In The Future Is History, Masha Gessen follows a couple individual Russians to tell the story of Russian politics from over the 30 years from the beginning of glasnost and perestroika though the first invasion of Ukraine and its effects. The individuals who are centered are mostly Russian elites either through their relationships to major politicians or are political activists.
The Russian
world that Gessen describes can be bizarre. There is a transition from an
intense communist ideology to an intense nationalist ideology. She describes one
child who attended an elite communist preschool waking up from a nap by being
fed caviar and being called a “Future Communist,” and how portraits of Lenin
and Marx were prominently displayed in the school. But the nationalism was
always under the surface. Immediately after that description of communist preschool,
she describes “coffins,” which were questions on standardized tests just for
Jewish students. These students would be pulled for additional examination and
asked questions that were usually impossible to solve.
While I was
reading the book, I started to think of Russian and French civilizations as
similar in receiving mortal wounds from left-wing revolution. They both went
into revolutions that destroyed their previous, aristocratic ruling class. And
then the revolutions were both betrayed by men who would become dictators. But
where Napoleon was defeated by a European coalition, Stalin got to be a part of
the coalition that destroyed Hitler. But then they both ended up on the losing
end of a hegemonic struggle- France with Germany and Russia with the United
States. Maybe Vladimir Putin would have seemed more like Napoleon III if his
invasion of Ukraine had led to his downfall. France finally lost all claim to
European hegemony in WWII, and Russia lost it in the fall of the Soviet Union.
But unlike France, Russia wasn’t brought into the US-led international order.
Instead, Russia has joined a Chinese-led opposition to the Pax Americana, so
the story is going in a pretty different direction now.
The Soviet
Union itself probably weakened Russian society significantly. There are many
big, obvious reasons, like land collectivization and the purges. But also some
things that are less atrocities and more just the way Communists ran the country.
Like a lack of social mobility: groups were formally segregated by the types of
work they did, and artists lived with other artists, Politburo members went to dachas
with other Politburo members, etc. And the birth rate plummeted while abortions
shot up. Abortion was a common contraception method, and in 1984, there were
nearly twice as many abortions in Russia as there were births. The official
recognition of various nationalities also divided people and focused on
promoting national minorities into the power structure in order to coopt the
elites of that group. The national republics would form the seams for the
breakup of the Soviet Union.
After the
Soviet Union broke up (very well documented in Collapse), the new
democracy was not all it cracked up to be. First of all, it wasn’t a very
healthy democracy. Civil society and elections were never seriously
established, and all through Yeltsin’s presidency, Russians dealt with a bad
economic situation. People got nostalgic for the certainty of the Soviet Union,
which the majority had not wanted to collapse. There was even a cable channel
that showed only old Soviet television 24 hours a day—it was called “Nostalgia”
and put a hammer and sickle in the corner of the screen. That nationalism and
nostalgia helped form the movement of Alexander Dugin, a chief ideologue of
Putin’s Russia. When he formed a new political party to advocate for Russian
chauvinism, he named it National Bolshevism (not too distant from “National
Socialism” either). The basis of the ideology was an opposition to “open
society,” as advocated by Karl Popper and popularized further by George Soros
in the 1990s. Gessen writes that the Soviet Union may not have offered a real
vision of the future, but it offered an ability to know one’s future, and to
make small-scale decisions about it. Russia from the collapse of Communism to the
rise of Putin was unpredictable and chaotic for the average Russian.
Something I
learned from the book was how big the scapegoating of gay people is in Putin’s
Russia. In the 2010s, when Russia broke out in major protests that were
sweeping the world, Putin brought the hammer down on gay people, and Russia passed
several anti-LGBT laws. Something that I’ve seen in America is that it became
popular for normal people to film their own “to catch a predator videos” in
which they claim to identify pedophiles. In Russia, they would turn them into
the police, but according to Gessen, these were often just gay men who were
targeted for being gay. I have seen the same videos in America, but they don’t
get sent to the police, they get beaten up. There is no way to know if they are
really pedophiles, since the videos just show them getting beaten up and forced
to confess. This is not a good substitute for the legal system.
Those
protests in Russia failed because protests aren’t actually that strong of a way
to topple a government. They don’t work if the government can muster massive
force against protestors and do it without fear of democratic backlash against the
government. But protestors in 2010s Russia thought they might be successful
because they had seen that exact form of protest topple the Soviet Union—why would
this be any different? The difference was that Putin is a harder man who had no
qualms about using force against the protestors. In 1989-1991, Mikhail
Gorbachev and other Soviet leaders were directionless and couldn’t justify
using force to themselves. Putin, on the other hand, had a faith in his
nationalism and knew he had the support of the country. And if he didn’t, it
didn’t matter, they couldn’t remove him in an election. Gorbachev had wanted to
be removeable by elections, which is a much weaker position to operate from.
The guy who takes democracy and turns it into authoritarianism is always going
to be stronger than the guy who takes authoritarianism and turns it into
democracy. Yuri Levada sees these protests as a continuity in Russian history,
in which the society enters a state of arousal, protesting, and needs to be
crushed by the leader so that all can feel secure again in the knowledge that
their leader reigns supreme. Importantly, these same protests that failed in
Russia succeeded in Ukraine, and led directly to Russia’s 2014 invasion of
Ukraine.
Gessen
takes issue with the term “illiberal democracy” because it is too generous with
the regimes it describes. Putin’s regime, she writes, is authoritarian, and
should be called that. It may have elections, but so did Stalin’s Russia. The
elections are just a sham in which no serious opposition can exist since they will
be jailed. The only difference is the existence of a carefully-managed number
of minority parties in today’s Russia, whereas Soviet Russia had an official
one-party policy. She also distinguishes totalitarianism from authoritarianism
by adopting Ekaterina Shulman’s definition that “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.”
I think
that Russia and China today both represent alternatives to the West and liberal
democracy. Both have sham elections. Russia is more interesting to strong-executive
conservatives, who like its traditionalism, official nationalism, and the strength
of a strongman. China is less appealing to Americans, but has more appeal to
people in the developing world who want the answers to getting high levels of
growth. Europe doesn’t seem to appeal to anyone these days, and I can’t think
of any other plausible civilization that people want to imitate. One
description of Russia was especially interesting:
Entire civilizations in history had
ceased to exist. How had life in them felt in the last decades and days? Russia
and the Russians had been dying for a century—in the wars, in the Gulag, and,
most of all, in the daily disregard for human life. She had always thought of
that disregard as negligence, but perhaps it should be understood as active
desire. This country wanted to kill itself. Everything that was alive here—the
people, their words, their protest, their love—drew aggression because the
energy of life had become unbearable for this society. It wanted to die; life
was a foreign agent.
Miscellaneous Facts:
- Under Communism, the Russian city Nizhny Novgorod was named Gorky, after the writer Maxim Gorky’s penname, which he had chosen because Gorky means “bitter” in Russian. His real name was Alexander Peshkov.
- Chess champion Garry Kasparov is an Armenian-Jewish Russian from Baku, Azerbaijan. That’s a complicated ethno-national situation.
- In 1990, Bush and Gorbachev signed a trade agreement that sent lots of dark meat chicken that Americans didn’t like as much as white meat to Russia. The deal was so big that chicken thighs flooded stores and were called “Legs of Bush.”
- When asked to name the greatest people who ever lived, Russians like to pick Russians. Stalin became more popular after the end of the Soviet Union, rising from 12% in 1989 to 40% in 2003, and dropping only to 36% in 2003. Putin had risen from 21% in 2003 to 32% in 2008.
- Apparently Putin hosts an annual call-in show where he answers (carefully-selected) questions from average Russians.
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