The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

The purpose of defining the Soviet totalitarian regime was to gain more clarity on what Russia had inherited. The inventory was long. On paper, one-party rule had been abolished—but the people remained. The old nomenklatura continued to dominate the bureaucracy and the bureaucracy continued to dominate society, maintaining its upside-down structure. If anything, the upheaval of the 1990s had sped up the process of rotation, as a result of which ever less informed and less competent people were brought to the top. Censorship had been abolished, but after a brief period of freedom, mass media were being monopolized by the state. The KGB had been renamed and had lost some of its reach (some functions, like border control, were taken away), but the judiciary continued to serve the executive power, rule of law had not been established, and law enforcement saw its function in protecting the state. To the extent that society had been demilitarized, Putin had reversed this process—indeed, on the day Yeltsin's resignation made him acting president, Putin found the time to sign a cabinet measure reintroducing military training in secondary schools.¹⁴ The economy was no longer ruled by a central planning authority, but it retained its distributive nature: the Kremlin apportioned assets and access during the privatization of the 1990s, and when Putin came to office he got to work redistributing companies and wealth. Lower down the food chain, this distributive way of functioning was usually called corruption, but it was not exactly that, since the issue lay not with any individual bureaucrat but with the very system of limiting and distributing goods and services. This, in turn, rested on the institution of collective hostage-taking—a system that reinforced lowered expectations, like the Metro Seryozha encountered, which was not selling a service but distributing it.

What should the Russian system be called, then? It was no longer the totalitarian regime it had been, but after disassembling some of its totalitarian institutions—like the Party-state or total militarization —it had started re-creating them, or something that resembled them. But these struck Gudkov as being more like imitations of totalitarian institutions. Western journalists were using the word "authoritarianism" because they seemed to think that authoritarianism was totalitarianism-lite, but the regime was not authoritarian either. Gudkov thought it might be called "pseudototalitarianism." One thing was certain: this regime was not going to develop into a functioning democracy. In fact, it did not seem capable of developing at all. It probably could not re-create the old systems of terror and complete mobilization. Its sole purpose, or so it seemed to Gudkov when he was writing about this in 2001, was to stay afloat, to maintain just enough inertia. In this, its main resource was the Russian citizen weaned on generations of doublethink and collective hostage-taking: the Homo Sovieticus.

back when sociologists and political scientists were defining totalitarianism, psychoanalysts and philosophers were trying to understand and explain it. Gudkov had little patience for much of their writing, in part because they were, generally speaking, Marxists, and in part because several of them were German exiles with a mission—to warn the rest of the Western world that it could happen there. They had seen fascism rise to power in a functioning democracy, and they wanted their knowledge to serve as warning. Gudkov's experience was different—at this point he was less interested in how totalitarianism came to be than in how it refused to end—but some of what he was trying to describe when he wrote about Homo Sovieticus had been noticed by psychoanalyst Erich Fromm seventy years earlier.

Fromm had fled Germany in 1934, and in 1941 he wrote an urgent book called Escape from Freedom, in which he attempted to describe the psychological origins of Nazism, though he was careful to note that "Nazism is a psychological problem, but the psychological factors themselves have to be understood as being molded by socio-economic factors; Nazism is an economic and political problem, but the hold it has over a whole people has to be understood on psychological grounds."

¹⁵

To make his case, Fromm went back to the Middle Ages, when

a person was identical with his role in society; he was a peasant, artisan, or knight, not an individual who happened to have this or that occupation. The social order was conceived as a natural order, and being a definite part of it gave a feeling of security and of belonging. There was comparatively little competition. One was born into a certain economic position which guaranteed a livelihood

determined by tradition.¹⁶