The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

affairs—and with borders that divided its nation—first because it was weak in the wake of the First World War and later in the interests of peace and stability in Europe, but this had been "misinterpreted as a sign of weakness." Now, he said, Germany was finally asserting itself by fulfilling its sacred duty to the oppressed Germans of Czechoslovakia.¹⁸

Most of the elements of Putin's Crimea speech were familiar from his earlier statements: the tragedy of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the hypocrisy of the United States, the treachery of NATO, the idea that America organizes revolutions and then forces its values on traditional cultures, the obligatory below-the-belt reference, which these days also had to be homophobic, and even the enemy within— the "fifth column." But the idea of a divided nation and a moral duty to countrymen abroad that superseded laws and national boundaries had a different antecedent—it recalled Hitler's Sudetenland speech directly. This got Gudkov reading or rereading thinkers who wrote about Nazism. It occurred to him that all this time his thinking about ideology had been wrong. He had been taught that totalitarian ideology had to include a vision of the future. But this was never a key characteristic of Nazism. Its vision had been archaic, and its promise was simplicity, the return to an imaginary past when laws were instincts and the nation was a tribe.

So maybe this was it. Crimea was Russia's ideology. This was why it pulled together every theme that Putin had floated before. And judging from the reaction to Putin's speech, and from survey data, it functioned as an ideology: Crimea mobilized the nation. Levada Center polls showed that 88 percent of the population supported the annexation of Crimea and only 1 percent said that they were "definitely opposed." This fell below the survey's margin of error: it was as if these people—people like Gudkov—did not exist.¹⁹

Hannah Arendt wrote that an ideology was nothing but a single idea taken to its logical extreme. No ideology was inherently totalitarian but any ideology contained the seeds of totalitarianism—it could become encapsulated, entirely divorced from reality, with a single premise eclipsing the entire world. Totalitarian leaders, she

wrote, were interested less in the idea itself than in its use as the driver and justification of action. They derived the "laws of history" from the single chosen idea and then mobilized the people to fulfill these imaginary laws.²⁰

Now that there was, apparently, an ideology, Russia checked off all the boxes on any of the traditional lists of totalitarian-society traits— except, perhaps, Gudkov's own list, which included enforced poverty.

Maybe this was how it worked when a totalitarian society was reconstituting itself rather than being shaped by a totalitarian regime: the ideology congealed last. Gudkov thought of Russia's totalitarianism as a recurrent totalitarianism, like a recurrent infection; as with an infection, the recurrence might not be as deadly as the original disease, but the symptoms would be recognizable from when it had struck the first time.

another person to whom Putin's speech sounded familiar was Dugin. He recognized himself. It had been just over five years since Dugin declared his intention to become his country's lead ideologue, and it was happening: Putin was using Dugin's words and his concepts, and he was carrying out his predictions. Back in 2009, Dugin had prophesied the division of Ukraine into two separate states: the eastern portion would be allied with Russia and the west would be forever looking toward Europe. Dugin saw Ukraine as inhabited by two distinct nations—the western Ukrainians, who spoke Ukrainian, and the people of the east, a nation that included ethnic Russians and ethnic Ukrainians who were, nonetheless, Russian in language and culture. The two nations, in Dugin's view, had fundamentally different geopolitical orientations. This meant that Ukraine was not a nation state. It also meant that its division was preordained—the only question was whether it would be peaceful. There might be war, he had warned back then.²¹