The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

If only the law were clear and permanent and applied to all equally, Arutyunyan's job would be easier. She would guide her client to understand that her fears were projections—which they were, by definition, yet how was she to draw the line between the woman's fear of a collision with her superego and her fear of a collision with Russia's so-called law enforcement? The client's world did not just feel unpredictable: it was unpredictable by design.

It was not just this client who was living in a state of constant anxiety: the entire country was. It was the oldest trick in the book—a constant state of low-level dread made people easy to control, because it robbed them of the sense that they could control anything themselves. This was not the sort of anxiety that moved people to action and accomplishment. This was the sort of anxiety that exceeded human capacity. Like if your teenage daughter has not come home—by morning you have run out of logical explanations, you can no longer calm yourself by pretending that she might have missed the last Metro train and spent the night at a friend's house and her phone battery had died, and you are left alone with your fear. You can no longer sit still or reason. You regress, and after a while the only thing you can do is scream, like a helpless terrified baby. You need an adult, a figure of authority. Almost anyone willing to take charge will do. And then, if that someone wants to remain in charge, he will have to make sure that you continue to feel helpless.

The whole country felt helpless. You could see it if you turned on the television, which Arutyunyan rarely did. Everyone on television was screaming all the time. There were debate shows—this was what they were called, that is—in which two or more people ostensibly

representing two sides of an issue yelled at each other for an hour and a half at a time. "America wants to see us weak!" yelled a politician who happened to be the grandson of Vyacheslav Molotov, the Stalin-era foreign minister who signed the Soviet-Nazi pact. "What is Russia supposed to do?" yelled back his nominal opponent, whose side was supposed to argue for peace with the United States but who was only there to project anxiety. While both debaters yelled in fear, the moderator, who wore all black to every show, yelled in order to scare the participants and the audience.⁵

Newscasts and morning shows ran cookie-cutter anxiety- producing segments. A news report would focus on the dangers of drugs, or of sexual predators. Then a person introduced as an activist would enter the studio and explain that the government was not doing enough to confront the danger. There should be the death penalty for drug dealers! Pedophiles should be castrated! By the end of the monologue, the hosts—usually a man and a woman—would be in a panic, screaming that no one was protecting their children from drugs and pedophiles. The format harked back to a Soviet tradition, in which it was always the imaginary "ordinary people" who supposedly begged the Party for ever more restrictive and punitive laws, but its main purpose was to maintain a constant pitch of high anxiety.

What options did this frightening country offer its intolerably anxious citizens? They could curl up into total passivity, or they could join a whole that was greater than they were. If any possession could be summarily taken away, no one felt any longer like anything was truly their own. But they could rejoice alongside other citizens that Crimea was "theirs." They could fully subscribe to the paranoid worldview in which everyone, led by the United States, was out to weaken and destroy Russia. Paranoia offered a measure of comfort: at least it placed the source of overwhelming anxiety securely outside the person and even the country. It was a great relief to belong, and to entrust authority to someone stronger. The only thing was, belonging itself required vigilance. One had to pay attention: one day Ukraine was where the important war was being fought, the next day it was Syria. In the paranoid worldview, the source of danger was a

constantly moving target. One could belong, but one could never feel in control.