Chapter 1
When Totalitarianism Rises Again: The Russian Tragedy
Russia's story is one of perpetual cycles-freedom gained, freedom lost, and the crushing weight of totalitarianism that refuses to release its grip. In "The Future is History," Masha Gessen masterfully chronicles Russia's post-Soviet journey through the lives of four Russians born in the 1980s who grew up during the contested 1990s and came of age under Putin's increasingly authoritarian rule. The book has been hailed as "essential reading" by The Washington Post and earned Gessen the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2017. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright called it "a sweeping intellectual history of Russia over the past four decades, told through the eyes of four people who lived it." Through intimate portraits and meticulous research, Gessen reveals how Putin's Russia systematically dismantled the tools of self-understanding-sociology, psychology, and honest history-leaving citizens without the language to comprehend their own society's regression into totalitarianism. What makes this work particularly haunting is its timeliness: as democratic backsliding occurs globally, Gessen's analysis offers a warning about how easily freedom can slip away when a society loses its ability to understand itself.
Chapter 2
The Destruction of Knowledge: Russia's War on Social Sciences
The Soviet Union's systematic assault on social sciences left a devastating intellectual vacuum. While the regime nurtured exact sciences for the arms race, it deliberately destroyed the tools that would help citizens understand themselves and their society. The 1922 "Philosophers' Ship" deportations marked an early battle in this war on knowledge, followed by imprisonment and execution of intellectuals who dared think independently. By the 1980s, Soviet social scientists lacked not just information but the theoretical frameworks, skills, and language necessary to analyze their own society.
Marina Arutyunyan's experience as a psychology student at Moscow State University in the 1970s perfectly illustrates this intellectual suffocation. She entered hoping to study the human psyche but instead found propaganda masquerading as scholarship. The Soviet approach rejected the very concept of inner conflict as impossible; citizens were shaped entirely by society, with anomalies classified only as criminality or mental illness. After taking medical leave, Arutyunyan discovered intellectual "fortochkas"-tiny windows of fresh air in the sealed Soviet academic environment: Merab Mamardashvili's philosophical lectures, Alexander Luria's neuropsychology, and most precious, Freud's case studies in the restricted library collection. These glimpses revealed humans as complex creatures capable of reflection yet prone to mistakes-precisely what she yearned to study but was forbidden to acknowledge.
Sociologist Lev Gudkov faced similar obstacles. After twice failing to enter the Institute of Foreign Relations due to insufficient "critical thinking" (meaning insufficient adherence to Party ideology), he discovered Yuri Levada's sociology lectures in 1968. Sociology itself was barely tolerated in the USSR-Lenin had effectively banished it, and the discipline had to hide under euphemistic names like "Concrete Social Studies." Levada's department offered a rare intellectual oasis where staff secretly read Western sociologists and engaged in genuine discussions. This paradise ended when Levada's books were condemned for allowing "ambiguous interpretations." Though purged, Levada's group continued meeting secretly for twenty-five years, "assimilating Western sociology" while their careers stagnated.
This war on knowledge created a society that had lost the language for self-understanding. Without sociologists, psychologists, or philosophers, what can a country know about itself? What can its citizens know about themselves? The regime's attack wasn't merely academic-it was an assault on Russian society's humanity itself.
Chapter 3
Homo Sovieticus: The Human Type Shaped by Totalitarianism
After twenty years of underground seminars, Levada reassembled his sociology team at the newly created All-Union Public Opinion Research Center in 1987. Though officially tasked with studying and shaping Soviet public opinion, Levada's actual hypothesis was that "Homo Sovieticus"-the human type shaped by Soviet totalitarianism-was dying out, which would eventually lead to the regime's collapse.
Levada theorized that Homo Sovieticus was characterized by self-isolation, belief in state paternalism, "hierarchical egalitarianism," and an "imperial syndrome." This Soviet person lived with fundamental contradictions, employing Orwellian "doublethink" to maintain parallel, contradictory beliefs. The totalitarian state functioned as a "superinstitution" that controlled every aspect of life, creating profound loneliness by destroying meaningful human interaction.
Despite having no experience in field research, Levada's team designed surveys that confirmed their hypotheses while revealing surprising results. Their "deviance" questions showed unexpected tolerance toward marginalized groups, with aggression highest among those over fifty and under twenty. Most significantly, they found almost no true believers in communist ideology-only 5.6% looked to Marx and Lenin for answers, while half relied on "common sense." Homo Sovieticus wasn't indoctrinated but rather engaged in constant negotiation with the state through various "games" of pretense and complicity.
However, Levada's optimistic prediction that this human type would die out with older generations proved tragically wrong. Follow-up studies in the mid-1990s revealed that Homo Sovieticus persisted among the young. Russians defined themselves in opposition to Europeans, describing their national character as "open," "simple," and "patient"-essentially a hollowed-out identity valuing emptiness and tolerance for violence. The majority simultaneously believed both that Russians had become fundamentally different from Westerners and that Russia would eventually follow the path of "civilized countries"-classic doublethink that suggested the totalitarian mindset had survived the Soviet collapse.
By 1999, Soviet nostalgia had only grown stronger. Fifty-eight percent of Russians wished to return to pre-1985 conditions, up from 44% in 1994. Even Stalin's reputation had improved, with 26% viewing his rule positively. Russians continued to describe themselves as "open" and "patient," while their attitudes toward "deviants" shifted from elimination to "helping" them-reflecting a return to paternalistic Soviet thinking. The human type shaped by totalitarianism hadn't disappeared; it had merely adapted to post-Soviet conditions.
Chapter 4
The Failed Revolution: How Democracy Never Took Root
The August 1991 coup marked a pivotal moment in Russian history. When Soviet state media announced that Gorbachev was unable to fulfill his duties "for health reasons" and a State Committee on the State of Emergency had taken power, resistance formed at the White House (Russian Supreme Soviet building). Boris Yeltsin declared it headquarters against the coup and supporters built barricades. After three tense days, the coup collapsed, and Gorbachev returned to Moscow, declaring he had "come back to a different country."
In the aftermath, Yeltsin gained tremendous power, appointing allies to key positions and suspending Communist Party activities. Despite Gorbachev's attempts to salvage the union treaty, the USSR continued disintegrating as republics declared independence. On December 25, Gorbachev resigned, and the Soviet Union ceased to exist.
Yet this apparent victory for democracy quickly unraveled. By September 1993, Russia's political crisis had reached a breaking point. Yeltsin issued a decree dissolving the Congress and scheduling new elections. The Congress refused to recognize this, instead appointing General Rutskoi as president. Like a B-movie version of the 1991 coup, opposition forces barricaded themselves in the White House while supporters gathered outside. The standoff exposed Russia's constitutional vacuum-citizens still carried Soviet passports and used Soviet currency, with no clarity about their country's name or governance structure.
After nearly two weeks of escalating tensions, armed Congress supporters stormed the Moscow mayoralty and federal television center, causing almost a hundred deaths. On October 4, military forces sided with Yeltsin. Tanks fired on the White House, which burned through the night. The final toll: 146 dead, over a thousand injured, and two thousand arrested. The "Execution of the White House" marked the first time since the Soviet collapse that Yeltsin had firm control-based not on law but on force. Many Russians soon conflated the events of 1991 and 1993 in memory, with both becoming reasons to avoid "politics."
The failure to establish genuine democratic institutions during this period left Russia vulnerable to authoritarian regression. The political landscape defied traditional left-right categorization. The Communist Party represented the conservative "left," making everyone opposing it "right" by default. For those seeking to be un-Soviet, embracing Western political positions became paramount-whether libertarianism, pacifism, gay rights, or free markets. Yet these political identities remained shallow, lacking institutional foundations.
By the late 1990s, the promise of democracy had given way to disillusionment. The December 1999 parliamentary elections featured competing parties but lacked substantive differences. Gudkov concluded these weren't true political parties but vehicles for "acclamation"-a process where the governed simply affirm choices already made for them by the bureaucracy. Russians were not just acclaiming candidates but reaching for a sense of belonging and majority that had been lost with the Soviet collapse.
Chapter 5
Putin's Rise: The Return of Totalitarian Thinking
On December 31, 1999, Yeltsin stunned the nation by announcing his resignation, declaring "I have fulfilled my life's mission" and that Russia needed "a strong man who deserves to be president." In a televised ceremony, Yeltsin transferred the "nuclear suitcase" to Putin before departing the Kremlin in a Mercedes limousine, leaving his successor waving from the porch.
Putin's emergence coincided with an unprecedented phenomenon-his approval ratings shot from 31% to 80% between August and November 1999, a vertical line on graphs unlike anything sociologists had ever seen. The catalyst for this transformation was a series of apartment building bombings that killed 293 people, which the government used to launch a new offensive in Chechnya. Unlike Yeltsin's unpopular first Chechen war, this campaign was embraced by the public, with Putin positioned as its brave leader. His crude promise to "rub out" terrorists "in the outhouse" resonated with ordinary Russians who saw him as decisive yet one of their own.
Putin's consolidation of power accelerated after the Beslan school siege in 2004, when he implemented political reforms justified as protection against external threats. The Kremlin's "preventive counter-revolution" aimed to counter American-sponsored "color revolutions" by mobilizing the public sphere while suppressing dissent. Former Politburo member Alexander Yakovlev gave a final revealing interview before his death in October 2005, lamenting Russia's nationalist turn and Stalin's rehabilitation. He exposed the truth about who really held power: "We used to pretend that we were in charge. But it was the CheKa, the KGB who were always really in command." He described Russians' "leader principle" as a disease-a fear of freedom rather than natural disasters or terrorism-and predicted the rise of "fascist groups" as "shock troops of tomorrow."
Putin's Russia increasingly embraced conservative ideology as a tool for maintaining power. In his 2006 address, Putin declared depopulation Russia's most pressing problem, instituting "maternal capital"-payments to women having a second child. The World Congress of Families, an American conservative organization, found a spiritual center at Moscow State University, with Russians becoming senior partners backed by the government and Orthodox Church. Moscow State's sociology department established the Center for Conservative Studies under Alexander Dugin, who positioned it as neither liberal nor Soviet-Marxist, but as a conservative intellectual center aligned with the feelings of "both the people and the regime."
By 2007, Putin had abandoned diplomatic niceties at the Munich security conference, openly challenging NATO expansion and claiming betrayal of supposed Western promises not to expand eastward. Russia's new aggressive posture manifested in April 2007 when Estonia moved a Soviet war memorial from central Tallinn, triggering cyber attacks that paralyzed Estonian government websites, banks, and critical infrastructure. The incident demonstrated how Russia could still threaten even a NATO member through unconventional warfare.
Chapter 6
The Crackdown: Eliminating Opposition and Independent Thought
The contested parliamentary elections of December 2011 sparked the largest protests since the Soviet collapse. Though the elections maintained the usual suspects in their usual proportions-Putin's United Russia, the Kremlin's puppet populists, the Communists, and the Liberal Democratic Party-obvious ballot stuffing and number doctoring triggered widespread outrage. Protesters wore white ribbons as symbols of a peaceful "White Revolution," drawing approximately 50,000 people to Bolotnaya Square.
The authorities responded with a systematic crackdown. Human Rights Watch called it the "worst crackdown since the Soviet era." New legislation included expanded espionage and treason laws, a ban on American adoptions of Russian orphans, and laws restricting children's literature. These laws served as signals that the Kremlin was in charge and strict order was being reconstituted. Self-censorship quickly returned as vigilant citizens began demanding book removals from libraries and bookstores.
The anti-gay propaganda law, passed unanimously in 2013, exemplified this new wave of repression. When LGBT activists protested the bill, they were beaten by counter-protesters while police looked on, then arrested while their attackers went free. Putin cemented this ideology in his Valdai Club speech, framing Russia as defender of Christian values against Western moral degradation, linking homosexuality with Satan worship and pedophilia. Meanwhile, vigilante groups like "Occupy Pedophilia" conducted "safaris" to entrap gay men, filming their humiliation and abuse.
Opposition leaders faced systematic neutralization through house arrest, emigration pressure, death threats, and fabricated criminal charges. Boris Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister under Yeltsin who had become a vocal Putin critic, published damning reports on Russian governance, detailing corruption, military neglect, infrastructure decay, and other failures. He faced increasing harassment-attackers tried to catch him in fishing nets, threw ammonia in his face, and even tossed a toilet onto his car roof. His face appeared on increasingly threatening propaganda posters throughout Moscow-first as part of the "Fifth Column. Aliens Among Us," then on a "March of Traitors" banner.
On February 27, 2015, Nemtsov was shot dead on the Moskvoretsky Bridge, just minutes from the Kremlin. The bridge, despite being under constant surveillance, had no security response for at least ten minutes after the shooting. The next day, 50,000 people marched through central Moscow carrying Russian flags, Nemtsov portraits, and a banner reading "Heroes Don't Die." His daughter Zhanna stated she held Putin personally responsible for her father's death. After briefly returning to Moscow, she left Russia permanently following the poisoning of Vladimir Kara-Murza, her father's colleague who had been maintaining a memorial on the bridge where Boris was killed.
Chapter 7
Crimea and Ukraine: War as Ideological Cement
In March 2014, following the Sochi Olympics and the Ukrainian Euromaidan revolution, Russia annexed Crimea. The peninsula's violent history included nearly two centuries as part of Russia after its 1783 annexation, Stalin's 1944 ethnic cleansing that removed Tatars and other minorities, and Khrushchev's unexplained 1954 transfer to Ukraine. For Russians, Crimea remained their beloved vacation destination-a universal aspiration and symbol of summer memories, regardless of social class.
On March 18, 2014, Putin delivered a triumphant forty-minute address to parliament, interrupted by standing ovations and ending with chants of "Thank you!" He signed a treaty joining Russia and Crimea, framing the annexation as historical justice. Putin claimed Crimea was the cradle of Russian civilization, dismissed the suffering of Crimean minorities, and positioned Russians as victims who "had been robbed" when the USSR collapsed. He portrayed Russians as "one of the largest divided nations in the world" and blamed America for orchestrating the Maidan and threatening Russian interests. The speech contained familiar Putin themes but also echoed Hitler's 1938 Sudetenland speech with its concept of a divided nation and moral duty to countrymen abroad that superseded international law.
Gudkov realized Crimea had become Russia's ideology, mobilizing the nation with 88 percent supporting annexation and only 1 percent opposed. Putin was now using Alexander Dugin's words and concepts, carrying out his predictions about Ukraine's division. Dugin had prophesied Ukraine would split into two nations with different geopolitical orientations-the Russian-allied east and Europe-facing west. A billionaire ally delivered Dugin's memo to the Kremlin proposing to annex Crimea and southeastern Ukraine by organizing unrest to justify intervention. By April, protesters in Donetsk and Luhansk took over government buildings, declared a People's Republic, and war began.
Western countries followed the US in imposing sanctions on Russia, banning Russian companies from financial markets, embargoing high-tech oil equipment exports, and restricting military technology sales. Putin responded with counter-sanctions, banning Western food imports. While Kremlin media claimed this would cost Western countries $9 billion and benefit Russian producers, the actual result was a 10% increase in food prices and drastically reduced selection. Gudkov tracked two diverging curves: Putin's approval rating remained anomalously high while consumer confidence plummeted-a contradiction that defied economic logic but aligned with totalitarian patterns where scarcity serves the regime's survival.
Chapter 8
Trauma and Society: Russia's Collective Death Drive
Psychologist Marina Arutyunyan documented how Russia systematically evolved into a society engineered to sustain chronic anxiety. The arbitrary enforcement of laws became a powerful tool of psychological control - exemplified by the shocking overnight demolition of 97 Moscow buildings in 2016 for alleged documentation irregularities, leaving hundreds of businesses and residents displaced without warning. This pattern of unpredictable state action, from random tax inspections to selective prosecution, created an atmosphere of perpetual dread that effectively paralyzed citizens' sense of agency and control over their lives.
Television emerged as the primary instrument for maintaining this state of anxiety. Popular debate shows featured hosts who deliberately orchestrated conflict, with participants screaming over each other while moderators stoked fears about various threats. News programs devoted extensive coverage to sensationalized dangers - from drug epidemics to pedophile rings allegedly targeting Russian children. The relentless bombardment of threatening content maintained viewers in a heightened state of arousal, leaving them with two psychological options: complete withdrawal into passive acceptance or submission to a greater collective identity that promised protection.
This environment proved fertile ground for paranoid nationalism. Many citizens found relief from their personal anxiety by embracing nationalist narratives, celebrating territorial acquisitions like Crimea while accepting an increasingly paranoid worldview where Russia stood alone against hostile foreign powers. The annexation of Crimea in 2014 became a particularly potent symbol, with the phrase "Crimea is ours" ( ) emerging as a rallying cry that justified sacrificing personal wellbeing for perceived national greatness.
Arutyunyan's analysis extended beyond individual psychology to examine how entire societies process trauma. She observed Moscow's physical transformation as a reflection of collective psychological state - historic low-rise buildings were systematically destroyed, traditional sidewalks were replaced with slick tiles that became treacherous in winter, and mature trees were removed from streets. These changes created an urban environment characterized by what she called "the geometry and texture of a graveyard" - cold, inhospitable, and devoid of organic life.
The concept of societal trauma builds on psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton's groundbreaking work with survivors of massive historical traumas. Through his studies of survivors from Chinese thought reform camps, Hiroshima, and Nazi concentration camps, Lifton identified key psychological responses including "psychic numbing" - an emotional shutdown that allows survival but blocks normal human connection - and "doubling" - where individuals create separate functioning personalities to cope with moral conflicts. His description of twentieth-century experience as "lifelong immersion in death" proved particularly relevant to understanding post-Soviet Russia's trajectory.
Societies, like individuals, can experience collective trauma through various mechanisms - sudden catastrophes, prolonged warfare, genocide, systematic oppression, or even rapid social change that destroys familiar structures. Russia's particular tragedy lay in its inability to process the multiple traumas of its Soviet past - from the terror of Stalinist purges to the collapse of the USSR. This unresolved historical trauma left Russian society vulnerable to totalitarian regression, unconsciously seeking the familiar comfort of authoritarian control rather than facing the anxiety-inducing challenges of building democratic institutions and civil society.
Chapter 9
The Future Is History: Totalitarianism's Endless Return
Scholars debated how to categorize Putin's Russia. Some rejected "totalitarian" as too extreme, while even "authoritarian" was controversial. "Hybrid regime" became popular, with political scientist Ekaterina Shulman defining it as "the authoritarian regime in the new historical moment"-one that rewards passivity rather than mobilization. She argued Putin's regime survived by strategically imitating both democracy and totalitarianism in varied measure, with the level of force being negligible compared to twentieth-century standards.
Hungarian sociologist Balint Magyar rejected terms like "kleptocracy" and "crony capitalism" as implying voluntary association. Magyar, who had experienced repression firsthand under communism, developed his own concept: the "post-communist mafia state." This term acknowledged both the communist foundations and the mafia-like structure centered around a patriarch who "disposes of positions, wealth, statuses, persons." In Putin's Russia, the inner circle consisted of men from his Leningrad youth, KGB colleagues, and St. Petersburg administration associates. Unlike totalitarian states built on violence and ideology, the mafia state used these merely as instruments, focusing solely on accumulating wealth and concentrating power.
Yuri Levada had theorized that periodic protests were essential to maintaining Russia's social structure. Gudkov expanded this idea, suggesting that tension inevitably builds between authority and society, creating potential for change. The regime responds with force-either internally through arrests and restrictions, or externally through war. This simplifies society to "us," "them," and "our leader," restoring calm while preventing change. Gudkov called this process "abortive modernization," occurring at regular intervals throughout Soviet history, with the 1993 shelling of parliament and 2008 Georgia war serving similar functions. His depressing conclusion was that Russian society had remained essentially unchanged for a century.
In October 2015, Putin addressed international Russia experts in Sochi, framing peace as an anomaly-"a fragile state of equilibrium" difficult to sustain. He portrayed the Cold War as a golden era of world peace maintained by nuclear deterrence, lamenting that "in the last quarter century, the threshold for applying force has clearly been lowered." This rhetoric aligned with what Gudkov had diagnosed as "recurrent totalitarianism."
The story of post-Soviet Russia is one of tragic circularity-a society that briefly glimpsed freedom but lacked the tools to understand or sustain it. Without the language of social sciences, without the capacity for collective self-reflection, Russia remained trapped in its totalitarian patterns. The future became history, endlessly repeating itself in new forms but with the same underlying structure. For the young Russians born in the 1980s who grew up during the contested 1990s, the promise of a different future gradually gave way to the realization that they were living in the same Russia their parents and grandparents had known-a society where the individual remains subordinate to the state, where truth remains elusive, and where freedom remains an unfulfilled promise.
