The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

no inner world whatsoever. His single greatest fear seemed to be that of having a thought of his own. It eventually emerged that an earlier generation had greatly feared arrest and had devised a strategy of extreme mimicry: they would be more Soviet than the Soviets who might arrest them for not being Soviet enough. The strategy may have worked—or the man's relatives may simply have been among the tens of millions who happened not to be arrested—but by the time Arutyunyan's patient was born, the Soviet masks had been pulled on so tight for so long that the people behind the masks were frozen in immobility.

As extreme as the case was, the way forward was fairly clear. When the patient's main fear is that of simply engaging in reflection, the presence of an uncritical other can help him realize that he will not destroy the world with his thoughts. The journey is extremely painful, but at the end of it lies freedom.

throughout the 1990S, Robert Jay Lifton, an American psychiatrist known for his work on trauma and on the traumatic effects of totalitarian ideologies, convened a group of Eastern European psychotherapists to try to understand the particular problems they and their patients faced. The essential story revolved around people discovering their histories in family secrets. "Often, parents hide facts because they don't want to endanger their children," wrote Fyodor Konkov, the Russian contributor to the resulting collection.

They reason that ignorance of a parent who has been purged or marginalized will protect their children from having problems with the regime. But what I understand happens in such situations from the child's point of view is that an empty space, a void develops in

their identity.¹⁹

The strategy had two protective goals, practical and psychological:

The parent thinks, if I deny that something bad has happened to us and I deny and prevent myself from showing the feelings I have

about the trauma, I will save my child the pain of these feelings. But the surviving parent also prevents himself from the potential closeness with the child which comes from sharing the pain. By behaving in this manner, the parent trains the son to deny the clues he has already perceived. . . . It is not hard to understand that children raised in this way experience gaps in their emotional life which affect their ability to make and keep intimate relationships.

Many layers of understanding are missing.²⁰

"Dr. Konkov describes a specific affective state, one of inner emptiness, which children experience during arrested grief, when they feel they have been lied to about the life and death of their parents or grandparents," Lifton and his coeditor, psychoanalyst Jacob D. Lindy, added in their comments.²¹ Perhaps this was the nature of the emptiness that had so struck Carl Rogers when he visited the Soviet Union—when he also observed that none of his interlocutors seemed to have been able to keep an intimate relationship going.

Lifton and Lindy also noted a particular problem these therapists faced, one that they had seen in other psychologists working with traumatized populations: a certain kind of countertransference. "In each case, this intense reaction was a clue to ways in which the patient's wound—a legacy of the Communist era—connected with the therapist's wound of the same traumatic history."²²

arutyunyan was certain that wounds formed when something was missing, willfully unremembered. Her own family had made the unusual choice to maintain its story, and this gave her an advantage. She had learned the story in stages. It must have been in fourth or fifth grade when she asked her mother why the family album contained no photographs of Arutyunyan's grandfather. The absence was conspicuous: the life of the family was otherwise solidly visually documented, or so it seemed to Arutyunyan. There was a photograph of her mother, Maya, as a baby, in 1925. There were numerous photographs of Maya's mother, Anna Mikhailovna, as she made her

way up to the very top of the Soviet ladder, becoming a member of the Academy of Sciences and the Central Committee, collecting honors and awards along the way, looking stern yet inspired every time. And not a single photograph of Anna Mikhailovna's husband, Maya's father, Grigory Yakovlevich Yakovin. Arutyunyan knew that he had died long ago, before the war, and even that he had been executed. But surely there had to be pictures?

"They feared for me," said Maya. "So they destroyed the photographs."

"They" were Maya's mother and grandmother, but what did this mean?