The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

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THE FUTURE IS HISTORY

HOW TOTALITARIANISM RECLAIMED RUSSIA

MASHA GESSEN

NEW YORK T/MEiS-BESTS ELLING AUTHOR

ALSO BY MASHA GESSEN

Dead Again: The Russian Intelligentsia After Communism Ester and Ruzya: How My Grandmothers Survived Hitler's War and Stalin's

Peace

Blood Matters: From Inherited Illness to Designer Babies, How the World and I Found Ourselves in the Future of the Gene

Perfect Rigor: A Genius and the Mathematical Breakthrough of the Century

The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin

Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot

Gay Propaganda: Russian Love Stories (editor)

The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy

THE FUTURE

IS HISTORY

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HOW TOTALITARIANISM RECLAIMED RUSSIA

Й Z

MASHA GESSEN

RIVERHEAD BOOKS NEW YORK 2017

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Anna Akhmatova's publishing rights are acquired via FTM Agency, Ltd., Russia.

Verses from Requiem by Anna Akhmatova are quoted from Anna Akhmatova: Selected Poems Including 'Requiem' by A.S. Kline, translator. Copyright © 2005, 2012. All rights

reserved.

Verses from "Snow-Clad Is the Plain" by Sergey Yesenin are translated from the Russian by

Alec Vagapov.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gessen, Masha, author. Title: The future is history : how totalitarianism reclaimed Russia / Masha Gessen. Other titles: How totalitarianism reclaimed Russia. Description: New York : Riverhead Books, 2017. Includes bibliographical references and

index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017014363 (print) | LCCN 2017034714 (ebook) | ISBN 9780698406209

(ebook) | ISBN 9781594634536 (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH: Russia (Federation)-Politics and government—1991- | Russia (Federation) —History—1991- | Moscow Region (Russia)-Intellectual life. | Russia (Federation)—

Biography.

Classification: LCC DK510.763 (ebook) | LCC DK510.763 .G48 2017 (print) | DDC 947.086—

dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017014363

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Version 1

IN MEMORY OF SVETLANA BOYM

CONTENTS

Also by Masha Gessen Title Page Copyright Dedication Dramatis Personae Prologue

PART ONE | BORN IN THE USSR

one Born in 1984 two Life, Examined three Privilege four Homo Sovieticus

PART TWO | REVOLUTION

five Swan Lake

six The Execution of the White House seven Everyone Wants to Be a Millionaire

PART THREE | UNRAVELING

eight Grief, Arrested

nine Old Songs

ten It's All Over All Over Again

PART FOUR | RESURRECTION

eleven Life After Death twelve The Orange Menace

thirteen All in the Family

PART FIVE | PROTEST

fourteen The Future Is History fifteen Budushchego net sixteen White Ribbons seventeen Masha: May 6, 2012

PART SIX | CRACKDOWN

eighteen Seryozha: July 18, 2013 nineteen Lyosha: June 11, 2013 twenty A Nation Divided twenty-one Zhanna: February 27, 2015 twenty-two Forever War

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

About the Author

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

seven people act as the main characters of this book, making appearances throughout the narrative. I have used a modified Russian convention to refer to them. As anyone who has ever read a Russian novel knows, Russians have numerous names. A person's legal name is the full first name plus a patronymic—a form of the father's name. In contemporary life, however, the name/patronymic combination is generally reserved for formal occasions and for older people. At the same time, most full names have a variety of diminutives that derive from them. Most Russians have a diminutive that was chosen for them in childhood and continue to use it throughout their lives; most, though not all, diminutives derive clearly from their full name, which can be reverse-engineered from the diminutive. For example, all Sashas are Alexanders; most Mashas are Marias. Children are almost always addressed by their diminutive.

In this book, those who first appear in the story as children are called by their diminutive throughout (e.g., Masha, Lyosha). Those who first appear as adults are called by their full names (e.g., Boris, Tatiana). Those who first appear as older people are introduced by their name and patronymic and referred to by these names for the duration of the book. Below is a list of the main characters. Dozens of other people are mentioned in this book; their names are not on this list because their appearances are episodic.

Zhanna (b.1984)

Boris Nemtsov, father Raisa, mother Dmitry, husband Dina Yakovlevna, grandmother

Masha (b. 1984)

Tatiana, mother Galina Vasilyevna, grandmother Boris Mikhailovich, grandfather Sergei, husband Sasha, son

Seryozha (b. 1982)

Anatoly, father

Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev, grandfather

Lyosha (b. 1985)

Galina, mother

Yuri, biological father

Sergei, stepfather

Serafima Adamovna, grandmother

Marina Arutyunyan, psychoanalyst

Maya, mother

Anna Mikhailovna Pankratova, grandmother Lev Gudkov, sociologist

Alexander Dugin, philosopher, political activist

PROLOGUE

i have been told many stories about Russia, and I have told a few myself. When I was eleven or twelve, in the late 1970s, my mother told me that the USSR was a totalitarian state—she compared the regime to the Nazi one, an extraordinary act of thought and speech for a Soviet citizen. My parents told me that the Soviet regime would last forever, which was why we had to leave the country.

When I was a young journalist, in the late 1980s, the Soviet regime began to teeter and then collapsed into a pile of rubble, or so the story went. I joined an army of reporters excitedly documenting my country's embrace of freedom and its journey toward democracy.

I spent my thirties and forties documenting the death of a Russian democracy that had never really come to be. Different people were telling different stories about this: many insisted that Russia had merely taken a step back after taking two steps toward democracy; some laid the blame on Vladimir Putin and the KGB, others on a supposed Russian love of the iron fist, and still others on an inconsiderate, imperious West. At one point, I was convinced that I would be writing the story of the decline and fall of the Putin regime. Soon after, I found myself leaving Russia for the second time—this time as a middle-aged person with children. And like my mother before me, I was explaining to my children why we could no longer live in our country.

The specifics were clear enough. Russian citizens had been losing rights and liberties for nearly two decades. In 2012, Putin's government began a full-fledged political crackdown. The country waged war on the enemy within and on its neighbors. In 2008, Russia invaded Georgia, and in 2014 it attacked Ukraine, annexing vast

territories. It has also been waging an information war on Western democracy as a concept and a reality. It took a while for Western observers to see what was happening in Russia, but by now the stories of Russia's various wars have become familiar. In the contemporary American imagination, Russia has reclaimed the role of evil empire and existential threat.

The crackdown, the wars, and even Russia's reversion to type on the world stage are things that happened—that I witnessed—and I wanted to tell this story. But I also wanted to tell about what did not happen: the story of freedom that was not embraced and democracy that was not desired. How do you tell a story like that? Where do you locate reasons for the absences? When do you begin, and with whom?

Popular books about Russia—or other countries—fall into two broad categories: stories about powerful people (the czars, Stalin, Putin, and their circles) that aim to explain how the country has been and is run, and stories about "regular people" that aim to show what it feels like to live there. I have written both kinds of books and read many more. But even the best such books—perhaps especially the best such books—provide a view of only one part of the story of a country. If we imagine reporting, as I do, in terms of the Indian fable of six blind men and an elephant, most Russia books describe just the elephant's head or just its legs. And even if some books supply descriptions of the tail, the trunk, and the body, very few try to explain how the animal holds together—or what kind of animal it is. My ambition this time was to both describe and define the animal.

I decided to start with the decline of the Soviet regime—perhaps the assumption that it "collapsed" needed to be questioned. I also decided to focus on people for whom the end of the USSR was the first or one of the first formative memories: the generation of Russians born in the early to middle 1980s. They grew up in the 1990s, perhaps the most contested decade in Russian history: some remember it as a time of liberation, while for others it represents chaos and pain. This generation have lived their entire adult lives in a Russia led by Vladimir Putin. In choosing my subjects, I also looked for people whose lives changed drastically as a result of the crackdown that began in 2012. Lyosha, Masha, Seryozha, and Zhanna

—four young people who come from different cities, families, and, indeed, different Soviet worlds—allowed me to tell what it was to grow up in a country that was opening up and to come of age in a society shutting down.

In seeking out these protagonists, I did what journalists usually do: I sought people who were both "regular," in that their experiences exemplified the experiences of millions of others, and extraordinary: intelligent, passionate, introspective, able to tell their stories vividly. But the ability to make sense of one's life in the world is a function of freedom. The Soviet regime robbed people not only of their ability to live freely but also of the ability to understand fully what had been taken from them, and how. The regime aimed to annihilate personal and historical memory and the academic study of society. Its concerted war on the social sciences left Western academics for decades in a better position to interpret Russia than were Russians themselves—but, as outsiders with restricted access to information, they could hardly fill the void. Much more than a problem of scholarship, this was an attack on the humanity of Russian society, which lost the tools and even the language for understanding itself. The only stories Russia told itself about itself were created by Soviet ideologues. If a modern country has no sociologists, psychologists, or philosophers, what can it know about itself? And what can its citizens know about themselves? I realized that my mother's simple act of categorizing the Soviet regime and comparing it to another had required an extraordinary measure of freedom, which she derived, at least in part, from having already decided to emigrate.

To capture the larger tragedy of losing the intellectual tools of sense-making, I looked for Russians who had attempted to wield them, in both the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. The cast of characters grew to include a sociologist, a psychoanalyst, and a philosopher. If anyone holds the tools of defining the elephant, it is they. They are neither "regular people"—the stories of their struggles to bring their disciplines back from the dead are hardly representative —nor "powerful people": they are the people who try to understand. In the Putin era, the social sciences were defeated and degraded in new ways, and my protagonists faced a new set of impossible choices.

As I wove these stories together, I imagined I was writing a long Russian (nonfiction) novel that aimed to capture both the texture of individual tragedies and the events and ideas that shaped them. The result, I hope, is a book that shows not only what it has felt like to live in Russia over the last thirty years but also what Russia has been in this time, what it has become, and how. The elephant, too, makes a brief appearance (see here).

PART ONE

BORN IN THE USSR

one

BORN IN 1984

MASHA

on the seventieth anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution, Masha's grandmother, a rocket scientist, took Masha to the Church of St. John the Warrior in Central Moscow to be baptized. Masha was three and a half years old, which made her roughly three years older than all the other children in the church that day. Her grandmother Galina Vasilyevna was fifty-five, which made her roughly the age of most of the grown-ups. They were old—fifty-five was the retirement age for Soviet women, and you could hardly have found a fifty-five-year-old who was not yet a grandmother—but not so old that they remembered a time when religion was practiced openly and proudly in Russia. Until recently, Galina Vasilyevna had not given religion much thought. Her own mother had gone to church, and had had her baptized. Galina Vasilyevna had studied physics at the university and, though she graduated a few years before a course on the "foundations of scientific atheism" became a graduation requirement at all colleges, she had been taught that religion was the opium of the people.*

Galina Vasilyevna had spent most of her adult life working on things that were the very opposite of religion: they were material, not at all mystical, and they flew into space. Most recently, she had been working at Scientific Production Unit Molniya ("Lightning"), which was designing the Soviet space shuttle Buran ("Blizzard"). Her task

was to create the mechanism that would allow the crew to open the shuttle's door after landing. Work on the shuttle was nearly finished. In another year, Buran would take flight. Its first test flight would be unmanned, and it would be successful, but Buran would never fly again. Funding for the project would dry up, and the mechanism for opening the space-shuttle door from the inside after landing would never be used.¹

Galina Vasilyevna had always been extraordinarily sensitive to the subtle changes in the moods and expectations of the world around her—a most useful quality in a country like the Soviet Union, where knowing which way the wind was blowing could mean the difference between life and death. Now, even though all things appeared to be on track in her professional life—it was still a year until Buran took flight—she could feel that something was cracking, something in the very foundation of the only world she knew—the world built on the primacy of material things. The crack was demanding that other ideas, or better yet, another foundation, appear to fill the emptiness. It was as though she could anticipate that the solid and unmystical thing she had spent her life building would fall into disuse, leaving a metaphysical void.

Galina Vasilyevna may have learned that religion was the opium of the people and she may have been told, along with the rest of the country and the world, that the Bolsheviks had vanquished organized religion, but, having lived in the Soviet Union for more than half a century, she knew that this was not entirely true. Back in the 1930s, when she was a child, most Soviet adults still said openly that they believed in God.² The new generation was supposed to grow up entirely free of the superstitions of which religion was merely a subset and of the heartache that made religion necessary. But then, when Galina Vasilyevna was nine, the Second World War began. The Germans were advancing so fast, and the Soviet leadership appeared so helpless, that there was nothing left to believe in but God.³ Soon enough, the Soviet government seemed to embrace the Russian Orthodox Church, and from that point on, the Communists and the clergy fought the Nazis together.⁴ After the war, the church went back

to being an institution for the older generation, but the knowledge remained that in times of catastrophic uncertainty it could be a refuge.

Grandmother told Masha that they were going to church because of Father Alexander Men. Men was a Russian Orthodox priest for people like Galina Vasilyevna. His parents had been natural scientists, and he had a way of talking to people who did not grow up in the church. He had been ordained by the Russian Orthodox Church, which ever since the war had served at the pleasure of the Kremlin, but he had his own ways of learning and teaching, and these had brought him to the brink of being arrested.⁵ Now that things were opening up slightly, Men was on the verge of becoming spectacularly popular, gathering a following of thousands and then of hundreds of thousands, though it would still be a few years before his writing could be published in the Soviet Union. Masha did not understand much of what her grandmother told her about Father Alexander or the light in the teachings of Jesus Christ, but she did not object to going to church. November 7* was always her favorite holiday, because on that day, the anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution, her grandmother, who for 364 days a year was a reluctant and subcompetent cook, baked pies that Masha liked to eat.

"What the fuck did you do that for?" Masha's mother asked when she came to pick up her daughter and discovered her wearing a tiny cross around her neck. That, however, was the extent of the discussion. Tatiana did not have much use for conversation: she was a woman of action. When she had discovered that she was pregnant, she went to the Party Committee at her graduate school in the hope that the authorities would compel the future baby's father, who had at least one other girlfriend, to marry Tatiana. This was not an unusual request and would not have been an unusual intervention for the Party Committee to stage, but in Tatiana's case it backfired. Masha's father lost his spot in graduate school and, consequently, his right to live in Moscow, and had to return home to the Soviet Far East, thousands of kilometers from his girlfriends.

New motherhood brought further unpleasant surprises. It made Tatiana dependent on her parents. Virtually everyone in her generation used parents as a source of free childcare:⁶ the only alternatives were state-run neighborhood-based nursery schools, which were a cross between baby prisons and warehouses, or prohibitively expensive and questionably legal private nanny services. Tatiana had won unusual independence from her parents—unlike most other people her age, she lived separately from them, in a communal apartment she shared with just one family—but the baby tethered her anew to her parents' apartment a few blocks away. With two rooms and a kitchen, Galina Vasilyevna and Boris Mikhailovich had the space to care for little Masha, and with both of them working as senior scientists in the space industry, they had more time than their graduate-student daughter. Tatiana figured that to escape her parental home for good, she needed to make money and pull strings. None of what she had to do was exactly legal under Soviet law, which restricted all activities and banned most entrepreneurship, but much of what she did was quietly tolerated by the authorities in a majority of the cases.

At age three, Masha was admitted to a prestigious, highly selective, virtually inaccessible residential preschool for the children of Central Committee members. (In fact, by the time Masha was born, the average age of a Central Committee member was approaching seventy-five,⁷ so the school served their grandchildren and great­grandchildren as well as the children of a few extraordinarily enterprising Soviet citizens like Tatiana.) Here is how a writer from a previous generation of students described the preschool:

Inside, everything reeked of prosperity and just-baked pirozhki. The Lenin's Corner was particularly resplendent, with its white gladioli arrangements beneath Ulyanov family photos arranged like icons on a crimson velvet bulletin board. On a panoramic veranda facing the haunted woods, nomenklatura offspring snoozed al fresco, bundled like piglets in goose-feather sleeping bags. I had arrived during Dead Hour, Soviet for afternoon nap.

"Wake up, Future Communists!" the teacher cried, clapping her hands. She grinned slyly. "It's fish-fat time!" . . . A towering nanny named, I still recall, Zoya Petrovna approached me with a vast

spoon of black caviar in her hand.⁸

By the time Masha enrolled in school, the Lenin Corner had lost some of its luster and the teachers had toned down some of their rhetoric, rarely roaring the word "Communists" at their charges. But the daily rations of caviar remained, in even starker contrast to the world outside, where food shortages were the determining factor of everyday life. Still there, too, was the ubiquitous Soviet-preschool- issue single-lump farina, which could be stood vertically upon a plate. The school maintained a five-day-a-week boarding schedule, an unsurpassed Soviet luxury. On weekends, Masha, like many Soviet children, generally stayed with her grandparents. Trying to make enough to sustain this life kept Tatiana busy seven days a week.

When Masha was four, her mother taught her to tell counterfeit dollars from genuine currency. Being caught with either real or fake foreign money would have been dangerous, punishable under Soviet law by up to fifteen years behind bars,⁹ but Tatiana seemed incapable of fear. At any rate, this was her livelihood. She also ran a tutoring business: she had started out as a tutor herself, but soon figured out that she needed volume to make real money. She began matching clients—mostly high school students readying to face the grueling oral exams for university admission—with her fellow graduate students, who could prepare them. In her own tutoring, she now stuck to a highly profitable and rare specialty she had developed: she prepared young people to face the "coffins."

"Coffins" were questions specially designed for the Jewish applicants. Soviet institutions of higher learning generally fell into two categories: those that admitted no Jews at all and those that admitted a strictly limited number of Jews. The rules of non- admission were not, of course, publicly posted; rejection was administered in a peculiarly sadistic way. Jewish applicants usually took entrance exams along with all the other aspiring students. They pulled examination tickets from the same pool as everyone else. But if they succeeded in answering correctly the two or three questions on the ticket, then, alone in the room with the examiners, they would be casually issued an extra question, as though to follow up on the answers given. This would be the "coffin." In mathematics, this was usually a problem not merely complex but unsolvable. The applicant would falter and founder. The examiners would then nail the cover of the coffin shut: the Jewish applicant had failed the exam. Unless, that is, the applicant had had Tatiana for a tutor. She perfected the art of teaching her clients not merely specific "coffins," which she had somehow managed to procure, but the general algorithm for recognizing them and proving them to be unsolvable. This bucktoothed blonde in aviator glasses could teach Soviet Jews to beat the antisemitic machine, and this kept Masha in caviar and disgusting Central Committee farina.

ZHANNA

TO ACHIEVE ANYTHING even resembling a level playing field, one had to not be Jewish. One's "nationality"—what Americans would call "ethnicity"—was noted in all important identity documents, from birth certificate to internal passport to marriage certificate to personnel file at work or school. Once assigned, "nationality" was virtually unchangeable—and it was passed on from generation to generation. Zhanna's father, Boris, had somehow—most likely through the foresight and effort of his parents—lucked into documents that identified him as ethnically Russian. With his dark brown eyes and dark hair in tight curls, and his parents' identifiably Jewish first names, Dina and Yefim, he was not fooling anyone, but he managed to short-circuit most inquiries by claiming, illogically, to be "half Jewish." This skill, his ethnically correct documents, and top high school marks enabled him to get admission to university. There had been one major obstacle: unlike the overwhelming majority of Soviet high school students, Boris had not joined the Komsomol, the Communist Youth League, and his graduation documents consequently identified him as "politically unreliable." His mother,

Dina Yakovlevna, lobbied the high school to change the wording. It seemed like an impossible undertaking, but it had to be done. In this family, which consisted entirely of natural scientists and medical doctors, everyone was brilliant and everyone was accomplished. The wording was changed. Boris was admitted to the Department of Radio Physics of Gorky State University. He would graduate with top honors and would complete his PhD dissertation by the time he was twenty- four. Consensus among his family and friends was that he would eventually win the Nobel Prize for his work in quantum physics.

Zhanna was born in 1984, the year Boris finished his dissertation. Her mother, Raisa, was a teacher of French. In Soviet terms, they were a bogema—bohemian—family, which meant that they organized their life in accordance with ideas that seemed Western and in ways that continuously expanded their social circle. They rented a house, while Boris's older sister and her child lived with Dina Yakovlevna, as was the norm. The house, in the dilapidated center of town, was old and wooden and had no bathtub or shower, only a toilet. The family made do—they heated water on the stove and washed over a basin, or showered at friends' houses—and anyway, they were not so Western that they had to shower every day. They were, however, so Western as to play tennis, a rarefied sport that landed the family a photo spread in the city paper when Zhanna was a toddler. All three of the people in the picture had dark hair and white-toothed smiles as wide as their cheekbones. They stood out in their gray city.

The city was named Gorky, after the Russian writer Alexei Peshkov, who, as was the Revolutionary fashion, had taken a tearjerker pen name: it meant "bitter." When Zhanna was first becoming aware of her surroundings, she had no idea that a writer named Gorky had ever existed: she thought the name was a literal description of her town. The Soviet government seemed to agree: four years before Zhanna's birth, it had chosen Gorky as the place of exile for the physicist Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov, the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize laureate and the country's best-known dissident. Sakharov's last name meant "sugar," and from the way Zhanna's father said his name, Zhanna knew there was something magical about him. She begged her father to take her with him when he said he was going to

"Sakharov's building"—she did not realize that he was not actually visiting the great man, just keeping a sort of occasional vigil—but he would not take her. She named her kitten Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov.

Here is how Sakharov's wife, Yelena Bonner, described the city in the spring of 1987, when Zhanna was not quite three years old:

You would think it's not early April but late autumn or the onset of

winter I see pedestrians pulling their feet up out of the puddles

as they walk: heavy, enormous clumps of dirt cling to their shoes. The wind bends treetops right down to the ground. A mix of snow and rain is falling from a dim sky, laying dirty-white stains on the surface of something that I'm not sure deserves to be called

"earth."¹⁰

Zhanna was pretty sure hers was the worst city on earth and its bitter name described the lives of those forced to live there, especially her mother. Raisa had to spend most of her time hunting for food. Sometimes she took the train to Moscow—a night to get there, then she would spend the day standing in line, and the next night on the train back. Most often Moscow yielded processed meats, which had not been seen in Gorky in years. Moscow had shortages of its own, but compared with Gorky, where a store might be selling nothing but unidentifiable dark juice in three-liter glass jars with tin covers, Moscow was the land of promise if not of plenty. One time Raisa returned with candy, a clear plastic bag full of sloppily wrapped grayish-brown cylinders. They were soy mixed with sugar, crushed peanuts, and a sprinkling of cocoa powder. Zhanna thought she had never tasted anything better. Another time a friend of Raisa's brought bananas in a gym bag. They were green and hard, and Raisa—who, unlike her daughter, had seen bananas before—knew that they should be kept in a dark cupboard, where they would ripen. Boris did not share in the responsibilities of daily procurement, but occasionally he shone with something he had "reached"—the Soviet term for getting hard-to-find food, and Zhanna thought that her father could "reach" things because he was so very tall. Basically, he was a superhero.

Zhanna had no set bedtime, and since there were always people at the house, sitting around the table and talking, she stayed up with them, until midnight or later. Her father, who had no set office hours, would drop her off at the neighborhood preschool on his way to the lab. This usually coincided with the beginning of Dead Hour—nap time—which was convenient, since Zhanna had not had enough sleep at home.

When Zhanna was about three, conversations around the table at the old wooden house began to change. They shifted away from the anomalous Doppler effect or whatever theoretical issue had been on Boris's mind to the fact that a nuclear-powered heating plant was about to be built in Gorky. Ground had been broken.¹¹ It had been only a year since the catastrophic accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine; the government had tried to keep information about the disaster from getting out but had succeeded only in slowing it down. By now, the magnitude of the loss and danger had seeped in. Dina Yakovlevna, a pediatrician, was badgering her son: "How can you, a physicist, stand idly by when something like that is about to be built within city limits?"

For as long as Zhanna, Raisa, Boris, and even Dina Yakovlevna had been alive, Soviet people had stood idly by while the government willfully put their lives in danger, but something had changed. In 1985, the new secretary-general of the Communist Party—the Soviet head of state—had declared what he called "a new course." He was not the first secretary-general to say those words or even the word perestroika, which means "restructuring," but now something was indeed changing. Dina Yakovlevna went to a rally at which she protested the planned nuclear plant; just a year earlier, a rally that had not been sanctioned by the Party would have been seen as a crime against the state, and participants would have been arrested and tried. Sakharov was allowed to leave Gorky after seven years and move back to Moscow. A physicist, an inventor of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, he had long become a crusader for nuclear safety. Boris went to visit him at his Moscow apartment and recorded an interview in which the great man spoke out against the nuclear plant, and the

interview was published in the city paper Gor'kovskiy rabochiy ("The Gorky Worker"). Sakharov had concluded by saying, "I hope that you succeed in changing the flow of events. I am fully on your side."¹²

In the end, plans for the nuclear-powered plant were scrapped and Boris had found something that engaged him as much or more than physics. The word politika sounded around the table more and more often, eventually joined by the word vybory—"elections."

both masha and zhanna were born in the Soviet Union, the world's longest-lasting totalitarian state, in 1984, the year that in the Western imagination had come to symbolize totalitarianism. George Orwell's book could not be published in a society that it described, so Soviet readers would not have access to it until 1989, when censorship constraints had loosened sufficiently to enable the country's leading literary journal to print a translation.¹³ But in 1969 a journalist named Andrei Amalrik had published—that is, typed up and distributed among his friends—a book-length essay titled Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?, arguing that the regime was headed for an implosion.¹⁴ Amalrik, who had already served time as a political prisoner, was arrested, along with a man accused of having distributed the book, and both were sentenced to prison terms. In his closing statement in court Amalrik said, "I realize that trials such as this one are intended to frighten the many—and many will be frightened—but I still think that a process of liberation of ideas has begun and is irreversible."¹⁵ He spent more than three years behind bars, followed by another three of internal exile, and was then forced to leave the Soviet Union. In 1980 he died in a car accident in Spain, on his way to a human rights conference.¹⁶ The Soviet regime lived on, surviving even 1984.

But the very next year, something began to crack. Was it launched by the new secretary-general, Mikhail Gorbachev, when he called for changes and declared glasnost and perestroika? Or was he merely giving voice to the process Amalrik had attempted to describe a decade and a half earlier? Amalrik had argued that Marxist ideology

had never had a firm grip on the country, that the Russian Orthodox Church had lost its own hold, and that without a central unifying set of beliefs, the country, pulled in opposite directions by social groups with different desires, would eventually self-destruct.

Amalrik was one of a very few Soviet citizens who saw the system as essentially unstable—most others thought it was set in stone or, rather, in Soviet-style reinforced concrete, and would last forever. The year Amalrik stood trial, another dissident writer, Alexander Galich, authored a song in which he described a small group of friends listening to one of his recordings. One of the listeners suggests that the singer is taking too great a risk with his anti-Soviet jokes. "The author has nothing to fear," responds the host. "He died about a hundred years ago."¹⁷ (Galich was forced to emigrate in 1974 and died in his Paris apartment three years later as a result of an electrical accident.¹⁸)

All who were thinking about the Soviet Union, inside the country and outside, shared two handicaps: they had to base their conclusions on fragmentary knowledge and phrase them in language inadequate for the task. Not only did the country shield all essential and most nonessential information behind a wall of secrets and lies, it also, for decades, waged a concerted war on knowledge itself. The most symbolic, though by no means the most violent, battle in this war was fought in 1922, when Lenin ordered two hundred or more (historians' estimates vary) intellectuals—doctors, economists, philosophers, and others—deported abroad on what became known as the Philosophers' Ship (in fact, there were several different ships). The deportations were framed as a humane alternative to the death penalty. Future generations of intellectuals were not as fortunate: those deemed disloyal to the regime were imprisoned, often executed, and almost always separated from their chosen discipline.¹⁹ As the regime matured, restrictions on the social sciences grew broader and, by virtue of the sheer passage of time, more profound. While the arms race spurred the Soviet government to rejuvenate and nurture the exact sciences and technology, there was nothing—or almost nothing —that could motivate the regime to encourage the development of

philosophy, history, and the social sciences. These disciplines atrophied to the point where, as a leading Russian economist wrote in 2015, the top Soviet economists of the 1970s could not understand the work of those who had preceded them by a half century.²⁰

In the 1980s, social scientists working in the Soviet Union lacked not only the information but also the skills, the theoretical knowledge, and the language necessary to understand their own society. Very few of them were trying, against all odds and obstacles, and these people were groping in the dark.

two

LIFE, EXAMINED

DUGIN

on new year's eve 1984, Evgenia Debryanskaya was hosting a party. Evgenia was a thirty-year-old single mother from Sverdlovsk, the largest city in the Urals. She thought of herself as provincial and undereducated—she had never gone to college—but she had money, connections, and beauty, which significantly boosted her ambition of becoming someone in Moscow. Her money came from playing cards: she was a shark, and thus an outlaw. Her connections came from an unlikely fact of provenance: she was the out-of-wedlock daughter of the longtime Moscow Party boss.¹ Her beauty was unconventional: she was extremely thin, with a prominent nose and short dark hair cut asymmetrically to fall over half of her chiseled face; and she spoke in a deep, smoke-filled baritone. Some combination of these unusual traits secured for Evgenia the use of a very large nomenklatura apartment on Gorky Street, Moscow's central avenue.

On New Year's Eve, people kept coming, to stay until the Metro reopened early in the morning—or to keep drinking and smoking and talking well into the next day and the day after. This was Moscow's bogema, the hard-partying, black-market-trading, intellectually edgy crowd. Some of them were writers or artists, and others claimed membership simply by living outside the official economy or by hosting good parties. Some of them would have read or heard of Orwell's 1984 or Amalrik's Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?, and this added an extra note of recklessness to the mood. A very young aspiring actress arrived with an entourage of male admirers. One of them split off from the group as soon as they walked in. Instead of continuing to the kitchen, he sat down on an orphaned chair in the hallway. He looked like he was barely out of his teens. He asked the hostess for water.

Evgenia brought him a glass. He took a sip and asked, "Do you know when violets bloom on the lips?" She had no idea what that meant, and she loved it. She loved him for being able to say something that was so clearly beautiful and so utterly incomprehensible. He stayed the next day and the day after that, for three years, until she stopped loving him.²

His name was Alexander Dugin. He came from what they both thought of as the dullest type of Soviet family: his father, who was educated as an engineer, worked for the KGB in some secret but unglamorous capacity. His mother was a bureaucrat at the health ministry. His grandmother was a dean at the Higher Party School, an apparatchik factory that took up several city blocks just a few minutes from the apartment Evgenia and Dugin now shared. Their love was not the only emotion that united them: a shared hatred of the Soviet regime brought them even closer. In 1985, Dugin, whose imagination took more risks than Evgenia's, said that the Soviet Union was ending. This was after Gorbachev had declared perestroika. They had a son that year and named him Artur, in honor of Rimbaud.

Evgenia learned French and English from Dugin, who insisted that books must be read in the original. When they met, Dugin was twenty-two and had been expelled from a technical university, but he could already read in French, English, and German. Now it took him two weeks at a time to acquire a new European language. He learned by reading books, and Evgenia learned by reading with him, taking turns sounding out the sentences. As long as she loved him, she never tired of hearing words she could not understand. The first book she read in English with him was The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Evgenia continued to bring in the money, but both agreed that Dugin was the one who worked. He rose early, ate whatever he could

scavenge in the kitchen, and sat down at his desk to read for the next eighteen hours. The void he sought to fill by reading was vast. His focus was philosophy. He spent months explaining Nietzsche's concept of the Dionysian to Evgenia; she loved the idea of embracing chaos—it seemed the perfect antidote to the stifling regimented boredom that surrounded them. Then Alexander told her that he had found a philosopher no one had ever heard of, one who had taken Nietzsche so much further. The philosopher's name was Heidegger.

The first translation of Heidegger's writing—just twenty pages of it —would not be published in Russian until 1986.³ Nor could Dugin, who had no affiliation with any Soviet institution and as a result no access to any but the smallest neighborhood libraries, find any of Heidegger's books in the original German. He finally procured a copy of Being and Time on microfilm. In the absence of a microfilm reader, he rigged up a diafilm projector—a Soviet technology for using thirty-five-millimeter film to show cartoons or short films at home using a hand-crank—to project the book onto the top of his desk. By the time he was done with Being and Time, Dugin needed glasses. He had also read the foundational text of his thinking and of the rest of his life.

ARUTYUNYAN

the phrase a Russian intellectual is probably most likely to use when talking about the early 1980s is bezvozdushnoye prostranstvo —"airless space." The era was stuffy like the Russian izba, a log cabin, when its windows are caulked for the winter: it keeps out the cold, but also the fresh air. The windows will not be opened even a crack until well into spring, and as time goes on, smells of people, food, and clothing mix into one mind-numbing undifferentiated smell of gigantic proportions. Something similar had happened to the Russian mind over two generations of Soviet rule. At the time of the October Revolution, the Russian intellectual elite had been both a part of and a partner to the European conversation about God, power, and human life. After fifty years of purges, arrests, and, most damaging,

unrelenting pressure on what had become an isolated thought universe, the Russian intellectual landscape was populated by barely articulated ghosts of once vibrant ideas. Even Communist ideology was a shadow of its former self, a set of ritually repeated words that had lost all meaning. Lenin had long ago dispensed with most of what Karl Marx had to say, enshrining a few of his selected ideas as uberlaw.

"As the time passed, Marx's successors revealed a tendency to present his teachings as a finite and all-inclusive concept of the world, and to regard themselves as responsible for the continuation of all of Marx's work, which they considered as being virtually complete," wrote Yugoslav Marxist dissident Milovan Djilas. "Science gradually yielded to propaganda, and as a result propaganda tended more and more to represent itself as science."⁴

Marina Arutyunyan enrolled in Moscow State University's psychology department in 1973, when she was seventeen. The department was new, the subject and purpose of study were not entirely clear—what, after all, could and would a psychologist do in Soviet society?—but it drew young people like Arutyunyan: cerebral and romantic in comparable measure, and driven to learn the secrets of the human soul. Arutyunyan knew that "psyche" meant "soul."

For the first two years at the psychology department, Arutyunyan was in hell. Endless hours were devoted to a subject called Marxist- Leninist Philosophy. This was a clear case of propaganda masquerading as scholarship, and while the young Arutyunyan might not necessarily have phrased it this way, she cracked the propaganda code. She developed a simple matrix on which any philosophy could be placed and easily appraised. The matrix consisted of two axes on a cross. One ran from Materialism (good) to Idealism (bad) and the other from Dialectics (good) to Metaphysics (bad). The result was four quadrants. Philosophers who landed in the lower left quadrant, where Metaphysics met Idealism, were all bad. Kant was an example. Someone like Hegel—Dialectics meets Idealism—was better, but not all good. Philosophical perfection resided in the upper-right-hand corner of the graph, at the pinnacle of Dialectical Materialism.

Arutyunyan shared this matrix with several classmates, and now they had Marxist-Leninist Philosophy down.

History of the Party proved a much more difficult subject. "Look at yourself," the professor said to her derisively. He used a Russian word —taz—that could mean either "hips" or "basin." There was apparently something wrong with Arutyunyan's taz. She looked around, confused, wondering if she had somehow besoiled a laboratory basin in a History of the Party classroom. The professor, it turned out, was referring to her hips, which he deemed too narrow to produce quality Party progeny.

In addition to the various propaganda sciences, psychology department students received hands-on instruction in the natural sciences. They dissected frogs, and were expected to proceed to dissect rats, but Arutyunyan rebelled when it came to that and her group was, blessedly, exempted from having to kill mammals. There was a subject called Anthropology, but this area of study in its Western understanding was disallowed in the Soviet Union, so the course would more accurately have been called Theory of Evolution. It included the study of genetics, banned for decades but recently redeemed, and this was interesting.

Physiology of Higher Nervous Functioning featured human brains in formaldehyde, which were brought in for every class and set on each table. Arutyunyan was too squeamish to use her finger—gloves, in short supply all over the country, were not an option—so she stuck it with a pen, earning the professor's wrath. "You are damaging the brain!" he bellowed.

For the purpose of legitimizing their peculiar area of inquiry, psychology students were also required to undergo detailed and rigorous training in statistical and data analysis. As for the psyche, it was conspicuously absent. If Arutyunyan learned anything in her first couple of years at university, it was only the basic logic behind this absence.

Marxism in the Soviet Union had been boiled down to the understanding that people—Soviet citizens—were shaped entirely by their society and the material conditions of their lives. If the work of shaping the person was done correctly—and it had to have been, since by now Soviet society claimed to have substantially fulfilled the Marxist project by building what was called "socialism functioning in reality"—then the person had to emerge with a set of goals that coincided perfectly with the needs of the society that had produced him. Anomalies were possible, and they could fall into one of two categories: criminality or mental illness. Soviet society had institutions to handle both. No other kind of disharmony was conceivable. Inner conflict was not an option. There was really no reason to take up the subject of the psyche.

To this day, the website of the psychology department of Moscow State University bears the traces of Russia's disjointed history with the study of the psyche. A Psychological Society was established at Moscow State University in 1885 and, the site states proudly, "became the center of Russia's philosophical life."⁵ In 1914 the society became a full-fledged institute, with teaching and research functions. Then the narrative on the site becomes suddenly depersonalized: "During the years of acute ideological struggle for the construction of a Marxist psychology, the institute's leadership changed." In fact, the institute itself was abolished in 1925. Six years later, the university shut down all departments dedicated to the humanities and social sciences. Ten years after that, the humanities returned, but psychology was now subsumed by the department of philosophy. Only in 1968 did the Soviet government recognize psychology as a discipline in which degrees could be awarded—and the country's leading university resumed, at least on paper, the study and teaching of the psyche—after a break of nearly half a century.⁶ The new students could hardly have known that less than a century ago Russian thinkers had been reading Nietzsche and arguing with him, or that Lou Andreas-Salome, who popularized the great philosopher's ideas in Russia and broke his heart, was a native of St. Petersburg. She went on to become one of Sigmund Freud's early and close students and to work as a psychoanalyst in Germany almost up until her death in 1937, at the age of seventy-five, but her ties to Russia had been severed by the Revolution nearly twenty years earlier.⁷

The Bolshevik state set out to create a New Man. The project contained an echo of Nietzsche's Ubermensch idea, but now it was a practical task rather than a philosophical exercise. For a time, it seemed that Freud's teachings could help bridge the gap between theory and practice. His writing had been widely translated before the Revolution, and he and his students had taught a number of Russian psychoanalysts.⁸ At one point, not long before the Bolsheviks came to power, psychoanalysis seemed to be gaining a foothold in Russia faster than in Western Europe.⁹ After 1917, the new regime set out to transform Freud's theories into dogma on which massive institutions could be based, much as it was doing with Marxism. In its simplified form, Freudism—a term coined by analogy with Marxism—"was seen as a scientifically valid promise of an actual, rather than fictional, transformation of man, to be carried out on the basis of his consciousness," wrote Alexander Etkind, a historian of psychoanalysis in Russia.¹⁰

A newly formed state publishing house put out a three-volume edition of Freud's Introduction to Psychoanalysis in 1922, and twenty thousand copies—a large press run, considering the era and the topic—were snapped up within a month.¹¹ The Russian Psychoanalytic Society was formed the same year, under the auspices of the state.¹² Between 1922 and 1928, state publishers put out an entire library of translations of foundational works by Freud, Jung, and other early psychoanalysts.¹³ A psychoanalytic preschool opened in Moscow, drawing the children of the newly minted Bolshevik elite. It was a pilot project, the prototype of an imagined future factory for the production of New Man.

It did not work. Not only was psychoanalysis particularly unsuited for reproduction on an industrial scale, but even in the confines of a single elite preschool it had a way of producing discomfort and discontent. The experimental psychoanalytic preschool was shut down in 1925, amid vague fears of precocious sexuality.¹⁴ Over the following five or six years, the Russian Psychoanalytic Society ceased functioning, Freud was depublished, and Freudians fell into disfavor or worse. Freud's most important Russian student, Sabina Spielrein, a

patient, student, colleague, and lover of Carl Jung, a teacher of Jean Piaget, and a co-discoverer of countertransference, had returned to Soviet Russia from Germany in 1923 and soon, it seems, faded from view. She died in 1942 in the southern Russian city of Rostov, shot as a Jew by the occupying Nazi troops.¹⁵

The demise of Russian psychoanalysis spelled the near-total end of any study of the psyche—in part because psychoanalysis had so dominated psychology and in part because the new state was now rejecting any explanation of human behavior that was not both material and simple. Ivan Pavlov's straightforward theories of cause and effect fit this approach perfectly; it remained only to condition the entire population, rendering it pliant and predictable. Etkind writes of a psychoanalyst in Odessa who installed a portrait of Pavlov on the flip side of a likeness of Freud that hung in his office: Pavlov would face visitors during the day, when an official might happen by, and Freud greeted his clandestine psychoanalysis patients in the nighttime.¹⁶

Only a few of the early Soviet psychoanalysts remained in Russia and lived. One long-term survivor was Alexei Nikolaevich Leontiev, who narrowly escaped official censure or worse in the 1930s¹⁷ and went on to have a long academic career, venturing into psycholinguistics late in life. But the work that had allowed Leontiev to continue research during the darkest Soviet decades was his activity theory, which viewed human beings exclusively through the lens of behavior and any human action as part of a larger process of communal action.¹⁸ When Arutyunyan was a student at Moscow State University, Leontiev's course represented the sum total of psychological theory taught in the first few years. His lectures were boring, painful, and infuriating. It made Arutyunyan angry that Leontiev's theory recognized only the conscious part of being human, leaving no room for metaphysics. Leontiev taught by feeding his students uncatchy phrases that summed up counterintuitive theories. One such mantra was "shifting motive onto the goal." For instance, if the student's goal is to pass his exam and he develops interest in the

subject matter, then his motive will have shifted onto his goal. This never seemed to happen for Arutyunyan.

She became seriously ill after her second year. Her medical leave lasted another two years. She came back older and perhaps smarter, and after passing exams for one year, was allowed to resume learning as a fourth-year student. This was the year students chose their specialty and began research projects. Arutyunyan landed in social psychology, and a new life began. Graduate students led seminars, including one on attraction. The young instructor talked about the threat of castration that men perceived as emanating from highly attractive women, and his students went wild. This was no "activity theory," this was sex and the psyche and everything they had dreamed of thinking about when they applied to the psychology department. Gradually, Arutyunyan and some of her classmates discovered that the space around them was not entirely airless. Russian architecture, created as it was for a very cold climate, contains a peculiar invention called the fortochka. It is a tiny window cut inside a larger pane. Even when windows have been sealed for the long winter, the fortochka can remain in use, being opened regularly to allow air to circulate. The Soviet university, as it turned out, had its fortochkas, and the way to learn was to hunt for them and then to stick your whole face in them and breathe the fresh air as though one's lungs could be filled up with reserve supplies.

One such fortochka was the thinker Merab Mamardashvili, who lectured in the philosophy department. He talked about Marx and Freud as intellectual revolutionaries, which was akin to heresy since Arutyunyan and her friends thought that Freud was something like God and Marx more like the Devil, but witnessing someone thinking —actually thinking—out loud proved exhilarating. Another fortochka was Alexander Luria, who lectured in the clinical psychology specialty. Luria had served as chairman of the Russian Psychoanalytic Society in the 1920s,¹⁹ had survived by going into neurology, and had become a great storyteller of the mind. Across a generation, an ocean, and the Iron Curtain, he managed to inspire Oliver Sacks, who considered Luria his teacher in the art of the "neurological novel."²⁰

The most important fortochka of all was found in the university library, which contained the spetskhran, a restricted-access collection to which a resourceful student or researcher could gain access. The spetskhran contained Freud's case studies. It was the most compelling, most engrossing, most mind-shattering thing Arutyunyan had ever read. Only years later, long after the last of the old Russian psychoanalysts had died, did she realize that what tied all the fortochkas together was not just that they gave her new knowledge and that they contrasted markedly with the mind-numbing recitations that filled the university, but that they all saw and described human beings the way she wanted to understand them.

Every school of psychology has its own concept of the person. Carl Rogers's sees people as basically good but often unlucky: they must be tended to better. The cognitive behaviorists imagine imprints that interfere with the functioning of otherwise serviceable human beings. The human being of psychoanalysis is a complicated creature, a creature capable of reflection but doomed to make mistakes in the process of reflecting, a creature endowed with huge, destructive energies. It is by no means an innocent creature, born good and merely handicapped by external forces. This was the creature Arutyunyan wanted to study. It would be years before she was able to articulate this, but for now she was writing her thesis on cognitive dissonance, thereby creating her own little fortochka. It turned out you could do that—write about Soviet people as though they could contain contradictions and inner conflicts—as long as you framed the story in requisite meaningless phrases lifted from one of the approved textbooks.

GUDKOV

what was arutyunyan going to do with all the knowledge she was hoarding? Being able to apply one's theoretical expertise was an unimaginable luxury in the airless space—if one was a psychologist or social scientist, that is, rather than a rocket one. Intellectuals aspired to and prized luxuries of a different order: an unburdensome job in a nontoxic environment that left time for thinking and breathing some fortochka air. This was a lot to want, and getting it required luck, brains, and connections. Arutyunyan, both of whose parents were sociologists, got a job at the Institute of Sociology, and this was virtually a dream setup.

An odd feature of the time—most likely an intended result of the system's highly developed ability to suppress those with deep expertise or excessive passion—was that people often had to work in fields that ran parallel to their primary interests. Ten years before Arutyunyan graduated from the department of psychology and went to work at the Institute of Sociology, a young man who wanted nothing more than to be a sociologist was writing a term paper on Freud's concept of defense mechanisms. Lev Gudkov had set out to be a journalist like his own father. Two years in a row he tried to gain entrance to Moscow's exclusive Institute of Foreign Relations, which trained diplomats and foreign correspondents, a high percentage of them fated to work for intelligence services. Both times Gudkov failed the essay portion of the entrance exams, which was graded on a dual scale: one mark for form and one for content. Both years, his form was deemed excellent and his content got a failing grade. He was not well-versed enough in what he was supposed to think. A criticism that would haunt his early career was that he lacked "critical thinking"— meaning, he was not sufficiently critical of anything that diverged from the current Party line.

Gudkov gave up and enrolled as an evening student at the journalism department of Moscow State University. This was one of the university's least challenging branches, and evening students, especially, were left to their own devices. For many of them, the department offered a nearly painless way to obtain a university diploma after six years of attending some lectures after work (the program was longer than normal because of its light course load). Gudkov realized that if he did not seek out knowledge himself, it would never find him. He looked, and eventually stumbled upon an elective lecture course offered by sociologist Yuri Levada.

The year was 1968, and the fact that thirty-eight-year-old Levada called himself a sociologist, and his subject sociology, was almost revolutionary. Sociology was not exactly banned in the Soviet Union, but the name of the discipline had been reduced to something like a curse word. Lenin himself had inaugurated it as a Soviet insult. The problem with sociology was much the same as with psychoanalysis: the field of study refused to be a "science" that could be used to create a new society of new men. A year before the Philosophers' Ship sailed, one of Lenin's closest allies, Nikolai Bukharin, published The Theory of Historical Materialism, an attempt at a sort of Marxist textbook of everything, written in a folksy language intended for the proletariat. Three things that Bukharin did in this textbook proved deadly for Soviet sociology: he included new ideas that he believed advanced Marxist theory, he subtitled it A Popular Textbook of Marxist Sociology, and he proclaimed the supreme importance of sociology among the social sciences because it "examines not some one aspect of public life but all of public life in all its complexity."²¹ Lenin hated the book, and the word "sociology" took the brunt of his rage. He underlined it throughout the book and supplied a small variety of comments in the margins: "Haha!" "Eclectic!" "Help!" and the like.²² In another eight years, when Bukharin was deposed in a Party power struggle, Stalin recalled Lenin's skepticism by describing Bukharin's work as possessed of "the hypertrophied pretentiousness of a half-baked theoretician."²³ Bukharin was eventually executed. Much earlier, sociology had had to go into hiding.

A cautious excavation began after the Second World War. The Institute of Philosophy in the Soviet Academy of Sciences was allowed to acknowledge the existence of a discipline called "sociology." The primary context in which the word appeared was criticism of Western sociological theories, which provided scholars with an excuse for studying them.²⁴ The Soviet academics took care not to call their own work "sociology": in 1968, a unit within the Academy of Sciences was allowed to graduate to being an institute, but it would be called the Institute for Concrete Social Studies. Levada, who had been trained as a philosopher, would head up the theory department of the new structure.

The Politburo resolution establishing the Institute for Concrete Social Studies was marked "top secret," as was a later document outlining the new institute's scope of work.²⁵ The secrecy, along with the institute's name—"social" instead of "sociological"—suggested that the Politburo thought it was stepping into sensitive and even dangerous territory. The potential benefits, however, outweighed the risks. The new structure was charged not only with criticizing bourgeois theory but also with studying Soviet society. The Central Committee itself was to approve studies and to receive their results. It was 1968, the year of the Prague Spring, when the Czechoslovak Communist Party attempted to split off from the Soviet Union and pursue its own, comparatively liberalized version of socialism. The Politburo was worried about similar ideas circulating in the Soviet Union. Indeed, in the summer, after Soviet tanks rolled into Prague, eight extraordinarily brave people staged a protest in Red Square; all were arrested. The following year, Amalrik would write his essay asking if the Soviet Union would last until 1984. The Politburo wanted to know the answer to that question too, and it ordered the Institute for Concrete Social Studies to be fully staffed, with 250 researchers, by 1971. Of course, there were no trained sociologists in the Soviet Union, so the new institute received special dispensation to hire researchers without advanced degrees. Levada was one of a handful of Soviet citizens who had trained themselves in sociology. He had graduated from Moscow State University with a degree in philosophy, studied sociology theory that he had found in spetskhran, and had then gone to Communist China to do research there: the system was always more tolerant of inquiry directed at other societies. Now Levada was virtually legitimized as a sociologist, and he was lecturing in the journalism department.

Levada was frighteningly intelligent, unabashedly passionate, and most important, he had mastered the art of thinking out loud during a lecture. He suggested that the peculiarities of everyday life in the Soviet Union could be observed, examined, and understood. In one lecture, for example, he analyzed a short story in which collective- farm workers are sitting around waiting for a Party meeting to start, complaining about their unreasonably demanding bosses and terrible work conditions. Then the meeting commences and the workers take turns lauding their collective farm's accomplishments and boasting of their own contributions to the Soviet cause. Once the meeting is over, they go home, where they return to complaining of their senseless work and miserly pay. Levada showed that the public-private behavioral divide, instantly recognizable to all his listeners, could be understood not just as hypocrisy but as a social and cultural institution.²⁶

Fourth-year student Gudkov fell in love. Now he wanted to be a sociologist and work for Levada. There were no job openings, so he would wait. An assistant's position finally opened up in September 1970. Who knew that work could be so enjoyable? Everyone was constantly joking, telling stories, and everyone seemed to be in love with everyone else, through some sort of multiplier effect produced by everyone's crush on Levada himself.²⁷ The best part, though, were the discussions. Each staff member had an ongoing assignment to read a Western sociologist and prepare presentations and discussion questions for the rest of the group. Gudkov got Max Weber. He felt like an ugly duckling, not nearly as smart as his new colleagues, but the thrill and sense of privilege far outweighed his discomfort.

Within two years, it was all over. Levada's problems began after he published his university talks in two tiny books titled Lectures on Sociology. The books passed the censors, who allowed a thousand copies out into the world, but once they were published, they were condemned for not relying on concepts of historical materialism in all their statements, and, worst of all, for "allowing for ambiguous interpretations"—in other words, for being the opposite of dogma, forcing listeners and readers to think.²⁸ Levada publicly admitted his mistakes but was still stripped of one of his advanced degrees and eventually forced to resign from the Institute. All his staff lost their jobs.

Levada's people struggled to find work: being purged for ideological reasons and their very affiliation with Levada marked them as dangerous. Within a year, though, all had settled somewhere, but often doing nothing beyond the empty imitation of activity that Soviet academic institutions had become so good at producing. What mattered was that Levada assembled his group into a seminar that met every couple of weeks in the evenings. They met wherever Levada was working at the time, and even when they got kicked out and had to move to another institute and had to change the seminar's name (following especially acrimonious evictions), for the next quarter century they never stopped meeting²⁹ and their mode of work and mission remained constant. It was, as the participants put it, "to assimilate Western sociology." They read twentieth-century theory, talked, and wrote papers that could never be published. In order to write a dissertation that he could defend, Gudkov had to recast his reading of Weber as criticism of Weber, and still it took him years to get his doctorate—he was once again criticized for insufficiently critical thinking, as well as for "bourgeois objectivity," the thought crime of failing to recognize the inevitability of capitalism's demise.

western visitors to the Soviet Union who lucked into Moscow's insular intellectual circles were usually taken with the luxurious sense of timelessness in which they existed. With careers almost entirely lateral and ambitions, if they ever existed, generally shelved, people like Arutyunyan, Gudkov, and even Dugin seemed to study solely for the sake of learning, rarely even entertaining the possibility that theory could be put to work in any way. But in 1984 Arutyunyan learned that the government was launching psychological "consultation" services, to provide something like family therapy. They were to be called Family and Marriage Centers, and their task was to try to stem the tide of divorces. Party committees had apparently despaired of their ability to manage and shore up the Soviet family: in the 1970s the number of divorces in the country had nearly doubled while the number of marriages barely grew.³⁰

A session with a psychologist at one of the new centers would cost three rubles if the psychologist had the equivalent of a master's degree; a doctorate holder's hour ran five rubles and fifty kopecks. This was a fraction of the cost of a black market pair of jeans, but one could buy dozens of loaves of bread with such a sum. Arutyunyan held a doctorate in philosophy by now, but her first client was disappointed to discover that he had just paid top-shelf rate for a meeting with a skinny young woman. She showed him her degree. He still wanted his money back because he had come for help talking sense into his teenage son but the boy had taken off on the way to the appointment. Arutyunyan was firm: there would be no refunds.

They met weekly for about six months. The son never showed, but judging from the father's reports, their relationship gradually evened out. As for the father himself, at his last session he told Arutyunyan, "All this time I have simply been living my life when I should really have been thinking about life."

three

PRIVILEGE

SERYOZHA

for seryozha, 1985 was the year his family was reunited.* Seryozha was three years old, and for as long as he had known, his family had been divided: he had an older sister, whom his parents missed very much, and so Seryozha missed her too, though he was not sure he had ever seen her. She lived very far away, in Canada, with Seryozha's grandfather. Seryozha's parents had chosen to send her to Canada; it was an opportunity for a better life for her, but the separation seemed to weigh heavily. Now she would come home, because Seryozha's grandfather was being allowed to return to the Soviet Union. He had been living in Canada as the Soviet ambassador. For someone like Seryozha's grandfather, this was exile. That is what he called it: "political exile."

Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev was a strange Communist bird. Raised in rural central Russia outside the city of Yaroslavl, he first learned of the Party as the all-powerful monster that punished the needy and the hungry: women in his village were jailed for digging potatoes out of the already frozen soil of collective farm fields, where they had been abandoned after a poorly managed harvest. He was not yet eighteen when he was drafted in August 1941. At the front he saw that the Communists were the bravest, most dedicated soldiers. He joined the Party. He was severely wounded and survived. Before the war was over, he was given an opportunity to go to college. He shared

a dorm room with four other disabled veterans. One of them had books of poetry by Sergei Yesenin, who had once written of the beauty of the countryside not far from where Alexander Nikolaevich had grown up. Then Yesenin had led a life of glamour and debauchery, marrying the American dancer Isadora Duncan, traveling to the United States with her, and finally committing suicide in a Leningrad hotel in 1925. His books went out of print shortly after, and for the next quarter century were circulated only surreptitiously. He was too lyrical, too reckless, too human to be Soviet.

Snow-clad is the plain, and the moon is white

Covered with a shroud is my country side.

Birches dressed in white are crying, as I see.

Who is dead, I wonder? Is it really me?¹

he had written in the year of his death.

Alexander Nikolaevich was struggling, in a way he could not yet put into words, with the idea of what—and who—was and was not Soviet. Yesenin, who had so eloquently written about his love of Russia and his childhood in its beautiful and impoverished countryside, was somehow not Soviet. Now, as the Red Army was liberating its own citizens from Nazi camps, they were condemned as traitors for having allowed themselves to be captured. Alexander Nikolaevich went to the railroad station to see the cattle cars carrying these inmates from the Nazi camps to the Soviet camps, and he saw women who went there in the hopes of seeing their missing men, if only for a second, and he saw hands throwing crumpled-up pieces of paper out of the cattle cars—these contained their names and addresses and the hope that someone would let their loved ones know they were alive.

Alexander Nikolaevich wondered how this could possibly be right. But the Party was very good to him. It gave him an education and started rapidly pulling him up the career ladder. Alexander Nikolaevich set his doubts aside. By the time Stalin died in 1953, Alexander Nikolaevich was a member of the Central Committee. As

soon as the leader died, some of his most recent decisions were reversed: a giant planned show trial was scrapped, and the relatives of some of the members of the Party elite were released from the Gulag. In 1956, at the twentieth congress of the Soviet Communist Party, the new Party secretary, Nikita Khrushchev, condemned Stalin as an unworthy successor to Lenin, applied to his rule the damning Marxist term "cult of personality," and disavowed mass arrests and executions.² This was when Alexander Nikolaevich lost his ability to reconcile the Party line and his long-shelved doubts. He asked to be released from the Central Committee in order to study Marx and Marxism—first in Moscow and then for a year at Columbia University in New York. The exercise worked, both because he found Marx profoundly compelling and because the United States on the cusp of the McCarthy era and the Cold War hardly seemed like an appealing alternative to the Soviet system. He returned to the Soviet Union to rejoin the Marxist-Leninist effort.

Still, he remained, in increasing contrast to most of the nomenklatura, a thinker. In 1972, Alexander Nikolaevich published an article titled "Against Ahistoricism." To those who could fight their way through its turgid Soviet language, the article delivered a radical message of protest against what Alexander Nikolaevich saw as the Soviet Union's growing nationalist conservatism based on the glorification of some imaginary peasant class's traditional values.³ "Political exile" to Canada was his punishment for publishing it.⁴ He returned more than a decade later, to become idea man to the new general secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev, in his project of reforming the Party and its country. In December 1985, Alexander Nikolaevich authored a document that proposed radical change:

The main components of perestroika are:

A market economy in which market rates are paid for labor.

The property owner as the agent of freedom.

Democracy and glasnost, which bring with them information accessible to all.

A system of feedback.⁵

To be sure, his idea of democracy was limited: in a letter to Gorbachev he suggested splitting the Communist Party in two—the Socialist Party and the People's Democratic Party—that would make up an entity called the Communist Union, which would run the country. He proposed creating the office of a president, who would be nominated by the Communist Union and voted by the people for a ten-year term. He argued that all this needed to be done because the Soviet government needed to try to stay ahead of the curve.⁶ Alexander Nikolaevich predicted the general vector of events accurately. The Communist Party was never split in two, but in a few years, the Soviet Union would hold a series of hybrid elections: nominations were handled from above, and the resulting legislative bodies had a convoluted structure designed to ensure the primacy of the Communist Party, but for the first time in seven decades, Soviet citizens had some choice at the polls. Gorbachev would indeed become the first president of the Soviet Union. He would also be the last, because the project of staying ahead of the curve failed.

It must have been the summer of 1985 or 1986 that Alexander Nikolaevich and Gorbachev spent together at a Party dacha in the Crimea. Seryozha met Ksenia, Gorbachev's granddaughter, and in another year or two they would spend the summer together at a nomenklatura children's camp on the Black Sea, but this summer, as the two men talked endlessly about what to do with their country, Seryozha was largely left to his own devices. He roamed the fenced-in grounds, which seemed boundless. He explored buildings that were designed to look like castles and had underground tunnels connecting them. He climbed down into the tunnels. Only later would it occur to Seryozha that the grounds had been heavily guarded and he had been watched at all times. Much later he would wonder, he would obsess, about how much of what he remembered of his childhood was real— whether he was ever really alone, and whether he was ever really loved by the people who surrounded him. Like the cook at his grandfather's dacha, who seemed to adore little Seryozha—later Seryozha's sister told him the cook had been a KGB colonel, and this

made Seryozha wonder whether the love had been a part of his assignment.

seryozha was a grandchild, not a child, of a top Party functionary, so some of his early life passed in what he thought, then and later, were regular Soviet conditions. His family, like other families, faced shortages of food and other consumer products, from toilet paper to wall paint. Little Seryozha took his turn standing in line with his number written in ballpoint pen on his palm—when lines went on for hours and days, assigning numbers became an additional measure for maintaining self-organization and what passed for fairness. But the place where Seryozha lived with his parents was known in the vernacular as tsarskoye selo—"the Czars' Village." The original Tsarskoye Selo—a real place that was officially named the Czar's Village—was the site of Peter the Great's summer residence in the early eighteenth century. Under the Soviets, Tsarskoye Selo was renamed Pushkin, for the poet who had been educated there, but the name "the Czars' Village" began attaching itself to blocks and small neighborhoods that housed the Soviet elites.

The stores here were better stocked, even though they were affected by the shortages. The buildings were better designed and constructed.⁷ The air was better than anywhere else in the city: the neighborhood in the west of Moscow contained less industry and more parks than any other.⁸ A state born of protest against inequality had created one of the most intricate and rigid systems of privilege that the world had ever seen. It began when the first Bolsheviks moved themselves into the palaces and the luxury hotels. Within the first few years of Bolshevik Russia's existence, the main mechanisms of privilege were defined and created. Even before the October Revolution—a few months before—Lenin had written that "the first phase of Communism" would not bring equality for all: "differences in wealth will remain unjust differences." Just a week after the Revolution, Lenin wrote that highly qualified professionals would need to retain their privileged position "for the time being." While the idle rich had to be stripped of their possessions, the highly trained had to be enticed to work for the new regime. The Marxist principle of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" was replaced with the more pragmatic approach of paying what the state could pay for extracting the maximum from those with high ability. Over the next few years, the list of those whose labor the state valued most highly was established, as were the mechanisms of compensation. The Bolsheviks placed a premium on the "creative intelligentsia," as it was termed—writers, artists, and, especially, filmmakers—as well as scholars and scientists. Military officers ranked even higher. But most of all, the Bolsheviks valued themselves: privileges and benefits for "political workers" exceeded those of all other groups.

The reasons were not only pragmatic but also ideological. "The leadership of the Soviet Communist Party has, from its early days, been profoundly elitist in its attitudes," Mervyn Matthews, a British scholar of Soviet society, wrote in the 1970s. "It has regarded itself as an enlightened band which understands the march of history and is destined to lead the Russian people—indeed the whole world—to communism. In daily life it has always ensured for itself and its close associates privileges commensurate with these awesome demands."⁹ The Soviet privileged were entitled to higher salaries and a set of additional financial rewards; bigger and better apartments; favored access to consumer goods; and certain education and travel privileges.¹⁰ The privileges grew in value and scope during the three decades of Stalin's rule, as did the wealth gap. In the Khrushchev decade, which saw a giant residential construction push, the gap narrowed slightly, but when Leonid Brezhnev came to power in 1964, the old tendency of growing differentiation resumed.¹¹

Paradoxically, the peculiarities of the Soviet economic system made the borders between differently valued groups of citizens only starker and harder to penetrate. Taxation was minimal, and redistribution of wealth was not its goal.¹² Because most of the extra compensation for the privileged was non-monetary, and because all of it was centrally administered, members of a given caste were grouped together socially and geographically. Members of the

Politburo lived in the same building as other members of the Politburo, procured consumer goods at the same distribution centers, sent their children to the same schools, got treated at the same clinics, were given plots of land on which to build a wooden dacha—a weekend or summer house—in the same area, and took the waters in the same sanatoriums. The same was true for members of the Academy of Sciences, who had their own special infrastructure, and for members of any of the "creative unions," such as those of the writers, artists, or cinematographers.

The quality of the construction and the comfort level of apartments varied from building to building: members of the Politburo were granted more square meters per family member but also larger windows, higher ceilings, and flooring made of harder wood. Academics got less, "creatives" less than that, engineers less still. Menial laborers often lived in dormitory rooms with linoleum flooring and shared bathroom facilities.

Those at the very top, whether out of a sense of shame or a residual longing for the security of a fortress, shielded their lives behind tall solid fences. Alexander Galich, the dissident singer- songwriter, had a song called "Beyond Seven Fences." Its narrator, an ordinary Soviet citizen, encounters the fences that surround the Communist leaders' estates and begins to fantasize about what the fences conceal: fresh, untrampled grass, clean air, hard-to-find chocolate-mint candy, birds of different kinds, shish kebab consumed in the security of knowing the fence is guarded, and at night, to top it all off, "they show films about whores." The narrator cannot take it anymore, heads back to the city, and the whole way back, he is subjected to a lecture extolling Soviet egalitarianism, broadcast over the train's radio system. He thinks of the leaders again: "Back there, beyond the seven fences, / Behind the seven locks, / they don't have to listen to this lecture, / they can just eat their shish kebab." The imagination painted a picture of the ultimate Soviet privilege: living in material comfort—and watching Hollywood films instead of listening to the leaders' own propaganda.¹³

Much of Seryozha's life passed behind the fences. On weekends, a black government Volga—the top model among Soviet-made cars— equipped with flashing lights that entitled it to ignore traffic regulations carried Seryozha's family out of the city. They took Rublyovskoye Shosse, a smooth and narrow road effectively reserved for use by the Soviet elites. The Volga turned off at Kalchuga, a village of solid fences. An automatic gate would open in one of them, and the car would drive onto the grounds of a government dacha reserved for the use of Alexander Nikolaevich. On weekdays, a similar Volga carried Seryozha to a different fence along the same road. This was a preschool for the offspring of the very top of the Soviet elite—a cut above the Central Committee preschool to which Masha's mother had bought access. In the city, the building in which Alexander Nikolaevich lived served as its own fence: it was a city block in which all entrances faced a large courtyard. Uniformed men guarded the gates between the building and the outside world. Seryozha found the men interesting and tried to charm them by talking to them. He knew he was charming—everyone said so, everyone agreed that he was wonderfully cute and fat and blond. But he could never get so much as a smile out of the men.

LYOSHA

lyosha grew up not quite at the opposite end of the Soviet class spectrum from Seryozha but at a great, unbridgeable remove. His family, too, had privilege, and Lyosha was aware of this growing up. His grandfather, a collective farmer, had had a local Party career. This would have meant several years of added pay for serving a term in the regional Soviet, a putative legislative body, and, later, some informal privileges of access. When he died in 1978, at the age of sixty or so, he had a bit more than others in the village: he left his family a cow. His widow, Lyosha's grandmother, sold the cow a couple of years later so that one of her five children could go to university in Perm, the nearest big city. Higher education in the Soviet Union was free, and students who had consistently high grades received a monthly stipend, yet with the food shortages, and the shortages of most other things one needed for living, no young person could reasonably expect to survive without help from home.

Lyosha's mother, Galina, the fourth-born and the smartest of her siblings, was lucky to get the help. Her older brother had gone to a military college after his compulsory service, but their mother had not had the money to send any of the rest to university or even so much as to help them leave the village. Two sisters married out, though both would soon be widowed. Then there was the cow, and the sale of the cow, and Galina went to Perm. After university she became a history teacher. She did not have to move back to the village: she was assigned to work in the town of Solikamsk, where, as a teacher, she qualified for a room and later even a small apartment of her own.

Solikamsk was one of the oldest settlements in the Urals: salt was mined there starting in the fifteenth century. In the 1930s and 1940s the town swelled with labor camps: tens of thousands of inmates were brought in from elsewhere in Russia and, later, from the occupied Baltic states and from defeated Germany.¹⁴ By the time Galina came here in the late 1970s, the camps were gone but the town, like so many Soviet towns, seemed bloated: many of its roughly hundred thousand residents lived like temporary settlers, in makeshift accommodations.

By the age of thirty-one, Galina was working as the vice-principal of a trade school and seeing the principal of another trade school in town. He was married. She became pregnant and planned to have an abortion. It would not have been her first, and this was normal: in the absence of methods for pregnancy prevention—hormonal contraceptives were unavailable in the Soviet Union and condoms were of abominable quality and in short supply—abortion was a common contraception method. In 1984, the year Galina became pregnant, there were nearly twice as many abortions in Russia as there were births.¹⁵ There was nothing shameful about having an abortion, so there was no reason to keep the plan secret: Galina's family knew, and her brother-in-law talked her out of it. He pointed out the obvious: she was over thirty, still unmarried, and if she had an abortion this time, she might never have a child at all. Statistically speaking, he was right: more than 90 percent of Russian women were married by age thirty,¹⁶ and few had children after that age.¹⁷

Galina agreed. She would keep the baby and raise him alone. This, too, was an ordinary path. For decades now, the Soviet Union had been trying, and failing, to recover from the catastrophic population loss caused by the Second World War and the Gulag extermination system. The thrust of the population policies initiated by Khrushchev was to get as many women as possible to have children by the comparatively few surviving men. The policies dictated that men who fathered children out of wedlock would not be held responsible for child support but the state would help the single mother both with financial subsidies and with childcare: she could even leave the child at an orphanage for any length of time, as many times as she needed, without forfeiting her parental rights. The state endeavored to remove any stigma associated with resorting to the help of orphanages, or with single motherhood and having children out of wedlock. Women could put down a fictitious man as the father on the child's birth certificate—or even name the actual father, without his having to fear being burdened with responsibility. "The new project was designed to encourage both men and women to have non- conjugal sexual relationships that would result in procreation," writes historian Mie Nakachi.— When Galina's son was born on May 9— Victory Day—1985, she gave him her own last name, Misharina, and the patronymic Yurievich, to indicate that his father's name was Yuri. Lyosha's full official name was thus Alexei Yurievich Misharin.

Galina became the principal at what was called a "correctional school." The name was misleading: the school was less a correctional facility than the state's attempt to compensate for any number of things that had gone terribly wrong with its students. Correctional schools were created to serve children deemed incapable of succeeding in mainstream schools. Most of these schools provided boarding during the week or year-round; some had special services for children with disabilities.

Galina worked at a correctional school of the most common type— the type for children whose parents failed to take care of them, often because they drank. Her students came from the neighborhood that lay between Lyosha's childhood block and the school: while he and Galina lived in a regular concrete-block building, this neighborhood was made up of wooden barracks left over from when the Gulag exploded Solikamsk's population. They called it the barachnyi district. Walking through it, as Galina did on her way to and from work six days a week, was considered dangerous; she carried a knife to protect herself. Sometimes she had to take Lyosha with her to the barachnyi district, usually when she was looking for a student who had gone missing. Lyosha found the barracks impressive and terrifying. The ceilings looked like they might cave in. There was a stench that was stronger and more offensive than anything he had ever smelled. Most of the inhabitants, including the parents with whom Galina occasionally had long conversations, were drunk. Lyosha was aware that this was somehow a function of poverty. He also made a mental connection between poverty and the word "suicide," which Galina used with some regularity when talking about her students. Other words included "pregnancy" and "alcohol" and, later, "drugs." These were children—older than Lyosha but children nonetheless, she made this clear—who drank, got pregnant, and killed themselves. Lyosha understood that the fact that these words did not apply to his and Galina's world was a function of privilege.

One did not have to go to the barachnyi district to see extreme poverty: it was found on Lyosha and Galina's block as well. A woman who lived one door down drank heavily, and her kids went to the correctional school. Some nights she passed out and the kids were locked out. Those nights, they often slept on Galina's landing— Lyosha figured they chose it because they knew she would not hurt them. Unfortunately, this meant that some mornings when Galina opened the door to take Lyosha to preschool the landing stank: the children went to the bathroom there. Eventually, in the 1990s, the building's residents installed a lock on the front door, to keep these and other interlopers out.

Lyosha's preschool days were long: he was dropped off at six,

before his mother walked the half hour to her own school, and was often not picked up until ten, when only the night guards remained on the grounds. This was just the way it had to be, because Galina was raising Lyosha alone, she had a demanding job, and her own mother lived too far away to help on a daily basis. Galina told Lyosha that his father lived in the big city of Perm, where she had gone to university. Perm was 120 kilometers* away, but for how often people went there, it may as well have been a thousand miles. Sometimes, a nice man stopped by and spent time with them. Galina told Lyosha to call him Uncle Yura.

When Lyosha was about three, Galina started to have the television turned on at all times. Sometimes she sat down in front of the black-and-white set and watched for hours as gray men on the screen did nothing but talk, occasionally raising their voices. Galina talked to Lyosha about the men—she seemed to have personal relationships with them—and there was tension in what was happening on-screen, a sense of earnestness and importance, so it was not boring. Lyosha learned some names, including Gorbachev, who was the most important. He had a large mark on his forehead, and Lyosha's cousin, who was quite a bit older, told Lyosha that it was a map of the USSR because Gorbachev was the president. When Lyosha told Galina that, she laughed and said it was just a birthmark. She had to be right, but the cousin would not hear of it. Galina took Lyosha to the polls, explaining that it was their "civic duty." What exactly their civic duty was, was unclear, but Lyosha liked voting because the precinct was decorated with red cloth and there were open salami sandwiches for sale.

In the summers, Lyosha stayed in the village with his grandmother. Assorted cousins were sent there as well, and their parents floated in and out, sometimes spending a week or two and sometimes staying just the weekend. One day when he was five, his aunt said, "Let's go get baptized," and they all went to another village, where there stood a church in a profound state of decay that was only accentuated by some recent spot repairs. A man in a dress took Lyosha by the hair and dunked his face in a vat of water. At that moment Lyosha hated the man and his own aunt, but a few minutes later he liked the bread and the wine the man put on his tongue, and he loved the little cross the man put around his neck. When they got back to their own village, Lyosha ran up to his mother shouting, "Look what I have"—meaning the little cross. Galina took a step back, looking like she might faint. She later explained to him that she was an atheist, and what that meant.

Lyosha loved to hear Galina explain things, especially when they had to do with history. She had many history books at home, and Lyosha worshipped these, particularly the ones about the Great Patriotic War. He read The Wreath of Glory, a set of heavy books in red leatherette covers. The giant anthology collected works of fiction and nonfiction, with each volume devoted to one aspect of the war: a book on the defense of Moscow, a book on Leningrad, a book on victory itself.¹⁹ He listened to vinyl records of war songs—the great march songs calling on people to rise up, the lyrical ballads about missing loved ones and fighting for them, and the heartbreaking postwar songs about lost comrades. Lyosha was convinced that his birth date was no accident: he was not just born on Victory Day—he was born on the fortieth anniversary of the end of the greatest war ever fought. When relatives came over on his birthday, he would grill them on their knowledge of war history. Once he was older, he turned the ritual into a quiz, putting days into preparing questions about the great battles at Stalingrad and Kursk. He did his best to play war songs on the piano. One of his cousins had given him a collection of Great Patriotic War sheet music for one of his birthdays. Lyosha took lessons in playing accordion, not piano, but he could read music, and he had intense determination. He played using one finger.

four

HOMO SOVIETICUS

perestroika was an impossible idea on the face of it. The Party was setting out to employ its structures of command to make the country, and itself, less command-driven. A system whose main afflictions were stagnation and inflexibility was setting out to change itself. Worst and probably intractable was the fact that people who had spent their lives securing power and individual leverage were expected to devise change that would dismantle the hierarchy of levers and might dislodge them. The system resisted change instinctively, and a great number of individuals plotted consciously to sabotage the change.

As the man appointed by Gorbachev to think through perestroika, to design it and guide it, Alexander Nikolaevich was confronted daily with the futility of the task. Much of the Party's leadership rejected change for fear of losing power. Those who appeared to welcome change, like, most notably, the head of the Moscow Party organization, Boris Yeltsin, were ultimately also driven by the desire for power, and this made them unreliable allies. The leaders of many of the Soviet Union's constituent republics were becoming lax in monitoring and containing nationalist forces: for decades the country had prosecuted local nationalist activists as enemies of the state, but perestroika loosened talk of self-determination in the Baltic republics, Ukraine, Georgia, and even in places that were nominally part of the Russian republic within the USSR. It was beginning to pull the country apart, creating tension and instability when the USSR could least afford it. The media, which were now—in large part thanks to Alexander Nikolaevich's efforts—granted greater freedom and even encouraged to tackle difficult subjects, were by turns too passive and too conservative, even reactionary. The public, to the extent that Alexander Nikolaevich could track what the public was thinking, also seemed torn between inappropriate passivity and equally inappropriate action: those who began speaking out seemed invariably to choose extreme positions, whether they were speaking in favor of democratization or in favor of cracking down to preserve the Soviet order. Alexander Nikolaevich took to calling all of them "extremists."

As a man who had struggled to educate himself, who had had to teach himself to think, Alexander Nikolaevich was sympathetic to the great number of people resisting change simply because they had never been exposed to anything outside the Party's dogma. In May 1988 he convinced the Central Committee to approve a concerted effort to restore thought and knowledge to the land. "It has come to the point where the West now has scholars who are better versed in the history of our own homegrown philosophy than we are," he wrote in the draft of an address to the Central Committee. "Twentieth- century Western philosophy contains a number of ideas that are avidly debated in books, at conferences, and so on. But many of these ideas were originally articulated by our thinkers. This is not surprising, for the tension [his italics] of the spiritual quest in Russia in the years leading up to the Revolution exceeded that of any European country." Alexander Nikolaevich suggested creating a team of five or six editors who would put together a library of Russian philosophers, between thirty-five and forty volumes that would include works by depublished nineteenth-century thinkers as well as those who had sailed on the Philosophers' Ship. He compiled his own list of thirty-nine thinkers to be restored to the Russian canon. And if this went well, he wrote, then books on history and economics (which he still called "political economy") could follow. The Central Committee said yes.¹

before the planned collection could materialize, journals began publishing previously silenced philosophers. Even Heidegger could now see print. For someone like Dugin, this was a confounding moment. On the one hand, he no longer had to spend his days hunting down copies of banned books or hurting his eyes by trying to read the microfilm projected onto his wooden desktop. On the other hand, his entire life was constructed around just this: fighting his way to difficult ideas, becoming one of the few people in the country to understand them, and continuing his process of self-education, knowing that he had all the time in the world, his hated static world. If the world was no longer static, and if the knowledge was no longer banned, who was Dugin now?

Evgenia left him. She joined a group of people who coalesced around a strange woman, Valeria Novodvorskaya. She was in her late thirties, and she had been in and out of punitive psychiatric clinics since she was a teenager—she was a radical lone-wolf dissident. Now, for the first time, she was assembling like-minded people. They began with a seminar, held in Moscow and Leningrad, for about eighty participants—a number that would have been unthinkable just a few months earlier. Even now, in April 1987, the organizers were terrified. They started with studying Soviet history—Novodvorskaya, who was a walking encyclopedia, lectured more often than anyone else—and soon began to organize protests on every topic they studied. They held tiny rallies to commemorate events that Soviet citizens had not been allowed to know about. Evgenia started getting detained on a regular basis. She seemed to enjoy it, and the publicity that accompanied it as Soviet papers began to cover what was happening in the streets. She was no longer living in the apartment she had shared with Alexander—she had managed to be allotted a place of her own, one room plus a kitchen in a 1970s concrete-block tower a short subway-plus-tram ride from the center. Dozens of people would cram into this space now, all of them rebel freaks, and as many as a dozen KGB cars were keeping vigil at the front door on any given day.² Their son, Artur, was living with Alexander's mother now, and Evgenia took

him on weekends when she was not busy protesting or being held at a precinct.

Novodvorskaya's group began calling itself a political party—this in a country where for seven decades there had existed only one Party. The new party was founded in May 1988 in the course of a three-day "congress" with about a hundred attendees. Some of the sessions were held in Evgenia's apartment. Participants were harassed, some were detained, some roughly. A dacha where the third day's meetings were scheduled to convene was raided by KGB agents who turned the place upside down, rendering it unusable. Only about fifty of the participants dared sign their names to the new party's platform.³ It was an outrageous document, which called for the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and referred to the Baltic states— Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia—as "occupied," demanding that they, along with any other constituent republic that so wished, be allowed to secede from the Union. It abolished the KGB, the death penalty, and the draft. Novodvorskaya and Evgenia would have gone even further—their views were a combination of libertarianism and anarchism, both of which seemed to them, at that point, the ultimate in Western thought—but the rest of the group held them back. As it was, several of the old dissidents who had served time for their anti- Soviet activities thought the document was too confrontational.⁴ This was not even what Alexander Nikolaevich meant when he used the term "extremists": it was a caricature of what he meant. A prosecutor threatened Novodvorskaya with charges of high treason, which carried the potential of the death penalty. But the activists responded in an utterly un-Soviet way: they did not stop in fear, and they did not fight the prosecutor—they just paid the threat no mind. All the organizers received summonses, and all ignored them. They proceeded with their congress, even though several people were detained in the process and held for about a week. The first political party in the Soviet Union that was not the Communist Party would be called Demokraticheskiy Soyuz, the Democratic Union.⁵

Novodvorskaya would later write that Evgenia was not so much anti-Soviet, like Novodvorskaya herself, as un-Soviet.⁶ Evgenia was having the time of her life—she was engaged, she was performing, she was admired, and she was also in love. She was having such a good time, in fact, that she was proving too much even for the Democratic Union, which kicked her out for talking out of school, often while drunk. In 1989, when founding a new political party no longer seemed radical in itself, she cofounded the Russian chapter of the Transnational Radical Party, a pacifist non-electoral political group with headquarters in Italy. The Italians gave Evgenia her first computer, but then the Radicals, too, kicked her out, for oversleeping on the day of a demonstration in front of the Romanian embassy. She decided that she was more interested in capitalism than in politics and started the Russian Libertarian Party. She also came out as a lesbian—the love that had been fueling her political life was the love of a woman—and launched the first queer organization in the country, the Association of Sexual Minorities (more specific terms of identity, like "gay" or "lesbian," were not yet familiar to the Russian ear).⁷

among the many things that grew confusing in the late 1980s was the left-right dichotomy. The way Alexander Nikolaevich used the word "right," it was but a stand-in for "conservative" in the most basic sense of the word: just wanting things to stay the way they were. But the way they were, nominally, was "left"—the most conservative force was the Communist Party. Few people, therefore, wanted to call themselves "left." That made everyone "right," or something closer to "radical" or "democratic" as opposed to conservative. Evgenia's Radical Party, which would have been far left in Europe, and her Libertarian Party were roughly equidistant from the Communist Party, which made the leap from one to the other seem like a small step. In fact, all her views shared a category much more important than the familiar—and therefore suspect—political divisions: they were Western. Before finding Novodvorskaya, Evgenia was briefly involved in an effort called the Group for Trust Between East and West, whose sole agenda was to counter the most basic premise of Soviet propaganda: the idea that the West was a threat. Even in

Alexander Nikolaevich's rhetoric, if not necessarily in his thinking, this premise appeared inviolate: almost any time he wrote a letter or gave a speech on the state of things in the Soviet Union, he made note of Western efforts to undermine the country and Western plots to sabotage perestroika itself. So if one strove to be, first and foremost, un-Soviet, as Evgenia did, one did well to embrace any number of political positions, from libertarianism to pacifism, one more Western than the next. Gay rights, the legalization of drugs, and the abolition of the death penalty, the lifting of all state controls in favor of the reign of the unfettered free market—everything fell naturally into line.

As for Dugin, who had lost the woman he loved, his son, and his life of intensive open-ended learning, he was bound to look for and find the position that was the opposite of everything. First he drifted into Pamyat ("Memory"), an organization that in the mid-1980s was emerging from the underground. It had long trafficked in antisemitic rhetoric, from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to contemporary world-Zionist-conspiracy theories. Now it allied itself with Gorbachev's perestroika on the one hand and with an imagined Russian nationalist revival on the other.⁸ The combination was fairly intuitive: Soviet internationalist rhetoric was just one of the aspects of hollow ideology that were being deflated. While official Soviet media pre-glasnost doled out their own regular servings of antisemitism framed as anti-Zionism, the system had generally subdued outright Russian-nationalist voices. Now this lid was lifted and hatred emerged in many stripes, of which Pamyat was the brightest. The Soviet leadership was either unsure about how best to react or unwilling to react, but Alexander Nikolaevich raged privately and publicly. "I am not Jewish," he said during a talk at the Higher Party School in March 1990, "yet every day I get fliers from Pamyat in which I am called 'the head of the Judeo-Masonic lounge of the Soviet Union.' There is only one reason for this, as far as I can tell: I really do speak out publicly, in writing and in speaking, everywhere and anywhere I can, against all manifestations of nationalism, including antisemitism. And I consider it to be the shame of any

member of the Russian intelligentsia and any Russian person at all who subscribes to this kind of ideology of racial hatred."⁹

After decades of amorphousness underground, Pamyat had acquired a charismatic leader, a former photographer named Dmitry Vasilyev, who railed against all the world at once: the Holocaust was a Jewish conspiracy (Eichmann was a Jew); rock music was a Satanist plot (slowed-down vinyl records sounded out chants to Satan); and yoga was a Western scourge (all the West wanted to do was contaminate Russian culture).¹⁰

Between its Soviet conservatism, as manifested by its avowed allegiance to Gorbachev, and its anti-Western, anti-everything-foreign stand, Pamyat was indeed the perfect opposite to the Democratic Union. Like Evgenia, though, Dugin soon parted ways with his first political organization. But while she became, briefly, a serial founder of radical groups, Dugin set out on a new intellectual project.

He now found inspiration in the writing of Rene Guenon, a long- dead Frenchman who had published more than a dozen books on metaphysics. A couple of volumes focused on Hindu beliefs, but he also wrote on Islam, cosmism, and "the esoterism of Dante." Dugin perceived a coherent worldview in this eclectic collection, or at least a coherent quest: the search for a tradition, or, rather, Tradition. He wrote a book—his first—The Ways of the Absolute. It was a dense text, parts of which no one but Dugin himself would be able to understand, but it contained one clear proposition: put aside all existing belief systems, all things learned, in favor of what he called "total traditionalism," a sort of meta-ideology that contained the cosmos. Indeed, it contained so much that it was probably better defined by what it decisively rejected: "the 'modern world' as such." Modernity was the opposite of Tradition, so the essential tradition Dugin was seeking could be located only by stripping away all views and things contemporary and working backward. Another word for "modern" might be "Western." By using a French philosopher obsessed with Hinduism and Islam to get at this idea of Tradition, Dugin was coming full circle to an earlier, newly forgotten idea held

by Russian thinkers who argued that their country should be turned away from Europe and toward Asia.¹¹

Dugin made his own pilgrimages to Western Europe. In 1990 he went to Paris, where he met Belgian New Right thinker Robert Steuckers. Here was an intellectual from the West who was as radical in his thinking as Guenon, but he was living right now and speaking to Dugin. Steuckers introduced him to the concept of geopolitics and, more broadly, the concept that Dugin's ideas could have practical implications in a changing world. He also suggested to Dugin that his ideas might combine into something called National Bolshevism. Within a year, Dugin met a number of other Western European New Right intellectuals, was welcomed to the conferences of the ethno- nationalist think tank Groupement de Recherche et d'fitudes pour la Civilisation Europeenne in Paris, and was published by an Italian New Right house.¹²

Dugin's book about Guenon was published in Russia in 1990, among many books—some of them better-written, but few by a better-read person—that attempted to find a metaphysical, esoteric, supernatural, or, on the contrary, ultrarational, mathematically argued way of explaining all of life and the world, which had so suddenly become so complicated. Dugin himself, meanwhile, found the Tradition he wanted in the Orthodox faith—not in the contemporary church but with the Old Believers, a faction that split off in the seventeenth century and had since attempted to maintain its ways in spite of the modern world.

the clich6 of the era was "floodgates." Everyone in every field was claiming that the floodgates had opened. To Arutyunyan, it felt more like the fortochka opened wider, then wider still, and then the entire window swung open. A friend who worked at the Moscow cardiology center told Arutyunyan that a doctor there was teaching a seminar on administering the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. The world's most popular personality test, in use since the 1930s, had been studied by a few Soviet psychiatrists and psychologists in the 1970s.¹³ They had tried to adapt it to Russian, which proved an

infinitely difficult task. For one thing, Russian is a thoroughly grammatically gendered language: most first-person statements have a feminine and a masculine form. The MMPI consisted of 566 first- person statements. The first adaptation efforts, therefore, created two versions of the test—one for women and one for men.

More important, the original test was rooted in American reality— and had been empirically tested for years before it was finalized and came into wide use. The Soviet psychiatrists and psychologists had very little opportunity to test their clinical reality. Now, in the late 1980s, one of them was allowed to include outsiders in his work, turning them into students, collaborators, and testers at once. How were they going to apply this foreign test? The Russian language, gendered or not, was the least of their problems. The test contained statements like number 58: "Everything is turning out just like the prophets of the Bible said it would." The Soviet person's reality included no prophets, and no Bible. The original adapted version of this statement read, "A person's future has been predetermined."¹⁴ Testing showed this to be a poor substitute, though. A better fit, as it turned out, was, "I am more cheerful when the weather is good." Question 255, "Sometimes at elections I vote for men about whom I know very little," became "Sometimes I positively appraise people about whom I know very little," and question 513, "I think Lincoln was greater than Washington," sidestepped possible disagreements about history by turning into "I prefer working with a supervisor who gives clear instructions to working with one who gives me greater freedom."

By 1989, the original MMPI was being retired in the United States in favor of an updated version, adjusted for changes in American society and clinicians' understanding of it. The "men" in the elections question became "people," and Lincoln and Washington were dropped altogether.¹⁵ In the Soviet Union, the adapted version of the first test was coming into use just as the reality to which it had been adapted was changing drastically—possibly making the effort to delete from the test all references to elections not just superfluous but counterproductive. Still, the very fact that more than a few psychologists, newly trained in using the MMPI, were going to start administering the test to a large number of apparently regular people —not psychiatric patients or criminals but previously unpathologized, untreated, and unstudied ordinary Soviet citizens—was groundbreaking.

Whatever its limitations as a diagnostic tool in the USSR, the MMPI proved invaluable for inspiring trust in psychologists: the strange trick of being able to draw convincing conclusions about someone's personality—being able to point to such traits as excitability, cynicism, or a proclivity for developing unexplained symptoms of physical illness—on the basis of a series of apparently unrelated questions struck the perfect balance between magic and science. It showed that, despite lacking a medical doctor's white coat, psychologists knew something the subjects did not. Even better, they knew things about the subjects that the subjects themselves did not know—at just the time when so many Soviet people were starting to sense that they knew less about themselves and their world than they had thought.

The psychologists, meanwhile, started to learn to be clinicians. Moscow State University's psychology department abandoned most caution and launched a series of workshops for and by practicing psychologists. Self-styled shrinks emerged from their apartments, where they had been seeing clients without a permit or permission, or from the library, where they had been reading Freud in the spetskhran, and began helping one another systematize their knowledge. There were workshops on family therapy, Gestalt therapy, and psychoanalysis.

As the Iron Curtain began to open a crack—a byzantine visa system was still in place, and the activities of visiting foreigners were highly restricted, but some people were now welcome to come in for some reasons—Western psychotherapists began to visit and teach. Carl Rogers came in 1987. It was both bizarre and earth-shattering that Rogers, a founder of humanistic client-centered therapy and the pioneer of nondirective counseling, would be the first major Western psychologist to lecture in the Soviet Union: his approaches rested first on placing the person at the center of things, and, second, on not

telling the person what to do. An organizer of his visit recalled that Rogers himself pointed this out, saying, "What you have asked us to do here is dangerous . . . because if people learn to empower themselves, they may not do what you want them to do. It may not fit in this culture."¹⁶

Rogers proceeded to lead some of the strangest groups he had ever encountered. Following a large lecture at Moscow University, he planned to spend four days working with a group of no more than thirty people. The roughly fifty people who crowded into the room and another dozen who congregated outside the door spent the first day screaming and fighting one another for a spot in the group. Rogers was, he wrote later, "horrified"—he italicized the word. "Rarely, if ever, have I heard such vicious hostility directed personally toward present members of the group."¹⁷ On day two, he noted, "It became evident that many of their personal problems relate to the great frequency of divorce. In this educated and sophisticated group, it is similar to the United States. One woman spoke of the way in which she and her husband had gradually worked toward a better and seemingly more permanent relationship. She was definitely the exception. Nearly everyone else spoke of 'When I left my first husband'; 'I have a problem with my child by my second marriage'; 'If I leave my second wife.' There was talk of the insecurity and estrangement of children of previous partnerships; the difficulty of maintaining relationships with one's children when they are at a distance; the interference of ex-wives and ex-mothers-in-law—the whole gamut."¹⁸ Even after the room had settled down, Rogers continued to be taken aback by his students' inability to listen to one another. Yet the formal debriefing several days later convinced Rogers that as therapists his students had been deeply affected by the suggestion that they should hold back judgment and even guidance. Indeed, they attempted to conduct what should have been a formal and formulaic meeting of an "academic council" in Rogerian fashion, a feat Rogers himself called "extravagant." As people, though, the Russian participants seemed to sadden the great therapist: he and his

co-facilitator noted "a certain 'lostness' . . . a pervading sense that there should be more to life, a deep despair about ever finding it."¹⁹

Virginia Satir, the world's most famous family therapist, came the following year. Pulling people one by one onto the stage from a crowded auditorium, she explained the most basic tenets of her approach, her belief in the fundamental goodness of every person: "I know he is a wonderful man. Why do I know this? Because he is a man at the station of life, and he is the only one exactly like him in the whole world."²⁰ Viktor Frankl came and lectured on existential therapy. The psychologists of Moscow were catching a glimpse of the twentieth century's professional conversation before the last of its great participants were gone. Rogers died in 1987; Satir in 1988; Frankl lived for another decade, but by the time he visited Moscow he was already in his eighties.

Arutyunyan tried to hear and learn all of it, all at once, before she came to the realization that to help a human being, she had to choose a single framework for understanding him. This was when she concluded that the flawed, complicated, and sometimes frightening human of psychoanalysis was her choice. It would be a while before she knew that psychoanalysis, too, had its different schools, each of which represented a different vision of the person.

gudkov's second invitation to work with Yuri Levada was twenty years in coming. After two decades of home-based seminars, Levada was reassembling his team as part of an official Soviet institution. In July 1987 the Central Committee decreed that "in order to study and deploy the public opinion of the Soviet population on the most pressing socioeconomic issues" a new center would be created under the auspices of the trade union authority and the labor ministry. This and subsequent documents made it clear that the future All-Union Public Opinion Research Center would not in fact be merely a research institution: it was expected to actively devise and implement strategies for shaping public opinion.²¹ The choice of overseeing agencies was logical: centrally controlled trade unions and the labor ministry were in charge of the human resource that was all the Soviet

people—who, the thinking went, would now be properly monitored and directed.

The new center began in chaos and confusion. The trade unions allocated half a million dollars—hard currency—to buy the latest computer equipment, and the sociologists were promptly swindled out of the entire sum by a con man posing as a Canadian technology supplier.²² On the bright side, there was the staffing: Levada knew exactly what needed to be studied, and he had all his people with him to conduct the research.

Levada's hypothesis, formed over the course of more than three decades working not only in the Soviet Union but also, in the 1950s, in newly communist China, was that every totalitarian regime forms a type of human being on whom it relies for its stability. The shaping of the New Man is the regime's explicit project, but its product is not so much a vessel for the regime's ideology as it is a person best equipped to survive in a given society. The regime, in turn, comes to depend on this newly shaped type of person for its continued survival.

Levada hypothesized a detailed portrait of Homo Sovieticus. The system had bred him over the course of decades by rewarding obedience, conformity, and subservience.²³ The successful member of Soviet society, suggested Levada, believed in self-isolation, state paternalism, and what Levada called "hierarchical egalitarianism," and suffered from an "imperial syndrome."²⁴ Self-isolation was a key strategy for both the state and the individual: as the Soviet Union sealed itself off with the Iron Curtain, so did the Soviet citizen separate himself from everyone who was Other and therefore untrustworthy. Ideology supported these separations by stressing "class enmity," but keeping one's social circle small was also a sound survival strategy during the era of mass terror, when excessive trust could prove deadly.²⁵ The belief in a paternalistic state, and an utter dependence on it, were bred in Homo Sovieticus by the very nature of the Soviet state, which, Levada wrote, was not so much a complex of institutions, like the modern state, but rather a single superinstitution. He described it as a "universal institution of a premodern paternalistic type, which reaches into every corner of human existence."²⁶ The Soviet state was the ultimate parent: it fed, clothed, housed, and educated its citizen; it gave him a job and gave his life meaning; it rewarded him for doing good and punished him for doing wrong, no matter how small the transgression. "By its very design, the Soviet 'socialist' state is totalitarian because it must not leave the individual any independent space," wrote Levada.²⁷ This description of totalitarianism echoed Hannah Arendt's explanation of how totalitarian regimes employ terror: "It substitutes for the boundaries and channels of communication between men a band of iron which holds them so tightly together that it is as though their plurality had disappeared into One Man of gigantic dimensions."²⁸ Robbed of his individuality and therefore the ability to interact meaningfully with others, she wrote, man became profoundly lonely, which made him the perfect creature and subject of the totalitarian state.²⁹

Since the state controlled every thing and every person, Soviet society had a simple vertical structure, rendering the Soviet citizen's thinking fundamentally hierarchical. Even though the exact systems of rank and privilege were secret, the basic logic according to which the state doled out goods and comforts in exchange for valued services ruled every person's life. At the same time, official ideology extolled equality and the state punished those who had, or wanted to have, too much. For Homo Sovieticus this translated into the value of equality within groups—a strictly enforced conformity at one's station in life. This was what Levada termed "hierarchical egalitarianism."³⁰ This term was an example of what Levada called "antinomies"—a philosophical concept that refers to the contradiction between statements either of which appears reasonable. Homo Sovieticus's world, according to Levada, was shaped by pairs of antinomies. The most important of these may have been what Levada called "the imperial syndrome." On the one hand, the USSR, like the Russia that preceded it, was incontrovertibly an empire. Its strength, breadth, and size were all sources of citizen pride. Every schoolchild knew that the Soviet Union occupied the largest territory of any country in the world—one-sixth of the Earth's landmass.

Broad is my native land

Many there are forests, fields, and rivers.

I know of no other country

Where man breathes so freely

This was a popular patriotic song that clearly made the connection: the Soviet person's wonderful life was a function of the very size of his country. On the other hand, every Soviet citizen was constantly made aware of his ethnic origin, which was immutable and contained on every document that referred to him. Only members of the single largest ethnic group—the Russians—could occasionally forget who they were. "So Homo Sovieticus is by his very nature, genetically, frustrated, faced with the impossible choice between an ethnic and a superethnic identity," wrote Levada.³¹

The antinomies required Homo Sovieticus to fragment his consciousness to accommodate both of the contradictory positions. Levada borrowed George Orwell's term "doublethink." Homo Sovieticus, like the characters of 1984, could hold two contradictory beliefs at the same time. These beliefs ran on parallel tracks, and so long as the tracks indeed did not cross, they were not in conflict: depending on the situation, Homo Sovieticus could deploy one or the other statement in the antinomic pair, sometimes one after the other, in quick succession.

But the most important thing Levada believed about Homo Sovieticus was this: his was a dying breed. He had been formed by the one-two punch of the Revolution and the Great Terror: the first event brought its ideals and values, and the second taught Homo Sovieticus to conform in order to survive. But now, thirty years after the death of Stalin, the people so shaped were dying off. Their children and grandchildren would be different. That, in turn, would mean that the regime could no longer rely on them to ensure its survival through their behavior. And that would mean that the regime—the USSR as it existed—would collapse. This was a far cry from what the trade union authority, the labor ministry, and the Central Committee had in mind, but this was what Levada wanted his team now to prove: that Homo Sovieticus conformed to his description and that the

phenomenon of Homo Sovieticus was bound to an older generation, which would mean that Homo Sovieticus would soon cease being the dominant social type in the Soviet Union, which would mean the end of the Soviet Union itself.

the task of proving that a certain social type existed, was dominant, and would soon die off was so circular that it verged on impossible. But this was not the biggest problem with the study. The biggest problem was that none of Levada's sociologists had ever done anything like this before. They had faithfully attended the seminar for twenty years. They had read their Western sociologists. Some of them, like Gudkov, had been lucky enough to work with some data in their official jobs. But none of them had ever done a survey, a poll, or any kind of field research.

They were theoreticians, so they had an idea of how a questionnaire ought to be designed. They were certainly well-versed in choosing samples—and for the first time ever, they would be allowed to do this. But what would they do with the data? None of them had been trained in statistical analysis: they would have to train themselves. The lack of computers made the setup look more farcical than tragic. It took them two years to be able to design and implement their study. On second look, the idea that they knew how to design a survey also seemed suspect. In Western sociology, which they had been studying, surveys inevitably built on earlier surveys, and, more important, on the terms of long-running public conversations. The problem was similar to the challenge of adapting the MMPI, except in this field there was no MMPI to adapt. In the Soviet Union, there had been no public, precisely because there had been no conversation: "One Man of gigantic dimensions" must speak with a single voice, and only when called upon.

How do you bring up a topic that has never before been discussed? How do you elicit the opinions of people who have not been entitled to hold opinions? How do you have conversations for which there is no language? Gudkov began to think of their group as a geological expedition setting out to determine the makeup of a monolith. They would have to begin with an exploratory explosion, a man-made disturbance that would expose the nature of Soviet society. Gudkov invented a tool for doing just this. Ask people "what should be done" with certain deviant groups. It was not hard to be a deviant in Soviet society, and many people were—people who listened to rock music, for example (they were generally referred to as "rockers"), and hippies (the term was still in circulation in the late 1980s because there was still a subculture of people wearing long hair and singing to acoustic guitar). Offer respondents a range of options, from "leave them alone" to the Leninist "liquidate." Gudkov figured that such questions would tease out the limits of tolerance and, more to the point, help measure the levels of underlying aggression.

The results of this part of the questionnaire surprised the group. Homo Sovieticus was clearly opening up to the world, feeling reasonably peaceful toward even the most deviant of groups, like the homosexuals: fully 10 percent believed that homosexuals should be "left to their own devices," another 6 percent thought they should be "helped" (the questionnaire did not specify what kind of help they should receive), and a third thought that homosexuals should be "liquidated."³² Considering that homosexual conduct was a crime punishable by up to three years in prison, Gudkov thought this level of aggression was low. More than 20 percent of respondents wanted to "liquidate" rockers, and nearly 8 percent wanted to "liquidate" alcoholics. But then a whopping 27 percent wanted rockers to be left alone, and more than 50 percent wanted to see alcoholics get help. In the absence of any data that could be used as reference, the researchers concluded that these results reflected a trend toward greater tolerance. The highest proportion of those who wanted to "liquidate" homosexuals was found in respondents older than fifty and younger than twenty: adults of working age were markedly less aggressive.³³

There was a lot of other good news. First, Levada's Homo Sovieticus hypothesis was largely borne out. The survey found the traits Levada had described, and it fleshed out the way Soviet

doublethink functioned in daily life. Orwell had described doublethink as follows:

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word "doublethink" involved the use of

doublethink.³⁴

The study showed how doublethink kept doubling back on itself. What Soviet people were required to believe and proclaim was counterfactual, and the requirement itself was but a mechanism of control, precisely because it contained its own negation. Homo Sovieticus lived a life of constant negotiation with the omnipotent state, and the negotiation itself was both the individual's sole survival strategy and an instrument of control. The sociologists identified several key areas of negotiation that they called "games."

There was a game called "Work," and one of the most-often- repeated Soviet jokes described it perfectly: "We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us." There was a game called "Care," in which "they"—the state—pretended to take care of the citizenry, which pretended to be grateful. What made this simple-sounding game instantly complicated was that it was not all pretense: the state indeed controlled the citizen's fate, and the citizen could be said to owe his continued survival to the state. In this sense, the game of "Complicity" was similar: Homo Sovieticus pretended to participate in the affairs of the state, and this made him complicit in everything the state did. The game of "Agreement," on the other hand, was a straightforward negotiation: pledging support for the state bought the citizen a modicum of privacy (and privacy was often the first thing dissidents were forced to sacrifice). The game of "Consensus" was a corollary of "Agreement": it allowed Homo Sovieticus's private self to be indifferent to and even dismissive of the state—as long as the public, collective citizenry demonstrated its loyalty to and enthusiastic support for the state.³⁵

The group administered its hundred-question survey to 2,700 people of various ages and backgrounds in different parts of the USSR, and here is what they did not find: people who believed in a radiant communist future, true Marxists, ideologues. The survey provided many opportunities for a true believer to manifest his convictions. But when answering the question "Where do you think a person can find answers to questions that concern him?" only 5.6 percent chose "In the teachings of Marx and Lenin," which would have been the "correct" answer in a different setting. About half chose the option "My own common sense." Asked whether they would prefer a supervisor who was a member of the Party, only 10.3 percent said yes, 21.5 percent said they would prefer to report to someone who was not a member of the Party, and the rest said they did not care.³⁶

Homo Sovieticus was not indoctrinated. In fact, Homo Sovieticus did not seem to hold particularly strong opinions of any sort. His inner world consisted of antinomies, his objective was survival, and his strategy was constant negotiation—the endless circulation of games of doublethink.

But the researchers saw hope. Younger people seemed less "Soviet." Asked to define a festive occasion, for example, respondents over the age of fifty were most likely to name official holidays, beginning with the days of military glory (Soviet Army Day and Victory Day) while the younger ones would say, "when you've gotten lucky" or "when you can get together with friends and have a drink." Asked to describe their greatest fear, the older people would say "war" while the younger ones said "humiliation." Asked to name the most significant event of the twentieth century, the older respondents most often said "victory in the Great Patriotic War" while the younger ones mentioned Stalinist Terror more often than anything else.³⁷

Levada concluded that the second part of his hypothesis, which held that Homo Sovieticus was dying off, was correct, and that this was inevitable. "One of the outcomes of these deals with the devil," he wrote, referring to the constant "games" Homo Sovieticus played, "is the disintegration of the structure of personality itself." Homo Sovieticus was caught in an infinite spiral of lies: pretending to be, pretending to have, pretending to believe, and pretending not to. The fakery concerned the most basic of facts and the most fundamental of values, and what lay at the bottom of the spiral was an absence: "even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink." The system destroyed the individual and the fabric of society: nothing was possible in the absence of everything, resulting, wrote Levada, in "the falling standards of education, culture, morality, in the degradation of all of society." If the Soviet person was ultimately an absence, then he could not reproduce. "Therefore we can view the Homo Sovieticus as a transient historical event," concluded Levada. The Soviet man would go extinct, and so would the USSR.

PART TWO

REVOLUTION

five

SWAN LAKE

in late December 1991, Masha was on a train with her mother. They were going to spend New Year's in Poland. Tatiana had been going there for a couple of years: since the stores in Moscow had emptied out completely and tutoring could no longer buy them a semblance of comfort, she had become one of Russia's first chelnoki—"shuttles," people who made their living by importing goods in quantities small enough to be carried as personal luggage. Tatiana trafficked in wares that had just last year been exotic but were now consumer goods: feminine pads, erotic magazines, and other intimate items everyone needed and no one had. The journey from Moscow to Warsaw took twenty-one comfortable hours: the train left in the afternoon and arrived the following morning. A few hours after pulling out of Moscow's Belorussky Station, the train crossed an invisible border.

"Belorussia," said Tatiana. "Here it is. Yesterday it was still ours. Today, it's a separate country."

Masha, who was in second grade, was not sure what this meant.

"Is Poland still ours?" she asked.

"Shush," snapped Tatiana, and looked at the two Polish women who shared their compartment, to make sure they had not been paying attention.

That discussion was over. On other occasions that year, Tatiana had tried to explain things to her daughter, generally confounding her further each time. In January, she told Masha that they would never again travel to Lithuania, where they had spent the previous August at the Baltic seaside resort of Palanga. Now, she said, "we" had done

something terrible there and the people of Lithuania would forever hate Russians. Masha had never really thought of herself as a part of some "we" who were Russians. At the Central Committee preschool the teachers had talked of "us" being "the Soviet people." The Soviet people had, for example, defeated the German fascists in the Great Patriotic War. Actually, it was difficult to think of another example of something "the Soviet people" had done, but then, the Great Patriotic War was enough—to know who the people were, and who Masha was.

In first grade, Masha's teacher also talked about the Great Patriotic War and the Soviet people, but added a children's subset to the category: the first-graders would be joining the Little Octobrists, the Communist Party's wing for seven-to-ten-year-olds. Over the decades, the Little Octobrists followed the Party's broadening trajectory: the organization had started out as small and voluntary, drawing politically motivated children, but by the 1960s all primary school children were inducted, wholesale, in first grade.¹ The ceremony usually took place in the fall, and from that point on every child wore a Little Octobrist pin on the lapel of his uniform. It was a red metal five-pointed star, with a picture of a toddler-age wavy- haired Vladimir Lenin in gold in the circle in the middle. Once inducted, Little Octobrists would be organized into "little stars"— groups of five, each with its own leader who reported to the class leader, who, in turn, reported to a mentor from within the school's Young Pioneer organization—the ten-to-fourteen-year-olds' segment of the Communist Party.

In Masha's year, the ceremony had to be postponed due to a shortage of Little Octobrist pins, so she spent months in anticipation. All the wide-ruled and large-graph green primary school notebooks had the bylaws of the Little Octobrists printed on the back cover. There were five of them:

Little Octobrists are future Young Pioneers.

Little Octobrists are studious kids. They study hard, love school, and respect their elders.

Little Octobrists are honest and truthful kids.

Little Octobrists are fun-loving kids. They read and they draw, they play and they sing, and they stick together.

Only those who work hard and persist earn the right to be called Little Octobrist.²

While they waited, the children learned the mythology of Communist-leader childhoods. They read Mikhail Zoshchenko's Stories About Lenin, written in 1940, a few years before Zoshchenko was condemned as an anti-Soviet writer and his short stories for adults were banned. The Lenin stories stayed in the curriculum, however, with the authorship de-emphasized. The stories portrayed Lenin as an extraordinary student and a loyal friend, but the story that made the biggest impression on Masha was the one called "Vase." In it, little Volodya accidentally breaks a vase while frolicking with his brothers and sisters at their aunt's house. He then lies about it and suffers pangs of conscience until, two or three months later, he makes a tearful confession to his mother, who then gets him absolved by the aunt. The story, ostensibly based on the recollections of Lenin's older sister, Anna, adds the apparently fictional detail that the other children had been so busy playing that they had not noticed who broke the vase—this serves to excuse their un-Soviet failure to denounce their little brother to the authorities.³

Masha also learned that another top Bolshevik, Sergei Kirov, was orphaned at an early age and spent part of his childhood in an orphanage. She did not learn that Kirov was assassinated in 1934 and that his death served as the pretext for one of the deadliest waves of Stalinist terror. She learned of a different set of deaths, though. The Bolsheviks—Lenin, Kirov, and others whose names she did not yet know—had killed the czar. There was scant mention of the czar's name, or of his wife and children, who perished with him. The killing of the czar was presented in a nondramatic, neutral manner, as an event that had been dictated by the laws of history.

Tatiana said this was wrong. Lenin had been no hero. He was bad. Did this mean that the czar was good? No, not really.

In fact, no one in the family shared Masha's joy when she finally became a Little Octobrist in March 1991. Her grandparents said it was nothing to be proud of. Yes, they affirmed, Lenin was bad. He had instigated something they called the Red Terror. The Chebotarev family did not do the Communist Party. Galina Vasilyevna's father had been a highly placed Party apparatchik who failed to stand up for his Jewish wife during Stalin's antisemitic purges of the late 1940s. His had been a fairly typical predicament. Most famously, Stalin's foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, had seen his Jewish wife arrested. Masha's grandfather Boris Mikhailovich had his own reasons to dislike the Party, though he never mentioned them directly. He had been drafted into the Red Army in 1945, at the age of eighteen, and shipped directly to the front line, which by then was in Germany. He spent the next six years in Berlin, where he served in what he invariably called "the occupying army." He deflected any questions about his time in the service with a statement of unparalleled bitterness: "I hate German women and Jews." If pressed, he would add only that he hated the Jews because they invented Communism.

A dozen years earlier, before Masha was born, Tatiana, then a student, had been told to join the Party. A representative at the university told her that the physics department had been instructed to admit one top student to the Party, and Tatiana was it. At twenty- four, Tatiana was a samizdat-reading Soviet cynic, and joining the Party appeared to her as an opportunistic, morally indifferent option. Her parents surprised her with their principled opposition. "This is not a done thing," they said. The university's Party organization would not take no for an answer: it had quotas to fill. Galina Vasilyevna and Boris Mikhailovich started getting phone calls at work: "Why doesn't your daughter want to join the Party?" The threat was hardly veiled: both Boris Mikhailovich and Galina Vasilyevna were non-Party members working for secret Soviet institutions. Theirs were exceptions of long standing, negotiated thanks to Galina Vasilyevna's father's Party status and Boris Mikhailovich's six-year military service, but they could be revoked. In the end, Tatiana managed to secure her own exception: she had been tutoring a classmate who had entered the department after his military service, as a standing Party member, and with his own exceptions made to the competitive admissions process. The department needed him, he needed Tatiana to continue his studies, and she needed him to make the Party organization leave her alone.

Galina Vasilyevna retired from her space-shuttle job in 1990. Alexander Men, the intellectual priest who had brought her to the Church, was murdered in 1990, but Galina Vasilyevna's spiritual quest had already taken her away from religion, to the TV, where a hypnotist by the name of Anatoly Kashpirovsky was making frequent appearances. As his live shows demonstrated, he had healing powers, so Galina Vasilyevna, like millions of other Soviet citizens, was holding widemouthed glass jars of tap water up to the television set to obtain a healing charge. Masha's grandfather also spent an inordinate amount of time in front of the screen, though he had no use for Kashpirovsky. For the first time in his life, he was interested in something other than his work and his bitter feelings about the Great Patriotic War: politics. He loved what he called "the democrats." This was a relatively small group, no more than 300 out of the 2,249 delegates to the periodic Congresses of People's Deputies of the USSR. It included, most notably, the dissident physicist Sakharov, along with a number of newly politicized academics and professionals and a few unorthodox Communist Party functionaries. Very little united them, except all were able to get behind Sakharov's opposition to the primacy of the Communist Party in Soviet politics and affairs of state. After Sakharov died in December 1989, Boris Yeltsin, the head of the Moscow Party organization, became the sole leader of the "democrats." Boris Mikhailovich loved Yeltsin like he had perhaps never loved anyone. Yeltsin was locked in mortal combat with Gorbachev, who oscillated on reform and would not cede the Communist Party. In 1990, Yeltsin resigned from the Party. Within a year, so did roughly four million other people—more than a fifth of the Party's total membership.⁴

In March 1991, the month Masha was inducted into the Little Octobrists, Gorbachev banned street protests in Moscow, in an effort to silence Yeltsin and his supporters. There were tanks in the streets, but the protests went ahead anyway, and Boris Mikhailovich went with hundreds of thousands of others and chanted "Yel-tsin!" In June, with millions of others, Boris Mikhailovich voted to elect Yeltsin president of Russia—no one was quite sure what this meant, considering that Russia was a part of the USSR, but it was an important part of the struggle.

seryozha's grandfather, Alexander Nikolaevich, did not want to leave the Communist Party. In the end, the choice was made for him. In a couple of years, he had gone from being one of the most powerful men in the Politburo (which numbered between twelve and fourteen members out of the more than four hundred people on the Central Committee⁵) to a pariah within the Party.

For over a generation before Gorbachev came to power, Politburo membership had generally been a lifetime appointment. When a member died, he was mechanically replaced by a candidate long held in reserve, often scarcely younger than the departed. Gorbachev started reshuffling the Central Committee's leadership several times a year, in an uphill battle to bring in fresh blood and shore up his own position at the same time. In his memoirs he notes, for example, that he chose to replace one Politburo member after he started nodding off during meetings—and the tone of the description makes clear this was a familiar symptom.⁶ When Alexander Nikolaevich first joined the Politburo as a full member in June 1987, Gorbachev put him in charge of ideology. In September of the following year, Gorbachev undertook one of his largest shake-ups of the bureaucracy. He brought in Vladimir Kryuchkov, a top state security officer who came highly recommended by Alexander Nikolaevich. Kryuchkov would now run the KGB. Gorbachev also freed up the post of the Politburo member in charge of foreign affairs—and he decided to move Alexander Nikolaevich into that role.⁷ Now he had his own handpicked people in the most sensitive posts.

Over the next year and a bit, Alexander Nikolaevich oversaw the rapid disintegration of the Eastern Bloc. Historian Stephen Kotkin

has called the Bloc the Soviet Union's "outer empire," like the "outer party" in Orwell's 1984.⁸ If the Soviet Union, with its fifteen constituent republics, was the inner empire, then the other countries of the Warsaw Pact—Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania—formed the outer empire. The Soviet Union gained dominion over these six countries in the post-Second World War negotiations with the Allied Powers. Initially, the arrangement also included Yugoslavia and Albania, but they wrestled free of Soviet influence in the 1940s and the 1960s, respectively. Each pursued its own leaders' version of socialism—a freer version of Soviet society in the case of Yugoslavia, and hard-line Stalinism in the case of Albania. Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and, to some extent, Poland attempted to break ranks over the years, but the Soviet Union brutally repressed these efforts—with military action in Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968, and a sort of preemptive imposition of martial law in Poland in 1981. Now Alexander Nikolaevich's mandate was inaction. He received an unending stream of visitors, representatives of those he called "friends" in his reports— the Communist parties of each of the satellites, who by turn tested the waters, asked for support, guidance, and permission. They were able to secure more permission than anything else.

One after another, the Eastern European states allowed protests, which quickly grew massive, and opened borders and attempted some measure of free elections with the participation of rapidly forming parties that were not Communist. Most places, the ruling party sat down with the opposition in what were called "round tables" and then exited the scene peacefully if not gracefully, leaving the ad hoc groups of former dissidents, academics, student activists, and trade union organizers to sort out the mess of turning a Soviet-style state with a command economy and a one-party system into a functioning democracy. In Romania, where the Party would not budge, a rebellious army seized and executed the Communist dictator and his wife. But the revolutions elsewhere were described by both local and Western press as "velvet."

The soft luxurious texture of these transformations was guaranteed by the passivity overseen by Alexander Nikolaevich. After regime change in its satellites, the USSR began pulling its military, secret police, and political personnel out of these countries. This was a complicated, expensive, and ill-prepared operation that often added homegrown insult to the moral injury of the personnel being decommissioned in a turnaround no one had bothered to warn them about. A KGB agent who was stationed in the East German city of Dresden would later describe the experience as frightful and humiliating.⁹ The agent's name was Vladimir Putin.

In the logic of perestroika, the pullout from Eastern Europe was inevitable: the "outer empire" was costing the Soviet Union too much, and the continued occupation of these countries could not be justified in the new ideology of openness. But Gorbachev, and Alexander Nikolaevich, imagined that the chain reaction would somehow stop at the Soviet border and the "inner empire" would remain intact.

alexander nikolaevich had never thought of the USSR as an empire. No one did, not even the Soviet Union's foes—even when Ronald Reagan called the country "the evil empire," his emphasis fell solely on "evil," by which he meant godless.¹⁰ Czarist Russia had been an empire, and during the civil war of 1918-1922, the Red Army took on a number of different national-liberation armies that were fighting the center more than they were fighting Bolshevism. Large chunks of the empire broke off and established independent nation-states: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Ukraine. Of these, only five countries around the Baltic Sea—Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland—got to keep their independence while Moscow reconquered the rest. Over the next several years, the Soviet government developed an entirely novel method of managing potentially troublesome regions. Historian Terry Martin has called the resulting system an "affirmative action empire."

At the basis of the affirmative action empire lay the belief that nationalism was a "masking ideology"—the need for national identity would fall away as class consciousness took hold and a stronger, socialist identity developed. National interests would naturally be superseded by class interests. Until that happened, however, national identities and national interests had to be acknowledged—but only insofar as they did not threaten the unity of the Soviet state. The Bolsheviks created a maze of national republics—starting with four (Russia, Ukraine, Belorussia, and the Transcaucasian Republic) and then subdividing them and conquering new territories for a total of eleven. Education and cultural production in the national language were encouraged in the republics. The largest, Russia, was an exception: both the expression and cultivation of a Russian national identity were strongly discouraged. Other ethnic groups living on the territory of the Russian republic were, however, pressed to assert themselves. Indeed, tiny ethnic groups were "discovered" and the number of ethnicities in Soviet Russia kept growing—for a time. In the 1930s the policy was rolled back, whether because of Russians' resentment, Stalin's paranoia (he feared subjects who might have connections to members of their ethnic groups living elsewhere in the world), or because the contradictions between the policy and its theoretical underpinnings had become too glaring—or for all these reasons. The practice of fostering national education and culture was scaled down. The Russian ethnicity was officially redeemed, and indeed the leading role of the Russian people began to be emphasized in most propaganda. The official expression of this new approach was "friendship of the peoples." The affirmative action empire was over. All peoples were equal, but the Russian nation was "first among equals." The phrase first appeared in a Pravda front-page editorial:

All the peoples [of the USSR], participants in the great socialist construction project, can take pride in the results of their work. All of them from the smallest to the largest are equal Soviet patriots. But the first among equals is the Russian people, the Russian workers, the Russian toilers, whose role in the entire Great Proletarian Revolution, from the first victory to today's brilliant

period of its development, has been exclusively great.¹¹

This was 1936—about a decade before Orwell's Animal Farm, with its principle that "some animals are more equal than others."

A campaign of concerted promotion of the Russian language, culture, art, and people began. The language was anointed the greatest of all the languages of the USSR. A 1937 editorial proclaimed: "In the center of the mighty family of peoples of the USSR stands the great Russian people, passionately loved by all the peoples of the USSR, the first among equals."¹² The constitution adopted in 1936 stated that the USSR was a "state union formed on the basis of the voluntary unification of equal Soviet Socialist Republics," each of which had the right to secede.¹³

In 1939-1940, in accordance with a pact Stalin signed with Hitler, the Soviet Union annexed some of the territories of the former Russian Empire, including a part of Poland (which was integrated into Ukraine and Belorussia), a chunk of Romania (which became Moldavia), a part of Finland (which eventually became a part of the Russian Republic), and the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, which became republics within the Soviet Union—with the theoretical right to secession. The constitution adopted in 1977, which Alexander Nikolaevich helped draft, added that the USSR was "multinational" and a federation. At the same time, the constitution gave the central government complete control over policy, including the command economy, and provided no guarantees of representation of the republics in the central government.¹⁴ Each of the constituent republics had its own cookie-cutter constitution, which gave it virtually no control over law, policy, or budget, even on paper. Yet every republic was, on paper, a "sovereign state." The Russian Republic itself was a federation that contained sixteen different "autonomous republics" that were also "states," plus dozens of other territorial units. None of these, however, had the right to secede from the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic.¹⁵ In the daily experience of the Soviet citizen, living in one or another constituent republic meant little. Quality of life was determined by individual privilege and, to a lesser extent, by proximity to the center. For visitors from other republics, life in the

Baltics appeared strikingly different—in large part because these republics were annexed later and retained some of their pre-Soviet infrastructure and culture; fewer people there spoke Russian, while other republics had been subjected to decades of learning the greatest of all languages. All Soviet citizens, however, were aware of their ethnicity, which was never neutral information—it could confer advantages where vestiges of affirmative action remained, or open one up to official discrimination or persecution if one's ethnic group was currently suspect. Policies and practices regarding different Soviet ethnicities shifted shapes frequently, and one had to be alert to successfully navigate the terrain of the "friendship of the peoples."

In other words, the Soviet system of managing both the republics and the various ethnic groups who populated them was inherently contradictory. Soviet Russia had once declared itself to be the world's first multiethnic anti-imperial state, yet its practices were imperial. It was another of the games the Soviet state played, much like the "We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us" game.

PERSONAL

Mikhail Sergeevich,

Some mathematical problems have no solution. They cannot be solved. Mathematics has methods for proving that a problem is unsolvable.

Karabakh is such a problem. It cannot be solved. There is no optimal solution. Any conceivable solution will be

unacceptable to one of the two sides.¹⁶

Alexander Nikolaevich wrote this note to Gorbachev in January 1988. For months, tension had been building between the republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan in the Caucasus concerning Nagorny Karabakh, an ethnic Armenian enclave that was part of Azerbaijan. This was the first region in the Soviet Union to cry foul in the nationalism/internationalism game. The impossibility of a solution was obvious: Azerbaijan was never going to cede the territory to

Armenia, and Armenia was never again going to be satisfied with Armenians living in Azerbaijan on what it thought of as historic Armenian land. One could, of course, have argued that it did not matter where a Soviet citizen lived, since republics had no real authority. But the fragile balance between symbolism and lived experience, identity and perception, had been shattered.

The Armenians appealed to Moscow for help. Alexander Nikolaevich was shocked by the depth of the conflict. He had always thought of nationalism as a retrograde ideology whose adherents were a priori in the wrong, making their opponents, invariably, right. Now he saw the face of ethnic conflicts the world over: no one was in the right. "It's time to stop wasting time and effort looking for a solution and, instead, look for a way out of the predicament in which we find ourselves," he wrote to Gorbachev. Alexander Nikolaevich proposed imposing direct Moscow rule in the region and, in the interests of lowering tensions, reintroducing full censorship in both Armenia and Azerbaijan. He proposed to "abstain completely from using any visual information (televised images, photographs, documentary film footage etc.) other than precleared materials of a positive nature."¹⁷

It did not work. About a month after Alexander Nikolaevich wrote the letter, the Nagorny Karabakh regional council, until then a ceremonial body, resolved to secede from Azerbaijan and join Armenia. Two days later, fighting broke out. The Politburo attempted to intervene by removing the head of the Nagorny Karabakh Party organization. Anti-Armenian pogroms broke out in Azerbaijan. Moscow removed Party bosses of both Armenia and Azerbaijan. Each republic voted to consider Nagorny Karabakh its own. Moscow sided with Azerbaijan. More anti-Armenian pogroms followed. Armenia expelled ethnic Azeris. Gorbachev had the Nagorny Karabakh secessionist movement leaders arrested (they were released six months later). Azerbaijan's Supreme Soviet voted to secede from the USSR. Anti-Armenian pogroms broke out in the Azerbaijan capital, Baku, a large, opulent city—one of the world's first oil capitals, where Azeris, Armenians, Jews, and assorted others had thrived for over a century. Now ninety Armenians were dead and the rest of the Armenians of Baku became refugees. Chess champion Garry Kasparov, a Baku native of Armenian-Jewish descent, chartered a plane to evacuate his family and as many other Armenians as the vessel could fit. Soviet troops entered Baku a week after the pogroms began and killed about 130 people. Armenia voted to secede from the USSR.¹⁸ It was now August 1990—two and a half years after Alexander Nikolaevich wrote the letter urging Gorbachev to seek a way out rather than a solution.

The Soviet Union was splitting along all of its seams. Gorbachev, though he may not have followed Alexander Nikolaevich's recommendations precisely, had been doing nothing but looking for a way out instead of solutions. Organizations that called themselves "popular fronts"—a term coined in Nagorny Karabakh—appeared, one after another, in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, as well as Ukraine and Belorussia. All proclaimed support for perestroika as their goal, but it quickly emerged that their goals did not match Gorbachev's.¹⁹ The Baltic republics, where there was still a living awareness that there had been a life before the Soviets, wanted their independence back. On August 23, 1989, as many as two million people formed a human chain connecting Vilnius, Riga, and Tallinn, the capitals of the three republics. If this count is correct, then one in four residents of the region participated in the peaceful protest, called the Baltic Way. The date was the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Hitler- Stalin pact that had granted the Baltics to the USSR. These people did not want to secede: they wanted an end to the occupation.

Five days earlier, Alexander Nikolaevich had given perhaps the most difficult interview of his life: he told the Pravda that the pact, known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and the secret protocols that divided Europe, existed. The USSR had denied the existence of the protocol for five decades. Just ten weeks before the fiftieth anniversary of the signing, Alexander Nikolaevich had hastily convened a commission to formulate a new, glasnost-appropriate stance on the pact. He was ill prepared, and he was not even entirely sure, at the start, that the secret protocol existed: the USSR had not

preserved an original copy. Still, he felt, it was essential for official Moscow to say something to distance Gorbachev from Stalin, on the one hand, and on the other, to de-escalate tensions with the Baltics.²⁰ The line he took in the Pravda interview was to acknowledge the protocols but not the occupation: Moscow would still claim that the Baltic states had voluntarily joined the empire. The hedge failed. Alexander Nikolaevich dealt a blow to the all-important myth of the infallibility of Soviet action in the Second World War, but from the point of view of the Baltics, his revelation was painfully insufficient. In a few months, Lithuania took a declaratory step toward independence: its Communist Party decided to sever ties with the Soviet Party organization. This was a double blow—to the Soviet Union and to the Party.

article 6 of the Constitution of the USSR stated, "The Communist Party of the Soviet Union is the leading and directive force of Soviet society and the nucleus of its political system." In other words, it had the monopoly on everything. Two bureaucracies existed—the Party one and the state one—but a single career ladder fed both, and Soviet bosses moved between Party and state jobs, often combining them.

In June 1989, during the first Congress of People's Deputies of the USSR, as the entire country watched, glued to the television, the recently elected Sakharov called for the abolition of Article 6. If the country failed to distribute power, he warned, perestroika would fail.²¹ What he was proposing sounded impossible even to Sakharov's allies at the Congress. But in just six months, when the pro- democracy faction formed a movement they called Democratic Russia, they proclaimed the fight against the Communist Party's monopoly their top goal.²² Sakharov had died a week earlier. Yeltsin became the singular leader of Democratic Russia. He had come up through the Party's hierarchy, but his views were changing faster than those of any other top-level Communist.

In the spring of 1990, Estonia and Latvia declared null and void all documents that made them a part of the USSR. In June, the Russian Republic, which now had its own parliament—chaired by Yeltsin— voted to assert "state sovereignty," though no one knew what that might mean. The following month, Yeltsin resigned from the Communist Party, and this meant that the largest Soviet republic, the first among equals, now had a leader who was not a member of the Party.

Alexander Nikolaevich disliked Yeltsin, his naked populism and his unabashed ambition. Alexander Nikolaevich was committed to reforming the system rather than destroying it, but as perestroika progressed, the distinction proved increasingly fuzzy. Sometimes, reform, as opposed to destruction, looked simply impossible. By late 1989, Alexander Nikolaevich came to the conclusion that the Soviet Union needed to be transformed into a federation, each of whose members would have tangible legislative independence and economic responsibility.²³ But he expected patience and trust from the republics. In October 1989, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Polish-born former national security adviser and scholar of totalitarianism who had counseled a succession of American presidents, came to Moscow and, among other questions, asked Alexander Nikolaevich what would happen if the Baltics ratcheted up their calls for independence. Alexander Nikolaevich said that this would be the end of perestroika because Gorbachev needed everyone to try to ride things out as a union.²⁴ Brzezinski was unimpressed. He titled his next book The Grand Failure, and in it he condemned not only the Soviet experiment but also Gorbachev's efforts at reform. He predicted that only Poland and Hungary might have a shot at a peaceful transition and a post-Communist future. For the Soviet Union, he laid out five pessimistic scenarios, two of which involved coups, either by the military or by the KGB, and one, the outright collapse of the regime.²⁵

Alexander Nikolaevich feared the failure of perestroika perhaps more than anything else. He kept lashing out at the Party's conservatives for holding the process back, and at times it seemed like Gorbachev had stopped listening to him altogether: all he was doing at any given point was looking for a stopgap measure, a way to balance the teetering union at the edge of a precipice. In the summer of 1990, following Russia's declaration of sovereignty (whatever it meant), the conservative wing pressured Gorbachev to introduce a state of emergency. He went halfway: he abolished the deliberative top government bodies of the USSR in favor of a cabinet and a security council under direct presidential control, but he refused to declare a state of emergency. But in January 1991, without any formal declaration, he allowed his ministers of defense and of the interior and the head of the KGB to try to retake the Baltics. This was exactly two years after the bloodshed in Baku, on a different edge of the empire. This time, nineteen people died: fifteen in Vilnius and four in Riga.²⁶ This was why Masha's mother told her they would never be welcome in Lithuania again.

Alexander Nikolaevich had known nothing of the planned intervention, and he did not know what to say to journalists who questioned him about the killings in Vilnius. He had not spoken to Gorbachev in days. He was not even sure he had a job any longer. One thing he knew for certain now, though, was that he had changed his mind about the nature of the Union: he decided that "friendship of the peoples" had been, at best, a delusion.²⁷

For a few days after Vilnius, some Soviet citizens assumed and others feared that the conservatives had taken over, perestroika had ended, and the only remaining question was how fast, and how far, reforms would be rolled back. But Gorbachev continued his balancing act, over a precipice that seemed to grow only deeper: both sides were now sure at all times that he was unduly favoring the other. Gorbachev scheduled a referendum on the future of the country. The single question citizens of the USSR were asked to consider: "Do you believe it is necessary to preserve the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as a renewed federation of sovereign republics with equal rights, where the rights and freedoms of people of all nationalities will be fully guaranteed?" It was not clear what the legal and practical consequences would be, or even what the question meant, since, with the exception of the words "renewed federation," it said the same thing as the existing Soviet constitution. Really, it was not so much a referendum as an opinion poll, with one poorly designed, overburdened question.

The Central Referendum Commission of the USSR reported that nearly 150 million people, or 80 percent of all eligible voters, took part in the referendum and that they overwhelmingly voted to preserve the Soviet Union: 76.4 percent said yes. Trouble was, all of these voters lived in nine of the fifteen republics. The Baltics and Armenia did not vote at all. In Georgia and Moldavia, the vote took place only in a couple of outlier regions. Kazakhstan offered an edited version of the referendum question, without the word "federation" or any reference to human rights.²⁸ The center no longer wielded sufficient power to compel different republics to coordinate efforts and questions on a referendum. There was little basis for concluding that a majority of citizens of the Soviet Union wanted the same thing, but Gorbachev interpreted the results as a mandate to draft a renewed union treaty. Yeltsin pressed on with the business of state- building in Russia. In late March—just ten days after the referendum —Gorbachev banned demonstrations in Moscow, to prevent a Yeltsin rally. Tanks blocked some of the streets in the center of the city. Demonstrators came out anyway, and no blood was shed. Once again, no one had won: the struggles between Yeltsin and Gorbachev, between the conservatives and the democrats, between the unionists and the pro-independence forces continued, almost ploddingly. On June 12, Yeltsin was overwhelmingly elected president of the Russian Republic. The new union treaty was scheduled to be signed on August 20.

Alexander Nikolaevich was, by turns, terrified, dismayed, and angry. In late April he wrote Gorbachev a letter warning him that conservative forces were gaining the upper hand. The only way forward was to stop Gorbachev's incessant political zigzagging. If Gorbachev was not going to lead decisive political and economic reform, then Alexander Nikolaevich would try to do it himself. "I must be, I absolutely must be honest before my country, before my people, before my self!" he wrote. "I shall seek dignified ways to fight incipient fascism and the Party's reactionism, to fight for the democratic transformation of our society. I don't have that much time left."²⁹ Alexander Nikolaevich was speaking not so much about the time he personally had left—he was sixty-eight, just eight years older than both Gorbachev and Yeltsin—as about the country, where, he felt, the window of opportunity for change had nearly closed.

Alexander Nikolaevich decided to help form a new political movement, the Movement for Democratic Reform. It had three foundational principles. Politically, it would renounce the vision of the USSR as a unitary state in favor of creating a federation with a clear division of rights and responsibilities between members and the center. Economically, it would set out a clear program of transition to a market system, in which, for the interim period, the state would retain only a third of all property. Most important, it would create a safety net for those who would be hardest-hit by economic reform.³⁰ The difference between a "movement" and a "party" was as confusing as everything else in the USSR. A movement exists to create change while a party strives to govern. But in the new Soviet reality a movement could include several parties. But then, a megaparty—the megaparty—was starting to include different movements. For Alexander Nikolaevich, it was key that he did not need to leave the Communist Party to become one of the leaders of the new movement. He was still hoping that the massive weight of the Party could be tilted in favor of reform. On July 20, 1991, he delivered an inspired speech at the founding congress of his new movement. He spoke of the painful discoveries that he had made, most of them in the six years since perestroika began:

We have fallen two epochs behind. We have missed the postindustrial era and the information era. As a result, our society is deeply ill. Our souls are permanently empty. We have grown to presume everyone guilty at all times, thus creating hundreds of thousands of guards watching over our morality, conscience, purity of world view, compliance with the wishes of the authorities. We have turned truth into a crime. We have robbed nature to within a breath of its life. We have created crime, queues, rudeness, corruption that goes all the way up from a store's truck unloader to a government minister. We have ostracized intellectualism and fostered a regime of the ignorant

Today we are living as though in two worlds at once. The old Stalinist world does not want to leave, and it is holding on to everything that can still prop it up. The new world is struggling to stay afloat within the old structures and often begins to act in

accordance with their rules

Over the last seventy years the Communist Party of the Soviet Union has been not a party but an organization of administrative command, integrated into the structures of state as its primary

Legislator, Distributor, Controller, and Monopolist on the Truth

None of this is said by way of reproach. These are lessons. Marx never imagined that his analysis of early capitalism would be transformed into an ideological weapon in the struggle for power. Nor is our great people to blame for having followed its trusting nature and its passionate faith in a better life, making it vulnerable to manipulation. It would not be right to direct this criticism at the millions of ordinary Communists who have been dominated by a

caste of Party bosses.³¹

This was war. Party leadership began talking about expelling Alexander Nikolaevich. A top-level member had not been expelled since the Stalin era: this seemed a fate worse than death. Death was another option. Alexander Nikolaevich got word that he might be assassinated. He drafted a letter to be opened in case of his death and then sought out the head of the KGB, his old protege Kryuchkov, in the Kremlin corridor. "Tell your people that they've miscalculated," he said. "I've drafted a letter, and three different outlets will publish it if something happens to me."³² On August 15, the Party Control Committee—which was precisely what its name suggests, a committee created for the control of Communists and the disciplining of any who strayed—voted to recommend Alexander Nikolaevich's expulsion.³³ Alexander Nikolaevich heard about it on the radio. On August 16, he wrote two letters. The shorter one, marked with his Party membership number—00000051—tendered his resignation.³⁴ The longer one was titled "An open letter to Communists on the danger of revanchism." Alexander Nikolaevich had been working on it for over three months, but it so happened that he finished it the day the Party expelled him. Two days later, on August 18, he showed the

draft to one of the other founders of the Movement for Democratic Reform, Leningrad mayor Anatoly Sobchak. Alexander Nikolaevich wanted to ensure it was clear and well-argued before sending it out. "Tragedy is possible," warned the letter, "for changes have affected the interests of the ruling elite." The letter was never sent.³⁵

on august 18, Masha's mother came to pick her up from her grandparents' dacha. She said she needed her daughter in Moscow to apply for a new foreign-travel passport for her. Three months earlier, Gorbachev had signed a new law concerning entering and exiting the USSR. The Iron Curtain was being lifted in stages. At the beginning, only a very few people were allowed to travel out of the Soviet Union, and only if they had a compelling reason and a slew of sterling character references from their place of work, their place of residence, and, preferably, the Party too. Foreign-travel passports were kept under lock and key, released only for the duration of the approved trip—no one got to keep his passport around the house. Starting in the mid-1980s, the vetting process gradually relaxed. Now the new law would make it possible for ordinary Russians to obtain five-year travel passports and even, if the law was followed to the letter, release them from the obligation to apply for an exit visa every time they wanted to travel.³⁶ Tatiana, whose business often took her to Poland, had long used her connections to secure a foreign-travel passport with a long-term exit visa, but with the new law, she figured she would get one for her daughter.

On August 19, Tatiana and Masha took the commuter train into the center of Moscow, then the Metro, and then an aboveground tram to their neighborhood. When the tram was passing through a tunnel at Volokolamskoye Roadway, Masha saw two tanks moving in the opposite direction.

"Wow! Cool!" said Masha.

"Fuck," said Tatiana.

She thought for a moment.

"We have to leave the country," she said. "We are getting off the tram." Her plan was to go directly to the passport office and, rather

than apply for a new passport for Masha, have her name added to Tatiana's passport. Then they would go directly to the American embassy, where, rumor had it, anyone could get a visa just for showing up. Then they would leave the country.

The woman at the passport office refused the request and refused a bribe too. Her boss said, "Come back in a week." It was all over: there was no point in even applying for a passport for Masha. They left.

They could not go home. It had been nearly two years since Tatiana managed to get rid of their flatmate, so the apartment was no longer a communal one; Tatiana and Masha had its two rooms and a kitchen all to themselves, but now Tatiana was being harassed by the reketiry—a new Russian word that meant "racketeers"—a mafia in the making that was trying to ride on the coattails of private enterprise in the making. Most of these guys ran primitive protection rackets, promising to be the krysha—cover—that would shield you from others like them. Lately they had established a permanent post outside Tatiana's apartment door. She did not want to go there with her child, so they went to Tatiana's parents' apartment instead.

In the empty apartment, Tatiana turned on the television. Swan Lake, the ballet, was on. She changed the channel. Swan Lake. This was boring. Masha went outside into the courtyard and played with a boy named Vitalik.

at six and at eight that morning, when the radio and television channels resumed programming after their nightly break, a familiar male voice had come on the air and said, "A decree of the vice- president of the USSR. In light of the inability, for health reasons, of Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev to carry out his duties as president of the USSR . . . the vice-president of the USSR, Yanaev, has taken over the duties of the president of the USSR as of August 19, 1991." Then the anchor read two addresses to the people of the USSR from people who called themselves "the Soviet leadership." First came a dry one, announcing a state of emergency effective at four that afternoon. Then came an impassioned one:

Countrymen! Citizens of the USSR!

It is at a critical hour for the fate of the Motherland and our peoples that we address you! A deadly danger is looming over our great Motherland! Reforms initiated by M. S. Gorbachev . . . have hit a dead end. Enthusiasm and hope have given way to distrust, apathy, and despair.

It blamed the reforms for inter-ethnic strife that had killed hundreds and turned half a million into refugees.

Every citizen feels a growing uncertainty about what tomorrow may bring and a deep worry for the future of his children.

It blamed the reforms for the country's economic crisis.

It is long past time to tell people the truth: failing urgent and decisive steps to stabilize the economy, the very near future will inevitably bring famine and a new wave of impoverishment.

It blamed the reforms for rising crime rates. The country is sinking into a quagmire of violence and lawlessness.

It promised to restore the pride, safety, and integrity of the USSR —that is, on the eve of the planned signing of the union treaty, to restore the empire to its former self. Read on the air and published in the morning's newspapers, the address was signed by the State Committee on the State of Emergency in the USSR, which numbered eight people, including Gorbachev's vice-president, Gennady Yanaev; and the head of the KGB, Kryuchkov; as well as the prime minister and the ministers of defense and the interior—the entire conservative cadre with whom Gorbachev had recently surrounded himself.³⁷ It took ten minutes to read all three documents. After that, Swan Lake came on.

Zhanna was in the countryside outside Gorky with her grandmother. Her parents had gone to Moscow the day before—they had planned only to pass through on their way to vacation on the Black Sea. Now, with nothing but Swan Lake for news, Zhanna's grandmother was sure that her son was in the thick of whatever was happening in Moscow, and she was worried sick. So was Zhanna.

They were right to be worried. Raisa, Zhanna's mother, was in front of the White House, the massive high-rise of white concrete that housed the Russian Supreme Soviet. Yeltsin had declared it the headquarters of resistance to the coup, and hundreds of people gathered there. After a bit of consideration, they started building barricades. Zhanna's father, Boris, was inside the building.

in solikamsk, where Lyosha's mother had been watching politics on television for two years, everyone was now watching the ballet on television. The grown-ups seemed subdued. In the days before Swan Lake, Galina's coworkers had been coming by the apartment to discuss lesson plans: the school year was starting in less than two weeks and history, it seemed, had changed again, so teaching it had to change too. The same thing had happened the summer before, and the summer before that. Now they were silent. At some point the ballet stopped and a gray picture with six old men wearing suits of different shades of gray appeared. One of them introduced the rest, and each of the men half stood at the sound of his name. Lyosha remembered the name of one of the men in the middle: Yanaev. He said that Gorbachev could no longer work as president and he, Yanaev, was taking over. Lyosha also remembered the word "Foros"— it was the name of the place where Yanaev said Gorbachev was lying ill.³⁸

Then there was a man on a tank, a big man surrounded by many smaller men. He held a piece of paper in his hand, and he said that something was illegal.³⁹ Lyosha asked his mother who it was. "That's our president," Galina said.

Then there was an airplane on the TV, against a dark sky, the sound of its engines winding down, and Gorbachev descending the stairs wearing a light casual jacket and smiling. His granddaughter followed, draped in a blanket, and Gorbachev's wife, Raisa, her arm around the girl. Gorbachev shook hands with several men, and then his face came fully into focus and a voice said, "Mikhail Sergeevich, for three days the country has been living in terrible tension, in awful worry for its president, for its future, for the fate of democracy. . . ."⁴⁰ Lyosha started crying. He loved Gorbachev so much, and he really had been so worried and so tense ever since he heard that Gorbachev was sick.

Soon it began to seem to Lyosha that all of it had happened in one day—the ballet, the three presidents on TV one after another, then Gorbachev's granddaughter with the blanket, and the tears. In fact, it had taken three days. On August 18, four men dispatched by the leaders of the coup flew to Gorbachev's dacha in Foros, in the Crimea, and effectively took Gorbachev hostage. The following morning, television broadcasts began with the state-of-emergency announcement and transitioned to Swan Lake. Yeltsin and his closest supporters took up their post inside the White House and his more distant supporters began to gather around the building while troops entered the city. Around noon Yeltsin climbed atop a tank parked outside the White House and declared the state of emergency illegal— but this would not be shown on television that day or the next. Instead, the gray men held their televised press conference. The people outside the White House, who now numbered in the thousands, built barricades that never could have stopped a tank, and handed out gas masks, falling far short of being able to equip everyone. The following day passed in nervous anticipation outside the White House and negotiations inside: the general who would have to lead the attack on the White House was unwilling to obey that order if it came but was not going to switch sides either. In the early-morning hours of August 21, three young men died trying to stop armored personnel carriers headed in the direction of the White House but still nearly a mile from it. By mid-afternoon six men, including the minister of defense and KGB director Kryuchkov, flew to the Crimea. A couple of hours later three men from among the coup's opponents followed them. Around two o'clock the following morning Gorbachev's plane landed in Moscow. Kryuchkov, who flew on the same plane, was immediately taken into custody: the Russian prosecutor general had already ordered the arrest of all the coup organizers. At noon on August 22 a Russian flag—white, blue, and red stripes—was raised over the White House for the first time. That afternoon Gorbachev held a press conference in which he said, "I have come back to a different country." He said that there had been an attempt to return the country to a totalitarian state and it had failed. At some point, Gorbachev had started using the word "totalitarian" to describe the regime that now seemed, finally, to have toppled. With that out of the way, he said, he would now press ahead with a new union treaty. He had already appointed ministers to replace the rebels in the Soviet government.⁴¹