The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

Her first evening at home, an oligarch friend of Boris's, Mikhail Fridman, was visiting. Father and daughter's joy at their reunion made him furious. "Idiots," he sputtered. "You are insane." Meaning, anyone who forfeited the chance at an American future in favor of a Russian one had to be crazy.

there was something disturbing in the way Russians were reacting to the terrorist attacks in America. Gudkov had long been thinking about the way Russia's self-concept was reflected in its attitudes toward the United States, and now he watched all the resentments and anxieties about America come to the surface. The wave of intense hatred with which Russians had reacted to NATO's Kosovo bombing campaign of 1999 had died down within a few months, returning the country to a sort of baseline level of anti-American sentiment, but now Gudkov was seeing it return, incongruously, in the wake of the September 11 attacks. Initially, the polls showed, Russians had reacted with sympathy and compassion, but very soon those feelings gave way to something else: the search for a way to blame the Americans themselves for the tragedy.

Part of this surely had to do with a sort of habitual insensitivity Russians as a society had developed in response to the wars, the terror, the violence, and poverty of its own twentieth century. This insensitivity, in turn, was tied, as both cause and effect, to the lack of social or cultural institutions that help process feelings. All of this was equally true of the ways Russians reacted to their own grief: they dulled it and moved on. But the resentment coming to the fore now was specific to the way Russians felt about Americans.

The Soviet Union had historically defined itself in opposition to the United States. The century of identification consisted of several

distinct periods. First, early Soviet Russia based its revolutionary push to industrialize on the American model and on American machinery. During the Great Depression, American-made industrial equipment became affordable—American tragedy worked in synergy with Russian need. Stalin said, "Dogonim iperegonim Ameriku" ("We shall catch up to America and overtake it") and Soviet factory machines were often inscribed with the letters DIP

in honor of this aspirational slogan.

During the Second World War the competition was set aside in favor of military cooperation. The two countries were allies. But with the beginning of the Cold War the United States had ceased being a partner or even a rival: it became the enemy—indeed, an existential threat. This image had shaped the final four decades of the Soviet Union's existence, had been the bedrock of its system of mobilization and control.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, Russians did not stop looking into the American mirror. What they saw now was humiliating: the United States was giving Russians handouts, sending them "Legs of Bush" and other food that Americans themselves did not want to eat. America was not just wealthier than Russia—so were many other countries, and some of them, like Switzerland or Saudi Arabia, were wealthier than the United States itself. But unlike an old European country, America did not apportion its wealth according to an entrenched class structure: it was a country of achievement and possibility for all—or so it claimed, and Russians believed this part. Nor was it a tiny oil dictatorship like the Saudis. America was the very definition of modernity; it was the country that Russia had failed to become. Here was a sterling example of Soviet-style doublethink: America was attractive and threatening at the same time, worth emulating and eminently hateable.

Hatred for the United States had become a Soviet political and social tradition. And now Russia's search for its own traditions infused this hatred with new potency. "I hate, therefore I am," Gudkov wrote, trying to describe the driving force behind this new anti-Americanism. September 11 fueled the hatred because it engendered anxiety. Surveys were showing that Russians feared that a third world war would result from the attacks, though there was no consensus as to who the parties in this war might be. It was nonetheless—or all the more—a terrifying prospect, and it was America's fault.

More than half the respondents said that the time had come to increase defense spending, even if this meant that cuts had to be made elsewhere. For a country that was barely—almost imperceptibly for most people in 2001—climbing out of a deep economic depression, this seemed a bizarre result. But then this aggressive anti- American stance was most pronounced among the better-educated, more-well-off respondents. This was the position of the newly emergent elite—the men in uniform and the neotraditionalists whom the Putin presidency had elevated.³