The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

When he was an adult, he wondered whether this was a memory from 1991 or 1993. He checked Wikipedia, but then he forgot. He checked again, and searched for a mnemonic device, but then forgot again. Eventually he resigned himself to looking it up every six months or so.

seryozha could be forgiven for being perpetually unable to pin down what had happened to the country in which he was born: much older people, learned observers and passionate participants in the events alike, had similar difficulties. Several narratives finally emerged. Harvard historian Serhii Plokhy has argued that the USSR collapsed because it was an empire in the century that ended empires: the process may have taken longer and looked different from the deaths of other empires because of the peculiarities of Soviet state-building and ideology, but that did not change the forces that pulled the Soviet Union apart.¹ Zbigniew Brzezinski, who predicted the Soviet collapse —and the 1991 coup—wrote that a basic paradox would bring the country down: its economy had dead-ended, and to survive economically it would have to reform politically, which would

inevitably destroy the state's entire system. But if, he posited, the country wanted to preserve its political system, it would fail

economically.²

More than a decade later, Princeton historian Stephen Kotkin wrote the story of the Soviet collapse as precipitated by Gorbachev himself, by oscillating between pursuing reform and not, constantly trying to fight a process he had set in motion.³ In other disciplines, University of California at Berkeley anthropologist Alexei Yurchak has also written that the Soviet Union was brought down by its own paradoxes, falling into the gap between the governing ideology and lived reality—a gap that exists and can produce a crisis in any society.⁴ And, of course, Yuri Levada and his team of sociologists predicted that the Soviet Union would die off because Homo Sovieticus, who held up all of its institutions, would go extinct.

With the exception of Brzezinski, who was a student and theorist of totalitarianism, and Levada, who proposed the Homo Sovieticus model, all these explanations try to make sense of the demise of the USSR in terms imported from very different societies. The loss of the social sciences in the Soviet Union made this inevitable: Soviet society had been forbidden to know itself, and had no native language to describe and define what had happened. The occasional fortochkas that opened up the possibility of self-examination were usually too small to allow scholars to adjust and adapt imported models, or to invent their own. Yurchak, who grew up in the Soviet Union but received his graduate education in the United States in the 1990s, provides probably the most obvious example of the ill fit of foreign models. He lacks the tools to explore the ways in which the gaps between ideology and reality in the Soviet Union differed from the gaps in Western countries, for which his model was devised. In functioning democracies the contradictions between avowed ideals and reality can be and often are called out, causing social and political change. That does not eliminate the built-in gap, but it has a way of making societies a little more democratic and a little less unequal, in spurts. Totalitarian ideology allows no such correction. Hannah Arendt maintained that any ideology can become totalitarian, but for that to happen it needs to be reduced to a single simple idea, which is then turned into a single simple idea from which the ostensible "laws of history" are derived—and enforced through terror.⁵ What distinguishes a totalitarian ideology is its utterly insular quality. It purports to explain the entire world and everything in it. There is no gap between totalitarian ideology and reality because totalitarian ideology contains all of reality within itself.

That quality of Soviet ideology is also the problem with Plokhy's argument that the USSR fell apart because it was an empire. Not only did the Soviet state not consider itself an empire, it claimed to be the opposite of one. That self-concept did not change during the Soviet dismantling or later, when Russia became its own federation of different territories, cultures, and ethnic groups. Of course, one can argue that an empire does not stop being an empire just because it says it is not one—a dog does not stop being a dog just because it identifies with its friend the cat—but an empire is unarguably a sociopolitical construction, and what it thinks of itself matters. To pass, like other empires in the twentieth century, into a post-imperial future, Russia would have had to reform its identity accordingly. But not even Yeltsin, who played perhaps the most important role in taking the Soviet Union apart, thought of it, or of Russia, as an empire.