The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

With the sanctions in place, the forum took on added importance for the Kremlin. Some of the Western guests were elected officials in their countries—and however marginalized their parties might be, they had the potential to disrupt the process of imposing and extending sanctions. So far, even Russia's closest European allies, such as Hungary, had joined the sanctions, but eventually the monolith would have to crack. Here too Dugin had a chance to wield his influence, capitalizing on his contacts with far-right parties in Greece, Finland, France, Austria, and, especially, Italy.⁴⁰ He was able not only to be a guest—he continued to lecture abroad even as he seemed to devote all his energies to eastern Ukraine—but also to play host. He invited some of his most daring foreign friends to the Donetsk region in June 2014, to show them how history was made, and to fantasize about a future Greater Russia.

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The Western powers introduced sanctions step by step, building on the premise that Putin could be pressured to change his country's behavior—to avoid even greater damage to the Russian economy. But to a Russia that believed that it was at war with the United States, this gradual ratcheting up of pressure looked like nothing but escalation. By the end of the summer Putin responded with sanctions of his own: Russia banned the import of foods from Western countries. Kremlin media estimated that the ban applied to $9 billion worth of imports— the message was that hostile foreign countries would lose this amount of money while Russian food producers would benefit.⁴²

What actually happened was that food prices grew 10 percent in a single month while the range of food available at supermarkets dropped noticeably. Most cheeses disappeared, for example. Russia once again became a place where food made the best gift: visitors or travelers returning from the West invariably came bearing cheese.

Gudkov made a chart that contained just two curves: Putin's approval rating and the Levada Center's consumer perceptions index.

The index was derived from answers to five questions: (1) How has your family's economic situation changed in the last year? (2) How do you expect it to change in the next year? (3) Do you expect the next twelve months to be good or bad for the country's economy as a whole? (4) What about the next five years? (5) Is now a good or a bad time to make large purchases, such as furniture, a television, a refrigerator?⁴³ They had been tracking the index since 1995, and had been asking the current set of questions since 2008. Soon after Putin's approval rating headed vertically up, the consumer perceptions index began its descent. The economic slowdown had been evident before the Olympics, then there had been a brief moment of optimism, but two months after the invasion of Ukraine, the decline became precipitous.⁴⁴

By the spring of 2014, layoffs were epidemic. The ruble, which had held steady for more than a dozen years, began losing ground against the dollar. Sanctions weakened it, the countersanctions pushed it further down, and in the fall of 2015 declining oil prices sent it tumbling. In December, after the ruble spent a day acting like a yo-yo and finally settled 11 percent down against the dollar, Russians rushed to dump their currency on durable goods. Car dealerships ran out of inventory and electronics stores ran out of large-screen televisions.⁴⁵

Gudkov studied his divergent curves. Putin's popularity stayed steady at the anomalously high level that was apparently no longer anomalous. The consumer perceptions index kept declining. This was impossible. Eventually, these curves would have to break and head toward each other.

Or not. Gudkov himself had once added poverty to the definition of totalitarianism: he had come to the conclusion that scarcity was essential for the survival of a totalitarian regime. So perhaps in a case of recurrent totalitarianism, a totalitarianism that was being created from below at least as much as it was being imposed from above, the state and society were cooperating in creating a sense of scarcity.