THE FUTURE IS HISTORY

Author: Masha Gessen
Year: 2017
Publisher: Brombergs Bokförlag AB
Language: Swedish 

To the rest of us Europeans, the Russians have long been a curious lot. Many a foreign writer has ventured to verbalise the soul of the Russian people, many an army general misjudged its resolve, and many a traveller gone astray in the thicket of the idiosyncrasies of Russian rationality.

What better cicerone into this maze of cultural, psychological, and political imbroglio, than the Russian born naturalised US citizen Masha Gessen? Gessen has written extensively on Russian politics and society after the iron curtain and they* have been a vocal critic of Vladimir Putin’s increasingly authoritarian reign and his contempt for the principles of human rights. What is more interesting is their analysis of how Putin’s grip on power became possible in the first place.

”Framtiden är historia” (The Future is History”) is a chronological report of the chain of events that were triggered by the Perestroika, unfolded during the tumultuous years of the Yeltsin presidency and, after a mere 10 years of quasi-democratic reforms, collapsed into what became the still extant Putin regime. Gessen tells the story from the perspectives of seven Russian individuals whose personal negotiations with the changing reality afford a glimpse into Russian social advancement during this period.

Gessen does not settle for merely telling the story of what transpired or even how it came to be, but makes a serious attempt to explain how Putin’s rise to power was not only possible, but in the greater scheme of things virtually predetermined.

At the heart of the matter, Gessen submits, is the singular mind of the Homo sovieticus, a term introduced to the general public by Alexander Zinovyev in the early 80s. The term as such is much older but was initially instituted as a way to capture the next level of human development that mankind as envisioned by the proponents of Stalinism, but its meaning soon became derogatory and used to denote the joint characteristics of a population that allowed itself to be indoctrinated by an oppressive system.

The most salient features of Homo sovieticus are acquiescence, patience, adaptability, distrust of anything foreign or challenging, and a penchant for double-thinking. The latter is the natural way in which Homo sovieticus is able to integrate two mutually exclusive opinions or conclusions and consider them valid simultaneously. This talent is perhaps best illustrated by a survey in which two questions are asked: 1. What countries do you believe are better than Russia? 2. Which is the best country in the world? Homo sovieticus will see no contradiction in listing four or five countries in response to question 1 and still answer ”Russia” to question 2.

Over time, Homo sovieticus and the USSR formed an interdependence where society was shaped by the Soviet rule and the Soviet rule hinged on society. The assumption in the West, but also among some notable Russian scholars at the beginning of the 1990s, was that the Soviet man would gradually die out and become replaced by a more modern generation of Russians with a taste for freedom, liberalism, democracy, and human rights. Much to their bewilderment and unmistakeable dismay, destiny would have it otherwise.   

We now know that the Yeltsin years proved to be but an imagined alembic and that Homo sovieticus, contrary to most expectations, transcended the domesticated population and traversed seamlessly into the post-USSR crop. Millennials in Russia did not revolt against their predecessors as their contemporaries did in other parts of Europe. Instead, they copied, reinforced, and amplified their mothers and fathers.

I am not a sovietologist. Nor do I specialise in Russian ethnology or Russian history. I am thus perfectly unqualified to offer even an approximation to what might have been the driver behind this unanticipated eventuation. A few thoughts do, however, spring to mind, most vividly those of Pierre Bourdieu's. Bourdieu argued that the way we perceive our world and our place in our community is history being codified into practice. He did not call this ”culture” as this word has a slightly different meaning in French than it would in English. Instead, he dusted off the old term ”habitus” which is not to be confused with ”habit”. For Bourdieu, people’s actions are direct manifestations of their perception of reality. As today’s practice is governed by yesterday’s experience, history will have a stronger impact on our actions than will current observations. Émile Durkheim was thinking along similar lines when he said that ”In each of us, in varying proportions, there is part of yesterday’s man”.

The works of Bourdieu (which I warmly recommend) may make us aware of the importance of the past in shaping the present in terms of cultural responses to current events, but it does little to elucidate why Homo sovieticus proved as resilient to political change as it so far appears to be. Nor does it explain how the Russian people were predisposed to adopting Homo sovieticus in the first place. It does, however, suggest that democracy may not be the natural aspiration for all communities that it is often portrayed as in Western Europe.

More precisely, recent history suggests that the Russian mindset seems to have not only allowed Vladimir Putin to come to power, but indeed craved it. Niccoló Machiavelli in his 16th-century work ”The Prince” is adamant that it is a simple matter to rule a people that is not used to freedom. Étienne de la Boétie, who lived a few of decades after Machiavelli, dedicated a whole essay ”Discours de la servitude volontaire” to this phenomenon. There appears to be little room for serious disagreement that the Russian nation is inherently suitable for totalitarianism.

My own contribution to the understanding of ”Framtiden är historia”, albeit modest and probably irrelevant, stems from one further feature of the Homo sovieticus, partly uncharted: nationalism. At closer inspection, to the extent my inarguably clouded and grievously inadequate powers of observation allow, I seem to discern a connection between the passivity and defeatism on the part of Homo sovieticus with regard to his own importance on the one hand, and his vigorous nationalism on the other. I submit for the consideration of the hypothetical reader of these lines, that a people that is not used to individual accomplishments or indeed even the expectation of personal greatness, and furthermore strives to be enslaved by a singular ruler, will by design be suspicious to all individualists or minorities (sexual, ethnical and others) and by extension to the very ideas of liberalism and tolerance. They will compensate their individual insignificance by adhering to the concept of collective greatness based on nation, ethnicity, or religion. I term this trade-off ”greatness by proxy”.

I read Gessen’s book in Swedish and have a remark about the translation. If someone had read this blog, they would have noticed that I do not always offer standard translations of the texts I refer to unless they are readily available in my own home library or on the internet. Instead, I slap on my own translation into the text and keep my fingers crossed that I do not botch it completely. I am certainly aware that the material is thus left deficient and that such sloth gives the whole text an amateurish air. Imagine, if you will, a professional translator doing the same. This is exactly my beef what Jessica Hallén. In the first chapter, Masha Gessen refers to an essay by Andrej Amalrik by the title ”Просуществует ли Советский Союз до 1984 года” which Hallén translates (probably from English) to ”Kommer Sovjetunionen att överleva till 1984?” apparently oblivious to the fact that Amalrik’s essay was published by Aldus Aktuellt in Swedish in 1970 under the title ”Kommer Sovjetunionen bestå till 1984?”. The reason I know this is that I have a copy of this book standing on a bookshelf less than two meters from me. A quick search in the database of the Royal Library would have delivered Hallén from this embarrassing blunder.

Speaking of translations.  ”Framtiden är historia” does not appear to be available in Russian. I wonder why…

All things considered, Gessen’s book is an extraordinary testimony to Russian governance after the disintegration of the USSR. Their ambition is unambiguous and their research meticulous, heedful, and, from what I can see, entirely adequate. I have no hesitation to endorse it to anybody who is interested in the rise of totalitarianism in general, and Putin and Russia in particular.

 

*I respect Masha Gessen’s, who identifies as non-binary, request to use the pronouns they/them.