The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

Gudkov and his team began asking survey respondents not only how much they made but also how much they needed to survive and how much they needed to live well. An extremely large study—nearly seventy-five thousand respondents in all—showed that real income grew consistently, but so did everyone's idea of what it would take to live well. Later, two American economists who mined Russian statistical data came to the same conclusion: in the course of the 1990s, average living space increased (from sixteen to nineteen square meters per person), the number of people traveling abroad as tourists more than tripled, the percentage of households that owned televisions, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, and washing machines increased, and the number of privately owned cars doubled.¹³ Compared with life in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, Russians were better off—but they felt poor.

Conventional wisdom was that some people were getting very rich while others sank into poverty, but Gudkov's data did not bear this out: it looked like the wealth gap was remaining steady or even shrinking slightly. True, some of the screens shielding the structural inequalities of Soviet society had been lifted, allowing people to observe others being rich—if only because, with most of the old secret distribution centers closed, the rich were now much more likely to do their shopping in plain view. But this exposure could hardly explain what Gudkov was seeing. He focused on the millions of people who had now traveled abroad: by 1995 nearly 17 percent of adults had been outside Russia. The experience had not made them feel like life had gotten better. They had seen something more devastating than the fact that some of their compatriots were better off: they saw that, beyond the country's western borders, virtually everyone was better off than virtually everyone in Russia. They had felt themselves to be not just poor individuals but people from a poor country. As this self- perception solidified, so did some of the results of Gudkov's surveys: the gap between answers to the questions "How much do you earn?" and "How much do you need to earn to survive?" closed. This did not mean that people felt like they had enough; they felt like things could hardly get worse. Their idea of how much they needed to live well continued to be out of reach.

Even as the country seemed to be in the throes of romance with private enterprise, one of Gudkov's stock questions—"Who is living well and happily in Russia?"—continued to elicit a stock, Soviet-era answer: crooks, con men, bureaucrats, criminals, and entrepreneurs. Happiness and wealth belonged to the Other. Asked if they thought they earned more or less than other people of comparable skill and experience, two-thirds of respondents answered "less"—a statistical impossibility that doomed Russians to jealousy.¹⁴

In late 1994, when MMM collapsed, Hoper-Invest also stopped paying out, and the ruble lost nearly a quarter of its value overnight. All three events were to some extent related to something that had happened earlier in the year: the government relaxed its monetary policy and began printing rubles—this was a boon to the pyramid schemes, and it also doomed the ruble to fall.¹⁵ Many Russians' core beliefs were thus confirmed: the government was no more trustworthy than the self-anointed investment kings, and economic hardship and injustice were life's only certainties.

arutyunyan was now attending training seminars abroad: Western psychoanalysts continued to give generously of their time and expertise to help their less experienced colleagues. At one of these seminars, conducted in English, she noticed that she could now tell the difference between the meanings of two words: "envy" and "jealousy." The former was a way of desiring something that someone else had and you lacked; the latter was resenting someone's taking possession of something that was yours. Envy was what you felt when someone had more money than you did. Jealousy was what you felt when you thought that the money was or should be yours. Either emotion could be awful to experience, but envy could also be constructive—it could spur you to action—and even benevolent, like when you envied someone his ability to be generous or productive. It stood to reason that the distinction was lacking in contemporary Russian: for three generations everything had been said to belong to everyone, and having more was said to be shameful. Jealousy was the only relevant emotion.