The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

We have fallen two epochs behind. We have missed the postindustrial era and the information era. As a result, our society is deeply ill. Our souls are permanently empty. We have grown to presume everyone guilty at all times, thus creating hundreds of thousands of guards watching over our morality, conscience, purity of world view, compliance with the wishes of the authorities. We have turned truth into a crime. We have robbed nature to within a breath of its life. We have created crime, queues, rudeness, corruption that goes all the way up from a store's truck unloader to a government minister. We have ostracized intellectualism and fostered a regime of the ignorant

Today we are living as though in two worlds at once. The old Stalinist world does not want to leave, and it is holding on to everything that can still prop it up. The new world is struggling to stay afloat within the old structures and often begins to act in

accordance with their rules

Over the last seventy years the Communist Party of the Soviet Union has been not a party but an organization of administrative command, integrated into the structures of state as its primary

Legislator, Distributor, Controller, and Monopolist on the Truth

None of this is said by way of reproach. These are lessons. Marx never imagined that his analysis of early capitalism would be transformed into an ideological weapon in the struggle for power. Nor is our great people to blame for having followed its trusting nature and its passionate faith in a better life, making it vulnerable to manipulation. It would not be right to direct this criticism at the millions of ordinary Communists who have been dominated by a

caste of Party bosses.³¹

This was war. Party leadership began talking about expelling Alexander Nikolaevich. A top-level member had not been expelled since the Stalin era: this seemed a fate worse than death. Death was another option. Alexander Nikolaevich got word that he might be assassinated. He drafted a letter to be opened in case of his death and then sought out the head of the KGB, his old protege Kryuchkov, in the Kremlin corridor. "Tell your people that they've miscalculated," he said. "I've drafted a letter, and three different outlets will publish it if something happens to me."³² On August 15, the Party Control Committee—which was precisely what its name suggests, a committee created for the control of Communists and the disciplining of any who strayed—voted to recommend Alexander Nikolaevich's expulsion.³³ Alexander Nikolaevich heard about it on the radio. On August 16, he wrote two letters. The shorter one, marked with his Party membership number—00000051—tendered his resignation.³⁴ The longer one was titled "An open letter to Communists on the danger of revanchism." Alexander Nikolaevich had been working on it for over three months, but it so happened that he finished it the day the Party expelled him. Two days later, on August 18, he showed the

draft to one of the other founders of the Movement for Democratic Reform, Leningrad mayor Anatoly Sobchak. Alexander Nikolaevich wanted to ensure it was clear and well-argued before sending it out. "Tragedy is possible," warned the letter, "for changes have affected the interests of the ruling elite." The letter was never sent.³⁵

on august 18, Masha's mother came to pick her up from her grandparents' dacha. She said she needed her daughter in Moscow to apply for a new foreign-travel passport for her. Three months earlier, Gorbachev had signed a new law concerning entering and exiting the USSR. The Iron Curtain was being lifted in stages. At the beginning, only a very few people were allowed to travel out of the Soviet Union, and only if they had a compelling reason and a slew of sterling character references from their place of work, their place of residence, and, preferably, the Party too. Foreign-travel passports were kept under lock and key, released only for the duration of the approved trip—no one got to keep his passport around the house. Starting in the mid-1980s, the vetting process gradually relaxed. Now the new law would make it possible for ordinary Russians to obtain five-year travel passports and even, if the law was followed to the letter, release them from the obligation to apply for an exit visa every time they wanted to travel.³⁶ Tatiana, whose business often took her to Poland, had long used her connections to secure a foreign-travel passport with a long-term exit visa, but with the new law, she figured she would get one for her daughter.

On August 19, Tatiana and Masha took the commuter train into the center of Moscow, then the Metro, and then an aboveground tram to their neighborhood. When the tram was passing through a tunnel at Volokolamskoye Roadway, Masha saw two tanks moving in the opposite direction.

"Wow! Cool!" said Masha.

"Fuck," said Tatiana.

She thought for a moment.