The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

in october 2015, Putin convened his annual meeting of international scholars and journalists who specialized in Russia. This year, the gathering was held in Sochi, where facilities built for the 2014 Winter Olympics had fallen into disuse. A month earlier, Putin had flown to New York to address the seventieth General Assembly of the United Nations. He proposed forming an international antiterrorist coalition "like the anti-Hitler coalition."¹³ The offer, in other words, was to join forces in fighting ISIS in exchange for Russia's unhindered reign in Ukraine and elsewhere in the region—just like participation in the anti-Hitler coalition had allowed the Soviet Union to keep the spoils of its earlier alliance with Hitler. When the United States snubbed the offer, Russia began bombing Syria. Now Putin convened international guests for a discussion titled "Societies Between War and Peace."

"Peace, a life at peace, has always been and continues to be an ideal for humanity," he said. "But peace as a state of world politics has never been stable." In other words, peace was an anomaly, a fragile state of equilibrium that, he said, was exceedingly difficult to sustain. The advent of nuclear arms helped, he said, by introducing the specter of mutually assured destruction, and for a while—from the 1950s through the 1980s—"world leaders acted responsibly, weighing all circumstances and possible consequences." This was a variation on the usual Soviet nostalgia rhetoric: casting the Cold War as the golden era of world peace.

In the last quarter century, the threshold for applying force has clearly been lowered. Immunity against war acquired as a result of two world wars, literally on a psychological, subconscious level, has

been weakened.¹⁴

He went on to blame this state of affairs on the United States and to justify Russian intervention in Syria, but the key point of his speech was that only at war could his Russia feel at peace. Or, as Erich Fromm had written of Nazi Germany seventy-five years earlier, "It is fate that there are wars."¹⁵ Arendt, writing about Hitler, had described a nostalgia for the First World War, which had satisfied a "yearning for anonymity, for being just a number and functioning only as a cog. . . . War had been experienced as that 'mightiest of all mass actions' which obliterated individual differences so that even suffering, which traditionally had marked off individuals through unique unexchangeable destinies, could now be interpreted as 'an instrument of historical progress.'"¹⁶

The concept of historical progress—of perpetual motion—was, in turn, key to Arendt's understanding of how totalitarianism took hold.

Russia's official rhetoric was evolving in full accordance with Gudkov's diagnosis of "recurrent totalitarianism." Following this inexorable logic, in September 2016, the justice ministry classified the Levada Center itself as a foreign agent. Gudkov had been expecting this for months, and he knew it spelled the end of his life's work. The law on "foreign agents" required organizations to identify themselves as such in all communications with the public. How would Levada sociologists ever conduct a survey again if they had to present themselves as "foreign agents"?¹⁷

years earlier, Arutyunyan's son, who was born in 1980, told his parents that he had realized they had raised him "in an oasis." The home where he had grown up—Arutyunyan's grandmother's giant Academy of Sciences flat, where four generations had now lived—had been largely shielded from the privations of the 1980s, the fears of the 1990s, and even from much of the sense of shutting down that pervaded the 2000s. These days, though, Arutyunyan found it difficult to stay in her oasis.

Not only had the country changed politically—now the city around her was changing physically. The low-rise stores and cafes had been razed, eliminating the eye-level urban environment that had appeared

in the 1990s. The city returned to its totalitarian scale. In Arutyunyan's neighborhood, the streets were eight lanes wide, the sidewalks could fit twelve people across, and the buildings had archways seven stories high. In the absence of the low-rise stores, people once again became mere specks.

Then the city ripped up the asphalt on the sidewalks throughout central Moscow and replaced it with pavement tiles. The first freeze showed that the ice that formed on these tiles stayed smooth and clear, unlike most of the ice on asphalt. People fell. Some days, the streets looked like scenes from slapstick comedy. Pedestrians kept slipping and falling, and slipping and falling. It was hard not to laugh, even as people were breaking arms and hips all around you. Then it was time to marvel at the regime's insistence on turning its own metaphors literal: it was determined to break its people.