The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

There was good news in the survey: when people were asked Gudkov's "dynamite" question—what ought to be done with various deviant groups—their responses generally expressed more tolerance than they had five years earlier. The overall share of those who favored "liquidating" deviants went down from 31 to 23 percent, and those who supported the idea of "leaving them to their own devices" went up from 12 to 29 percent. Those who would "liquidate" the disabled decreased from 25 to 18 percent while those who would "help" the disabled grew from 50 to 56 percent. By Western standards, these were frightening figures, but those were not the standards to be applied here: the sociologists wanted to know only how much attitudes were changing, and in which direction. But even such scant optimism as was engendered by this approach was dampened by responses to other questions. The share of those who would "leave alone" members of religious cults dropped from 57 to 51 percent while the proportion of those who would "liquidate" or "isolate" them grew noticeably. The same thing happened with "rockers": 26 percent wanted to "liquidate" them, up from 20. This issue was a bit of a Rorschach test: no one could be quite sure what "rockers" meant. It had once referred to those who played or listened to forbidden Western music, but the days when the state banned rock music were long over. If there was no marginalized or indeed identifiable group that was called "rockers," whom were the respondents wanting to "liquidate," and why? The sociologists concluded that the word had become a stand-in for "other," or "strange," and elicited an aggressive reaction precisely because— unlike homosexuals or the disabled—"rockers," whoever they were, were not the subject of any public discussion.

The rest of the survey left little room for hope. The percentage of people who said they were unhappy had more than doubled in five years—from 14 to 34 (though the share of those who said they were happy stayed steady at 46). A clue to what had made so many people so unhappy showed up in answers to another question, in which respondents were asked to rank the importance of changes that had occurred in the country. Barely half named things that could be considered accomplishments, such as political freedoms, the ability to travel, work, and study abroad, the right to open one's own business, and the "option of living without regard for the authorities," as the sociologists phrased it. An overwhelming majority saw the state's failures as the most significant changes: the rise of unemployment, the "impoverishment of the people," and a "weakening of Russian unity." Asked to name the most important events in the entire history of the country, people resorted to Soviet historiography, pointing to the Great October Revolution and the Great Patriotic War, which seemed to have lost none of its symbolic sheen despite a wealth of newly available information, starting with the Stalin-Hitler military alliance. In general, people seemed to have lost interest in learning more about Stalin, his rule, and his terror. Twenty-five percent of respondents now saw his role in history as positive (there was no benchmark to compare this response with, because five years earlier, at the height of the public conversation about Stalinist terror, the question itself would have been inconceivable). He ranked not far below Gorbachev and Yeltsin, whose "positive" ratings were 33 and 30 percent, respectively. These reflected a newly dim view of perestroika, which, people overwhelmingly said, had led to the regrettable breakup of the Soviet Union. The democratic revolution of 1991—the defeat of totalitarianism—was an event that existed in the sociologists' minds but not in the minds of their respondents.

Gudkov recalled going to a celebratory rally immediately after the failure of the August 1991 coup. A German friend had come along. "Long live great Russia!" chanted the crowd, and Gudkov sensed his friend tensing up. He noted that Germans are hypersensitive to expressions of nationalism, but Gudkov himself was unconcerned about the crowd's sentiment. Now he wondered if he should have paid more attention to the tone, and to the linguistic sleight of hand of the slogan. It had started as "Long live democratic Russia," but in the course of a few hours the word "democratic" had been dropped in

favor of "great." Had the ideas of freedom and democracy really been forgotten no sooner than they had apparently won?