The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

The concept had fallen out of use not only in Russia but also among those who studied Russia in the West, but Gudkov had the idea that it was time to revisit it. If you thought about it, the problems with the definition of totalitarianism were built in from the start. First, even though all the original scholars of totalitarianism were exiles from the totalitarian countries, they produced their descriptions on the outside. Certain distinctions were inaccessible to them. Looking from the outside in, one cannot see, for example, whether people attend a parade because they are forced to do so or because they so desire. Researchers generally assumed one or the other: either that people were passive victims or that they were fervent believers. But on the inside, both assumptions were wrong, for all the people at the parade (or any other form of collective action) and for each one of them individually. They did not feel like helpless victims, but they did not feel like fanatics either. They felt normal. They were members of a society. The parades and various other forms of collective life gave them a sense of belonging that humans generally need. They were in no position to appraise the risks of non- belonging in comparison with such risks in other societies, to think about the fact that being marked as an outsider in the Soviet Union carried immeasurably greater penalties than being marked as one in a Western democracy. They would not be lying if they said that they wanted to be a part of the parade, or the collective in general—and that if they exerted pressure on others to be a part of the collective too, they did so willingly. But this did not make them true believers in the ideology, in the way Westerners might imagine it: the ideology served simply as a key to unity, as the collective's shared language. In addition, the mark of a totalitarian ideology, according to Arendt, was its hermetic nature: it explained away the entire world, and no

argument could pierce its bubble. Soviet citizens lived inside the ideology—it was their home, and it felt ordinary.

It stood to reason that up close the two pillars of totalitarianism— ideology and terror—looked different than they did from a distance. It stood to reason, too, that researchers might overestimate the weight of ideology, because their objects of study were texts, and texts reflected the ideology more than anything else. Intellectuals were always falling into the trap of mistaking the written word for a true mirror of life.

In the Soviet Union, the ideology proved mutable. The official line shifted radically, from internationalism to the "friendship of the peoples," from viewing the family as a bourgeois anachronism to seeing it as the essential unit of Soviet society. What did not change was the importance of mobilization around whatever the ideology was, and the idea that the country was exceptional. What if ideology as such was not quite so important a component of totalitarian society? And what of terror? Arendt wrote her book soon after the Holocaust; Stalinist terror was still claiming hundreds of thousands of people a year. But the Soviet Union survived for decades after mass terror ended in 1953. Perhaps terror was necessary for the establishment of a totalitarian regime, but once established could it be maintained by institutions that carried within them the memory of terror?

Around 2004—toward the end of Putin's first term—Western journalists began, cautiously, to apply the word "authoritarian" to the Russian regime. Arendt had argued that authoritarian regimes were essentially unlike totalitarian ones and more like tyrannies, because they demanded the observance of certain knowable rules and laws rather than total subjugation from their subjects. A different distinction between totalitarian and authoritarian regimes was later proposed by Juan Jose Linz, a double exile. The son of a German father and a Spanish mother, Linz had left Germany as a child and Franco's Spain as an adult. As a sociologist at Yale, he wrote a book called Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes, in which he suggested the following three differences: in authoritarian regimes, the boundary between state and society was not diminished;

authoritarian regimes had mentalities rather than ideologies; authoritarian regimes, unlike totalitarian ones, had low levels of societal mobilization. The subjects of authoritarian regimes were, according to Linz's definition, passive: they simply accepted one-party or one-person rule. Authoritarian regimes were profoundly apolitical.¹²