The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

Under the changed conditions, especially the inflation, the older generation was bewildered and puzzled and much less adapted to the new conditions than the smarter, younger generation. Thus the younger generation felt superior to their elders and could not take them, and their teachings, quite seriously any more. Furthermore, the economic decline of the middle class deprived the parents of their economic role as backers of the economic future of their

children.²²

This passage described the Russian 1990s as precisely as it did the German 1930s, about which it was written. Arendt described this state as "homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness of an unprecedented depth."²³

A void opened up where certainty had been; the burden of freedom became unbearable. Hitler emerged as a quintessential authoritarian character with a program that appealed to other authoritarian characters. He hated the Weimar Republic because it was weak, just as his audience hated their elders. Fromm did not see the substance of Nazi ideology as important—indeed, he saw no substance in the ideology at all. Arendt also stressed that the premises of Hitler's—and Lenin's—ideologies to outsiders "looked preposterously 'primitive' and absurd."²⁴ Fromm observed no logic whatsoever in the ideology: "Nazism never had any genuine political or economic principles. It is essential to understand that the very principle of Nazism is its radical opportunism."²⁵ What Nazi ideology and practice did have, according to Fromm, was ritual that satisfied the audience's masochistic craving:

They are told again and again: the individual is nothing and does not count. The individual should accept this personal insignificance, dissolve himself in a higher power, and then feel proud in

participating in the strength and glory of this higher power.²⁶

And for the sadistic side of the authoritarian character, the ideology offered "a feeling of superiority over the rest of mankind" that, Fromm wrote, was able to "compensate them—for a time at least —for the fact that their lives had been impoverished, economically and culturally."²⁷

in the spring of 2008, the biggest national television channel announced an online contest to choose the greatest Russian who ever lived. It was called the Name of Russia. By mid-July, with nearly two and a half million votes cast, contest organizers announced that they had temporarily put a halt to the voting because someone—or some group—had rigged the results to make Joseph Stalin the winner. Once voting resumed, the results changed dramatically, to make Nicholas II, the last of the czars, come out on top. But then the organizers said

that this, too, had been the result of a hacker attack.²⁸ After a few weeks, the winner was announced: rather than either of the two popular frontrunners, it was Alexander Nevsky, a thirteenth-century prince known to most Russians as a vague memory from the history books and as the leader of Russian troops in the epic ice battle in Sergei Eisenstein's 1938 film Alexander Nevsky.

Lyosha was furious. Everyone could see what had happened: the television executives were mortified by Stalin's popular victory and decided to falsify results the same way real voting officials wrote up whatever was required of them. Except they must have gotten their signals crossed: they thought that Russia's last czar was a safe choice, but they failed to consider what he stood for because he had abdicated, giving in to the Revolution. He had been weak, and now he was despised. Worse, Yeltsin had once publicly repented for the Bolsheviks' murder of the czar and his family, admitting a legacy of guilt—and this admission, too, in the new disposition looked like weakness. So Alexander Nevsky, who had not even been in the running, looked like a safe political choice: all anyone knew about him was that he had fought wars.

"What kind of historical hero is he?" raged Lyosha. "He has no place at all in the Russian historiography!"

"But he fought the Germans!" said the other Lyosha. "And won."

The other Lyosha was, it would seem, Lyosha's boyfriend. He had started messaging Lyosha earlier that year on the VKontakte social network. Lyosha played hard to get. He actually was hard to get. His sublimation strategy, implemented two years earlier, was working. He was happy with his research and his friends. He spent all his time working on his dissertation. He shared an apartment with a female friend and her husband. He stayed away from the gay crowd, because it scared him: it felt like the abyss.

The other Lyosha would not give up. After a couple of months Lyosha agreed to meet. Then he relented. He figured he was strong enough now to allow himself to feel something. What he felt, very soon, was flummoxed. The other Lyosha had his own particular way of conducting a relationship. He would come to Lyosha's apartment