The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

The new laws were the perfect tools of a crackdown: vague enough to put millions on notice, they could be applied only selectively. But the laws, and the discussions in parliament and on television that accompanied their passage, served as messages. They signaled that the Kremlin was in charge, that strict order was being reconstituted. They also seemed to signal to the people of Russia that it was time for them to become enforcers. In Yekaterinburg, a group of parents formed a committee to demand that a number of books be removed from stores and their publishers prosecuted. The books included Israeli author David Grossman's young-adult novel Someone to Run With, in which one of the characters is a teenage heroin addict; American authors Lynda and Area Madaras's

"What's Happening to My Body?" books; and three other books about puberty. A court eventually threw the case out, but by this time one of the publishers had pulped the pressrun and the others had spent fortunes on mounting a defense of their books. Similar cases began popping up around the country. To survive, publishers—especially the publishers of children's books, who risked running afoul of the new Law for the Protection of Children from Information, had to stop publishing books for which they might get dragged into court. The new law, among other things, forbade any mention of death in books for children under the age of twelve. "Naturalistic" description of the human body was also off-limits. Publishers, who could be destroyed by one big lawsuit or even a few pulped pressruns, were well-advised to exercise an overabundance of caution. With vigilant citizens throwing fits in the stacks in one city after another, bookstores and libraries also had to err on the side of caution.¹⁸

Self-censorship was collective hostage-taking in one of its purest forms. It had kicked back in.

yuri levada had theorized that periodic protests did not change the structure of Soviet society. Gudkov had developed this idea further: periodic protests were in fact essential to maintaining the structure of society. No matter how restrictive the Russian regime was in any given period, after a while some tension would accumulate between institutions of authority and society (for lack of a better word—in a country with a nearly absent public sphere Gudkov wished there were a term for "society" that did not immediately call to mind a Western society). This tension represented society's potential for change. At times like these, argued Levada, society would go from a state of calm to a state of arousal. The regime invariably responded by using force.

Force could be used inside the country, as when people were arrested, institutions shuttered or purged, and laws became more restrictive; or outside the country, when war was waged. The effect was the same either way—society, which had become more complicated, reverted to a radically simplified state: us, them, and our leader, who shoulders all our responsibility and has all our trust. This made society as a whole feel better. Calm was restored. Change was prevented. Troublemakers were stopped. Gudkov started calling the process "abortive modernization." Crackdowns occurred at regular intervals during the Soviet period, as did wars. Gudkov's own research career, and Levada's project of creating a sociology school, were aborted by one such crackdown in the late 1960s—following the protests in Prague and demonstrations of support for them in Moscow. There were only a few arrests then—most people were punished by having to give up or curtail their intellectual work. The rest simply fell into step. This was the way state terror worked after Stalin: it was enough to punish a few to neutralize the many.

The periodic eruptions, followed by use of force that precluded change, continued after the Soviet Union collapsed. Gudkov was now rethinking the history of that collapse. If one viewed the period of perestroika and the first post-Soviet year as a period of societal "arousal," then the show of force occurred in 1993, when Yeltsin shelled the parliament building. It had the effect one would expect: society felt radically simplified, Yeltsin affirmed his role as leader— though the Russian vozhd'

or even the German Ftihrer was really the word Gudkov had in mind—and, as always happens in times of radical simplification, nationalism flourished. This explained the success of Zhirinovsky's party in the 1993 election. The war in Georgia, in 2008, served a similar function. Wars were almost as good as crackdowns because they discredited anyone who wanted to complicate things. This was Gudkov's depressing and, he had to admit, radical idea: the last century could be viewed as a continuity, with periodic bumps of "aborted modernization," and the society he had been studying his entire adult life had stayed essentially the same. What made this idea radical was that no one wanted to hear it.