The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

if the people who took to the streets all over Russia in 2011-2012 were protesting, whether they used the word or not, the totalitarian essence of the society in which they found themselves living, then the form and slogans of the protests were not as illogical as they had seemed to Masha. If one of the features of a totalitarian regime is that it politicizes every aspect of life, then protest that strove to be apolitical was an appropriate response. If a feature of a totalitarian regime was that it eliminated all space that belonged to people apart from the state, then holding protests in cordoned-off spaces was not such a strange idea: the very ability to negotiate such a space could be a victory. It stands to reason that the crackdown began with the annulment of that negotiation and the physical destruction of the protest space.

Even the use of the word "stability" by both the protesters and their opponents had a long history in the theory and reality of totalitarianism. Arendt pointed out that both the Nazi and the Soviet regimes conducted periodic purges or crackdowns, which she called "an instrument of permanent instability." Constant flux was necessary for the system's survival: "The totalitarian ruler must, at any price, prevent normalization from reaching the point where a new way of life could develop—one which might, after a time, lose its bastard qualities and take its place among the widely differing and profoundly contrasting ways of life of the nations of the earth." Indeed, she wrote, "The point is that both Hitler and Stalin held out promises of stability in order to hide their intention of creating a state of permanent instability."¹⁹

When protesters were asking for their "stability" back, it was this normalization that they demanded. But when a Putin foot soldier from UralVagonZavod said that the protesters must be crushed because only Putin could guarantee stability, he was reaching for the vision of the leader, literally asking to be mobilized by him then and there.

social scientists both inside Russia and outside it scoffed at the word "totalitarian" as applied to post-Soviet Russia. Even "authoritarian" was controversial. Soon after the crackdown began, the phrase "hybrid regime" came into vogue. The original term, coined by journalist Fareed Zakaria in a 1997 essay, was "illiberal democracy." Zakaria emphasized the distinction between democracy, a way of selecting governments through free and open elections, and liberalism, the political project of safeguarding individual freedoms. The two did not necessarily go together. Political theory had long acknowledged the existence of liberal autocracies, such as the Austro- Hungarian Empire, for example. It was time to recognize that the corollary could also exist. Zakaria cited the examples of Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, and Peru, among others, as countries where democratically elected leaders had consistently violated constitutional limits of power that had been put in place to safeguard individual freedoms. He noted that Russia, too, was at risk:

In 1993 Boris Yeltsin famously (and literally) attacked the Russian parliament, prompted by parliament's own unconstitutional acts. He then suspended the constitutional court, dismantled the system of local governments, and fired several provincial governors. From the war in Chechnya to his economic programs, Yeltsin has displayed a routine lack of concern for constitutional procedure and limits. He may well be a liberal democrat at heart, but Yeltsin's actions have created a Russian super-presidency. We can only hope

his successor will not abuse it.²⁰

The obvious issue with the idea of "illiberal democracy" was that, once a democratically elected government began curtailing freedoms, it was unlikely to continue having truly free and open elections—even if, technically, elections occurred at regular intervals. After all, even the Soviet Union had elections, which, according to the constitution, were direct and conducted by secret ballot: "No control over the expression of will of the voter is allowed," said Article 99. And there was never a more literal illustration of Arendt's thesis that totalitarian regimes rob their subjects of will: every candidate on the Soviet ballot invariably ran unopposed.

In Putin's Russia, most elections had been eliminated altogether: governors and senators were now appointed and the lower house of parliament was formed by parties, through a largely depersonalized form of voting. The candidate for president also in effect ran unopposed in every election beginning with the year 2000. Still, there were banners, billboards, concerts, and other accoutrements of a campaign, and there were ballots. It looked more like a Western democracy, but felt more like the Soviet Union. After a while, the term "hybrid regime" supplanted "liberal democracy."

In Russia, the term "hybrid regime" was popularized by Ekaterina Shulman, a young political scientist. She wrote that