The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

To Gudkov, the list looked bad from the beginning and worse with every passing survey. Russians apparently saw great people as having been almost exclusively Russian—and with the exception of Catherine the Great, they had all been men. By choosing primarily military leaders and heads of state (who were also generally appraised as military leaders), they showed that they equated greatness with power. (Albert Einstein, one of the few foreigners, started out at 9 percent in 1989 but quickly slipped while Hitler gained on him.)

It all fit. The love of power, the focus on Russia to the exclusion of the rest of the world—with an exception made perhaps only for a Napoleon or a Hitler, whose power trumped even their enemy status but who were made relevant by the fact that they had invaded Russia —this and other survey results added up to a totalitarian mind-set. The only consideration that gave Gudkov pause was what seemed like an utter lack of a concept of the future. He had been taught that totalitarianism presupposed the image of a glorious future. But as he researched both Communist and Nazi ideologies, he came to the conclusion that the appeal of the rhetoric in both cases lay in archaic, primitive images: a simple society, a world of "us," a tribe. Fromm, in fact, rejected the very idea of an image of the future in Nazi ideology and stressed the "worship of the past."

it may be more accurate to say that the Soviet system offered not a vision of the future but the ability to know one's future, much as tradesmen did in feudal times, and to make very small-scale, manageable decisions about the future. Arutyunyan thought about this when she researched her family history. How could her great- grandmother, a peasant woman before the Revolution, have imagined her future? How would she have known that all her sons would die from drink but her daughter would become an academic and a member of the Central Committee? So incomprehensible was this future that she could not fully understand it even after it had happened: of her daughter she knew only that she was "an important person."

But by the time Arutyunyan was growing up in the 1960s, the future stretched out before the Soviet citizen like a narrow but relatively well-lit hallway. If one was born to an educated family, like Arutyunyan was, one went to university. Her grandmother had been a historian, her parents were social historians and sociologists, and Arutyunyan received a degree in psychology, worked at the Institute of Sociology, and married a sociologist. There were, however, choices to be made, chief among them: whether to join the Party. Joining promised greater career advancement and possible perks, up to the ability to travel abroad. Not joining seemed to offer a small degree of autonomy. Each professional field had its own sets of minor choices as well. A theater actor from Moscow, for example, could choose to stay in a repertory in the capital or move to the provinces and become the lead at a local theater.

In the 1990s, the narrow hallway exploded into wide-open space. For Arutyunyan, this was exhilarating, the very essence of freedom. True, life became unpredictable and sometimes felt hard—for a few years in the early 1990s Arutyunyan was the sole breadwinner in her family of four adults and two children. Her parents and husband stubbornly stuck to their social sciences even as their colleagues looked for ways to earn money elsewhere. But Arutyunyan was learning to be a psychoanalyst, like she had always dreamed, and she was traveling abroad, like she had barely dared imagine. In Fromm's classification, all she experienced was "freedom to."

In a few years she saw more and more patients who were suffering from the unbearable burden of "freedom from." Much of their pain was regret: the 1990s looked darker in retrospect, and the roads not chosen weighed too heavily. One patient had left academia—he had been a biochemist—to work for a pharmaceutical company. The company went bankrupt, he could not find another job, and now he was driving a taxi for a living. He could not stop thinking about where he had gone wrong. Should he have stuck it out in academia? His former colleagues who had, seemed to have done better.

There was a specific Russian expression: budushchego net, "There