The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

Asked, in 1994, which of the major changes of the last five years had brought the country more harm or more good, Russians were lukewarm on freedoms: only 53 percent thought that freedom of speech had been a positive change, and other new freedoms ranked lower. Only 8 percent thought that the breakup of the Soviet Union had been a positive development. Seventy-five percent thought it had caused more harm, and this was the single highest figure in the entire survey, the thing Russians agreed on over any other.

Respondents did not exactly want to return to the Soviet Union, from what Gudkov could tell: the memory of food shortages, poverty, and airlessness was still raw. What Russians wanted was certainty, a clear sense of who they were and what their country was.

The sociologists tried to tease out what ideas of national identity there were. All individuals and societies define themselves, to some extent, in opposition to others, and for the Russians in 1994 this jumping-off image was a generalized stereotype of the European. This imaginary person was rational, cultivated, active—and Other. Russia was coming off a period of concerted self-denigration, when society was processing the shock of seeing firsthand what it had been told was the "rotten West." It had turned out to be shiny, happy, and also ordinary and law-based. For years, newspapers had used the phrase "the civilized world" to refer to that which Russia was not. Now Russians were distinctly tired of thinking of themselves, and their country, as inferior. So what did they see as the innate positive qualities of Russians? This open question elicited, on the basis of 2,957 surveys, three leading qualities: "open," "simple," and "patient." The ideal Russian, it seemed, was a person without qualities. It was clear to Gudkov that this was the blank mirror of the hostile and violent regimes under which Russians had long lived.

Hannah Arendt had written about the way totalitarianism robs people of the ability to form opinions, to define themselves as distinct from other members of society or from the regime itself.¹ Now this hollowed-out person was holding up the emptiness as his greatest virtue. If "open" and "simple" described the undifferentiated nature of a Russian, then "patient," as Gudkov read the responses, referred to Russians' tolerance for violence. In contrast to the imaginary European, all of whose qualities described agency, the respondents saw themselves as subjects of a regime that ruled by force. This made it seem that the war in Chechnya, which most of Gudkov's circle saw as a tragic anomaly, was actually a logical expression of the people's expectations.

The worst news in the survey, though, was that it contradicted Levada's original concept of Homo Sovieticus: back in 1989, he had predicted that as the subjects of totalitarianism died off, Soviet institutions would crumble. But this survey suggested that Homo Sovieticus was not going anywhere: there was no clear evidence that this sociological type was less prevalent among young people than in their parents' generation. Homo Sovieticus's central trait— doublethink—was in full display across age groups. Respondents continued to think in antinomies. A central one was this. A majority of respondents agreed with the following statement: "Over the seventy-five years of the Soviet regime our people have become different from people of the West, and it is too late to change that." A slightly larger majority agreed with the statement "Sooner or later Russia will follow the path that is common for all civilized countries." Most people agreed with both statements at the same time, and the fact that they did seemed to affirm the former and make the latter seem vanishingly unlikely.²

If Levada's original hypothesis was wrong, then the sociologists' interpretation of the collapse of the Soviet Union needed to be revised. Levada had long ago suggested that Soviet society moved, pendulum-like, between periods of extreme oppression and relative liberalization, as under Khrushchev and early on under Gorbachev, and that these cycles followed a pragmatic logic. The periods of liberalization allowed pent-up frustrations—and, more important, the people who would articulate them—to bubble to the surface. With the potential troublemakers visible and active, the crackdown that inevitably followed eliminated them. In the long run, the cycles

ensured the stability of the regime. The sociologists called the crackdowns "periodic castration."

Perestroika had seemed to begin as yet another period of a temporary loosening of the reins, but then the pendulum appeared to swing too far, bringing the entire edifice down. But what if that was not what happened? What if, in fact, it had swung just as far as it needed to go to maintain the cycles? What if the changes in borders, state structure, and laws did not actually reflect or cause profound changes in the structure of society?