The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

Who were "the people"? Levada's team had conducted its third Homo Sovieticus survey, and the results were devastating. Ten years after the original study, the hypothesis had been fully invalidated. Homo Sovieticus was not, as Levada had suggested, dying off. He was not only surviving but reproducing—and this meant that he was reclaiming his dominant position in the population.

According to the results of the 1999 survey, Russians were ever more nostalgic. "Would you prefer that things return to the way they were before 1985?"—before perestroika—drew a clear majority of respondents who agreed: 58 percent, up from 44 in 1994. The proportion of people who viewed the changes of the early 1990s as positive continued to shrink, while the percentage of those who said they could not cope with the changes grew noticeably. The more distant past became ever more appealing: now 26 percent believed that Stalin's rule had been good for the country, up from 18 percent in 1994. Those who held a negative view of the Soviet dictator were now in the minority. Russians continued to think of themselves mostly as "open" and "patient"—the percentage of people who cited these qualities had grown. At the same time, respondents seemed to become more open-minded with regard to "deviants": only 15 percent now wanted to "liquidate" homosexuals, down from 22 percent in 1994. But the number of those who would "leave them to their own devices" dropped too, from 29 to 18 percent. Russians now overwhelmingly wanted to "help" their homosexuals—an option that implied a sort of medieval model of helping the afflicted. Viewed in the context of epidemic nostalgia for the Soviet past, these results

made sense: they represented yet another way of returning to the paternalistic state.²⁰

In December 1999, Russia held its third post-Soviet parliamentary election. This seemed like one of the new era's few indisputable accomplishments: a number of different parties competed in what could reasonably be called a fair and open process. They split the popular vote in ways that pointed to the existence of large distinct groups that favored particular parties. There were features, however, that made this election very different from one you might observe in a functioning democracy. The leading parties had been formed just weeks or months before the election. This had been the case in the first two post-Soviet elections as well, but that had seemed understandable in the early stages of Russia's self-reinvention. Now, though, Gudkov found himself trying to understand what caused political parties to be discarded between elections.

The other troublesome feature in this election was a change in public etiquette. Local and federal government officials made an effort to appear on television more often than during the off-season— this was normal. But this time they did not appear solicitous of their voters: they consistently expressed certainty in their victory, making the election sound like a ritual rather than a contest. Their tone reminded Gudkov of the bureaucratic entitlement of the Soviet period.

Looking at the data, Gudkov and his coauthor, Boris Dubin, concluded that these two traits of the parliamentary election were symptoms of a single problem: the election had all the trappings of a political contest but lacked the substance of one. Democratic procedure, which had seemed a revolution in itself, was now the political equivalent of the "virtual economy" described by Gaddy—a mask pulled over a structure that refused to change.

Russia's current nominal multiparty system had grown out of the collapse of the Party state. The process was not unlike what Alexander Nikolaevich had proposed more than a decade earlier when he suggested to Gorbachev that the Communist Party should be split into two, in order to launch political competition. The suggestion might have looked naive but well-intentioned back then: Alexander Nikolaevich was trying to bridge the gap between a totalitarian system and a democratic one. Now it appeared that the gap had been unbridgeable: the old system's institutions had reconstituted themselves in a new guise. Gudkov and Dubin found that Russians— both the candidates and the voters—believed that political power rightly belonged to bureaucrats, whose chief qualification was experience in the bureaucracy. If a party advanced an agenda that diverged widely from existing policy, this party was viewed a priori as marginal. Elections became a popularity contest in a very small political field, where the leading candidates, by definition, agreed with one another. Of course, to some extent this could be said of many, possibly any, Western democracy. But Western democracies did not inherit their narrow political field from a seventy-year period of totalitarianism, and their future did not depend on their ability to advance fundamental social change.