The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

This description also fit late Soviet society, which, as Gudkov had observed, used limits on social mobility as one of its most important instruments of control. People generally moved neither up nor down the socioeconomic ladder—nor were they likely to work in a field very different from their parents'. Seryozha, who did not encounter a single child from outside the top level of the nomenklatura until after the Soviet Union collapsed, grew up behind a series of literal walls, but the invisible walls separating other Soviet citizens from members of different groups were just as effective. People who transcended these boundaries, as, for example, Lyosha's mother did when she left the village to go to university, did so through great effort and determination and were invariably exceptions—as Galina was even within her own family. Still, she was able to move but a step up and one sideways from her initial station: she became a schoolteacher in the small town closest to the village where her mother had worked at the collective farm.

Back at the beginning of the Reformation, wrote Fromm, the individual gained the ability to determine his own path—and at the

same time lost his sense of certainty in place and self. Fromm divided newfound freedom into two parts: "freedom to" and "freedom from." If the former was positive, the latter could cause unbearable anxiety: "The world has become limitless and at the same time threatening. . . . By losing his fixed place in a closed world man loses the answer to the meaning of his life; the result is that doubt has befallen him concerning himself and the aim of life."¹⁷ Along came Martin Luther and John Calvin with remedies for this anxiety: "By not only accepting his own insignificance but by humiliating himself to the utmost, by giving up every vestige of individual will, by renouncing and denouncing his individual strength, the individual could hope to be acceptable to God."¹⁸ In other words, the individual could in one swoop regain his certainty in the future—it would now be in God's hands—and rid himself of his most unbearable burden: the self.

In Fromm's view, a new kind of character was thus inaugurated and soon became prevalent among the middle classes of some societies. He described this character as someone who by an individual psychoanalyst might be diagnosed as a sadomasochistic personality but on the level of social psychology could be called the "authoritarian personality"—in part because sadomasochistic tendencies in individual relationships are usually understood as a pathology while similar behavior in society can be the most rational and "normal" strategy. The authoritarian character survives by surrendering his power to an outside authority—God or a leader— whom Fromm called the "magic helper." The "magic helper" is a source of guidance, security, and also of pride, because with surrender comes a sense of belonging. The authoritarian character is defined by his relationship to power:

For the authoritarian character there exist, so to speak, two sexes: the powerful ones and the powerless ones. His love, admiration and readiness for submission are automatically aroused by power, whether of a person or of an institution. Power fascinates him not for any values for which a specific power may stand, but just because it is power. Just as his "love" is automatically aroused by

power, so powerless people or institutions automatically arouse his contempt. The very sight of a powerless person makes him want to

attack, dominate, humiliate him.¹⁹

Another key trait of the authoritarian character is his longing for and belief in historical determination and permanence:

It is fate that there are wars and that one part of mankind has to be ruled by another. It is fate that the amount of suffering can never be

less than it always has been The authoritarian character

worships the past. What has been, will eternally be. To wish or to work for something that has not yet been before is crime or madness. The miracle of creation—and creation is always a miracle

—is outside his range of emotional experience.²⁰

Fromm and thinkers who wrote about the threat of totalitarianism after he did—Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno——believed that this character was common in modern societies. Periods of great social and economic upheaval had the ability to make the authoritarian character dominant in society and to carry an authoritarian character to the top. Germany after the First World War was in just such a state. Old certainties were gone, social structures were in disarray, and a chasm appeared between generations: