The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

This made Seryozha mad as the lieutenant had not, and his sweaty-headed boss had not, and all their made-up rules had not. This was outright mockery. An independent candidate—one who was not already a member of parliament—was required by new Putin-era laws to submit two million voter signatures in order to be registered as a candidate, with no more than fifty thousand signatures coming from any one region of the country.² This demanded either a lot of money or a large nationwide grassroots network of activists—preferably both. Many people had tried that year. Garry Kasparov could not even convene the required public meeting of an initial group of supporters, because no one would rent him space for such a meeting, for any amount of money. Boris Nemtsov had dropped out of the race to help another candidate, former prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov, but Kasyanov's signatures were arbitrarily thrown out.

³

But here was some guy named Bogdanov, whom no one had ever heard of, who was ostensibly representing a party that had in fact

been dormant since the early 1990s, whose political experience consisted of being a part-time member of a tiny powerless municipal council, and even this was probably fake—and Seryozha was supposed to pretend to believe that this clown had collected two million signatures? This felt just like the time when Seryozha thought everyone was crazy suddenly to accept that nobody, Putin, as the president-apparent. Except this felt worse. It was even more of an offense to human intelligence than the spectacle of Putin handing the presidency over to Medvedev like it was his to lend. Seryozha dropped his blank ballot into one of the bins and walked out. He took a cab back to the airport.

The Central Election Commission reported that Bogdanov got 1.3 percent of the vote. Medvedev won in the first round with 70.28 percent. The two perennial candidates—Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov and the Liberal Democratic Party's Vladimir Zhirinovsky (who, as members of parliament, were exempt from having to collect signatures to get on the ballot)—split the rest.⁴

both of the things that happened to Seryozha that day were examples of krugovaya

poruka—"circular guarantee"—or what Levada had called "collective hostage-taking," one of the most effective and, he had written, morally abhorrent Soviet institutions. It turned everyone into an enforcer of the existing order, independent and often outside of any law. In the case of the Metro queue, the police officer instinctively sensed that it was his job to ensure that all passengers remain in a state of equal misery, and to prevent any attempt at self- organization. At the polling place, the ballot—with the absurd, almost virtual candidate in first place—turned every voter into a co­conspirator. By casting a ballot one affirmed the legitimacy of the exercise. By voting for Medvedev in the absence of a believable alternative, one agreed to pretend to be an active supporter, symbolically entering the circle—krug in Russian—on which the system of "circular guarantees" is based. (In previous years the ballot had included the option of voting "against all candidates," but a 2006 law eliminated this option.)

Much earlier, soon after Putin's first election victory, Gudkov had decided that he needed to take time out of analyzing survey results to write about something else: a concept. The concept was totalitarianism. The word had not been used much in the last decade. It had been thrilling, in the late 1980s, to hear Soviet leaders—first Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev and then Gorbachev himself—start using the word to describe the Soviet system. These had been moments of epic honesty and openness. But then, after the Soviet regime appeared to have collapsed into a pile of dust, the word became instantly irrelevant: totalitarianism had ended, and the topics of the day were reforms, the economy, and the new system Russia was assumed to be building. Even the few people who stubbornly insisted on reckoning with the past generally chose to focus on one specific period in Soviet history—Stalinism—and one element of the Soviet system: state terror. But since the Levada studies continued to show that Homo Sovieticus was thriving and reproducing and the initial hypothesis about the withering of Soviet institutions had long been debunked, it seemed like a good idea to return to thinking about the nature of the system that had produced the institutions and the man.