated the German fascists in the Great Patriotic War. Actually, it was difficult to think of another example of something "the Soviet people" had done, but then, the Great Patriotic War was enough—to know who the people were, and who Masha was.