The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

This did not seem the right category. Everything had become political. Russia under Putin was mobilizing—the rhetoric, the renewed military parades, and, more than anything else, the Kremlin's youth movements with their training camps—all existed for this purpose. The boundary between state and society, faint as it had once been, was now obliterated: the takeover of the media and the attack on civil society had served that purpose. There was another issue with calling the Russian regime "authoritarian": it did not take into account the Soviet legacy, which Gudkov increasingly thought was key to understanding the nature of the current regime. He also happened to think that, contrary to what many Western Sovietologists believed, Soviet society had in fact been closest to matching the theoretical model of totalitarianism in real life. And as evidence mounted that Soviet social institutions had been preserved and were resurgent, Gudkov began to think of Russia as a permutation of a totalitarian system. To understand it, Gudkov decided to propose his own definition of totalitarianism, based on the Soviet experience. It contained seven points:

The symbiosis of Party and state . . . Society is organized in a strictly hierarchical way. It is constructed from the top down. . . . Society is thus turned upside down: the powerful upper layer will sooner or later become the least competent and least informed stratum, devoid of potential to develop or make its work more efficient. Every changeover brings a less active, less competent individual to the top

A forced societal consensus, created through a monopoly on mass media, combined with strict censorship. This creates the conditions for chronic mobilization of the population, always

prepared to carry out the decisions of the party-state The

subjects' attention is focused predominantly on events inside the

country, which is isolated from the outside world; hence the sense of exceptionalism, a focus on "us," and a powerful alienation barrier, a refusal to know or understand events "on the other side."

State terror, carried out by the secret police, special services, extrajudicial paramilitary structures . . . The existence of the secret police and concentration camps on the one hand and official propaganda and cultural production on the other, create the conditions for "doublethink." . . . The scale and character of the terror can vary greatly, from the Great Terror in 1918-1922 and the 1930s through the 1950s to the persecution, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, of dissidents, whose number and influence were relatively small.

The militarization of society and the economy . . . The activities of mobilizational structures that pierce society from top to bottom, from all educational institutions . . . to sporting clubs etc. . . . are intended less to prepare the population for battle against an external enemy than to systematically train the population . . . to carry out any and all of the regime's initiatives, because the "leader knows best."

A command, distributive economy and the concomitant chronic,

inevitable shortages of goods, services, information, etc

Shortages are not mere deficits but also a way of organizing society through official hierarchical structures of access to goods and services . . . supplemented by informal shadow economy structures.

A chronic state of poverty . . . Totalitarianism takes hold under the conditions of increasing poverty—when a large part of the population has no hope for a better future and projects hope on some extraordinary political measures. Totalitarianism is sustained by maintaining a very low standard of living.

A static population, strict limits on both vertical and horizontal social mobility except that which is carried out by the state for its

own purposes.¹³

Gudkov did not include ideology on his list of characteristics of totalitarianism: he had concluded that ideology was essential only at the very beginning, for the future totalitarian rulers to seize power. After that, terror kicked in. Later, the drive to conform would take a leading role. This produced what Gudkov meant by "doublethink": it was not the bizarre state described by Orwell but rather a habitual, almost passive fragmentation, when people thought different, often utterly contradictory things at different times and in different situations—whatever they needed to think in order to conform at that particular moment. This, more than anything else, guaranteed that no effective resistance was possible in the Soviet Union: fragmented people could not form and sustain relationships of solidarity and could not imaginatively plan for the future, which is essential for any group effort.