The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

Amalrik was one of a very few Soviet citizens who saw the system as essentially unstable—most others thought it was set in stone or, rather, in Soviet-style reinforced concrete, and would last forever. The year Amalrik stood trial, another dissident writer, Alexander Galich, authored a song in which he described a small group of friends listening to one of his recordings. One of the listeners suggests that the singer is taking too great a risk with his anti-Soviet jokes. "The author has nothing to fear," responds the host. "He died about a hundred years ago."¹⁷ (Galich was forced to emigrate in 1974 and died in his Paris apartment three years later as a result of an electrical accident.¹⁸)

All who were thinking about the Soviet Union, inside the country and outside, shared two handicaps: they had to base their conclusions on fragmentary knowledge and phrase them in language inadequate for the task. Not only did the country shield all essential and most nonessential information behind a wall of secrets and lies, it also, for decades, waged a concerted war on knowledge itself. The most symbolic, though by no means the most violent, battle in this war was fought in 1922, when Lenin ordered two hundred or more (historians' estimates vary) intellectuals—doctors, economists, philosophers, and others—deported abroad on what became known as the Philosophers' Ship (in fact, there were several different ships). The deportations were framed as a humane alternative to the death penalty. Future generations of intellectuals were not as fortunate: those deemed disloyal to the regime were imprisoned, often executed, and almost always separated from their chosen discipline.¹⁹ As the regime matured, restrictions on the social sciences grew broader and, by virtue of the sheer passage of time, more profound. While the arms race spurred the Soviet government to rejuvenate and nurture the exact sciences and technology, there was nothing—or almost nothing —that could motivate the regime to encourage the development of

philosophy, history, and the social sciences. These disciplines atrophied to the point where, as a leading Russian economist wrote in 2015, the top Soviet economists of the 1970s could not understand the work of those who had preceded them by a half century.²⁰

In the 1980s, social scientists working in the Soviet Union lacked not only the information but also the skills, the theoretical knowledge, and the language necessary to understand their own society. Very few of them were trying, against all odds and obstacles, and these people were groping in the dark.

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LIFE, EXAMINED

DUGIN

on new year's eve 1984, Evgenia Debryanskaya was hosting a party. Evgenia was a thirty-year-old single mother from Sverdlovsk, the largest city in the Urals. She thought of herself as provincial and undereducated—she had never gone to college—but she had money, connections, and beauty, which significantly boosted her ambition of becoming someone in Moscow. Her money came from playing cards: she was a shark, and thus an outlaw. Her connections came from an unlikely fact of provenance: she was the out-of-wedlock daughter of the longtime Moscow Party boss.¹ Her beauty was unconventional: she was extremely thin, with a prominent nose and short dark hair cut asymmetrically to fall over half of her chiseled face; and she spoke in a deep, smoke-filled baritone. Some combination of these unusual traits secured for Evgenia the use of a very large nomenklatura apartment on Gorky Street, Moscow's central avenue.

On New Year's Eve, people kept coming, to stay until the Metro reopened early in the morning—or to keep drinking and smoking and talking well into the next day and the day after. This was Moscow's bogema, the hard-partying, black-market-trading, intellectually edgy crowd. Some of them were writers or artists, and others claimed membership simply by living outside the official economy or by hosting good parties. Some of them would have read or heard of Orwell's 1984 or Amalrik's Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?, and this added an extra note of recklessness to the mood. A very young aspiring actress arrived with an entourage of male admirers. One of them split off from the group as soon as they walked in. Instead of continuing to the kitchen, he sat down on an orphaned chair in the hallway. He looked like he was barely out of his teens. He asked the hostess for water.

Evgenia brought him a glass. He took a sip and asked, "Do you know when violets bloom on the lips?" She had no idea what that meant, and she loved it. She loved him for being able to say something that was so clearly beautiful and so utterly incomprehensible. He stayed the next day and the day after that, for three years, until she stopped loving him.²