The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

a hybrid regime is the authoritarian regime in the new historical moment. We know the difference between authoritarian and totalitarian regimes: the former rewards passivity and the latter rewards mobilization. A totalitarian regime demands participation: if you do not march the march and sing the songs, then you are not

a loyal citizen. An authoritarian regime, on the other hand, tries to convince its subjects to stay home. Whoever marches too energetically or sings too loudly is suspect, regardless of the

ideological content of the songs and the direction of the march.²¹

Shulman was reiterating Juan Linz's definition of the difference between authoritarianism and totalitarianism, but omitting his distinction between the all-political nature of totalitarianism and the nonpolitical nature of authoritarianism. Hybrid regimes were fakers, wrote Shulman, but Western observers tend to focus on only one aspect of the fakery: that of democracy. "It's easy to notice that the facade of democracy is made of papier-mache," she wrote. "But it's harder to understand that Stalin's mustache is glued on." The amount of force applied by the Putin regime, she argued, was negligible by the standards of the twentieth century. A few dozen political prisoners was to totalitarian terror what the quadrennial election of Putin was to functioning democracy. The hybrid regime survived by imitating both democracy and totalitarianism strategically in varied measure, she argued.

Other terms used to describe the Putin regime were "kleptocracy" and "crony capitalism"—variations on Navalny's theme of the "Party of Crooks and Thieves." A Hungarian sociologist named Balint Magyar rejected these terms because, he stressed, both "kleptocracy" and "crony capitalism" implied a sort of voluntary association—as though one could partake in the crony system or choose not to, and proceed with one's business autonomously, if less profitably. The fate of Khodorkovsky and the exiled oligarchs, as well as of untold thousands of jailed and bankrupted entrepreneurs, demonstrated that this was a fallacy.

Magyar, who was born in 1952, grew up in Hungary, a relatively less repressive Eastern Bloc country. This allowed him to be well educated as a sociologist. But in the late 1970s Magyar became active in underground opposition politics and was duly punished: banned from teaching at the university and banned from traveling to the West. Eastern European societies became his area of specialization. In the late 1980s, as a founding member of the Alliance of Free

Democrats—Hungarian Liberal Party, Magyar was part of the democratic transition in his country. In the 2000s, the party gradually lost ground and finally ceased to exist, and Magyar returned to sociology. Under the new regime of Viktor Orban, he was once again persona non grata at the university, and once again focused on a study of Eastern European societies.

He had an intense dislike for terms like "illiberal," which focused on traits the regimes did not possess—like free media or fair elections. This he likened to trying to describe an elephant by saying that the elephant cannot fly or cannot swim—it says nothing about what the elephant actually is. Nor did he like the term "hybrid regime," which to him seemed like an imitation of a definition, since it failed to define what the regime was ostensibly a hybrid of.²²

Magyar developed his own concept: the "post-communist mafia state." Both halves of the designation were significant: "post- communist" because "the conditions preceding the democratic big bang* have a decisive role in the formation of the system. Namely that it came about on the foundations of a communist dictatorship, as a product of the debris left by its decay."²³ The ruling elites of post- communist states most often hail from the old nomenklatura, be it Party or secret service. But to Magyar this was not the countries' most important common feature: what mattered most was that some of these old groups evolved into structures centered around a single man who led them in wielding power. Consolidating power and resources was relatively simple because these countries had just recently had a Party monopoly on power and a state monopoly on property. This created unique conditions:

In the case of other autocratic systems, either . . . private property is converted to property quasi belonging to the state, or the formal distribution of property is left more-or-less untouched. . . . However, no historical example can be found of an instance where state property is transformed en-masse on the basis of dubious norms—at least so far as their social acceptance is concerned. When the intention is to create a layer of private owners, it seems as if they

were intent on producing fish out of fish soup.²⁴

The property and the power these groups were usurping had no other apparent legitimate holders. That made the job particularly easy.