Michael: What if the greatest catastrophe for a country isn't losing a war or an economic collapse, but losing the ability to understand itself? Today, we're exploring a story where an entire nation was forbidden from knowing its own mind, with consequences that echo into tomorrow's headlines. Kevin: Whoa, that's a heavy start. It’s like being a character in a story who has amnesia, but the author won't let you find out who you are. The potential for disaster feels enormous. Michael: It’s the perfect setup for the chilling premise at the heart of Masha Gessen's The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia. Kevin: And Gessen is the perfect person to tell this story. They're not just a journalist; they grew up in Moscow, emigrated, and then returned, only to have to leave again under pressure from Putin's regime. This isn't just academic for them; it's personal. Michael: Exactly. And that personal stake, combined with incredible research, won the book the National Book Award. It’s a masterclass in showing how totalitarianism isn't just a political system, but a psychological one. Gessen argues it begins by creating a society that can't think about itself. Kevin: How do you even do that? How do you stop a whole country from being self-aware? Michael: You start by destroying the tools. You create what Gessen calls an "intellectual void."

Michael: In the prologue, Gessen asks a haunting question: "If a modern country has no sociologists, psychologists, or philosophers, what can it know about itself? And what can its citizens know about themselves?" For decades, this was the reality in the Soviet Union. Kevin: Hold on, they literally banned sociology and psychology? How can a country even function without trying to understand its own people? Michael: They didn't just ban them; they replaced them with ideology. The state decided what a person was, how society worked, and any attempt to study it empirically was seen as a threat. Gessen uses the analogy of the six blind men and the elephant—each describing a different part, none seeing the whole. The Soviet regime essentially ensured everyone was blind and then told them what the elephant looked like. Kevin: That's terrifying. It’s like trying to be a chef but only being allowed to study the color of food, not the taste or texture. You'd have no real understanding of what you're creating. Michael: Precisely. And Gessen shows this through the incredible story of a woman named Marina Arutyunyan. In 1973, she enrolls in the psychology department at Moscow State University, hoping to learn the secrets of the human soul. Kevin: A noble quest. I'm guessing it didn't go as planned. Michael: Not even close. She walks into a world of pure dogma. Instead of exploring the human psyche, she's taught Marxist-Leninist philosophy. The core of her first few years of study is a bizarre, counterintuitive mantra: "shifting motive onto the goal." Kevin: What does that even mean? It sounds like corporate jargon from hell. Michael: It was a way of saying that individual desires and inner conflicts don't matter. All that matters is the collective goal. The individual psyche was basically erased from the equation. She describes seeing human brains preserved in formaldehyde, and it felt more like a butcher shop than a place of learning. The study of the soul had no soul. Kevin: Wow, that’s incredibly frustrating. So what did she do? Just accept this reality? Michael: This is where it gets interesting. She discovers what Gessen calls fortochkas—a Russian word for the small, hinged panes in a window you can open for a bit of fresh air. Even in this suffocating intellectual environment, there were tiny cracks. Kevin: Like what? Secret, underground philosophy clubs? Michael: Almost. There were a few lecturers, like the famous psychologist Alexander Luria, who had been part of the psychoanalytic movement before it was crushed. He would subtly drop hints of a different world of thought. But the biggest fortochka was the spetskhran—the restricted-access collection in the university library. Kevin: Ah, the forbidden books section! Every story needs one. Michael: And it's there, after years of propaganda, that Marina finally gets her hands on the works of Sigmund Freud. She reads his case studies, and for the first time, she's reading about real, complex human beings with inner lives, fears, and desires. It was a revelation. Kevin: I can only imagine. After years of being told the psyche doesn't exist, she finds the one person who made it his life's work. But that just highlights the absurdity of it all. Most people didn't have access to that fortochka. Michael: Exactly. The vast majority of the population was raised in this intellectual vacuum. And this created a specific type of person, a concept that's central to the book: Homo Sovieticus. Kevin: The Soviet Man. I’ve heard the term, but what does it actually mean in Gessen’s context? Michael: It's a person shaped by decades of this system. Someone who is deeply dependent on the state, who has learned to live with "doublethink"—holding contradictory beliefs without any cognitive dissonance—and who is profoundly cynical. They play the game, repeating the slogans, but don't believe in them. As the old Soviet joke went: "We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us." Kevin: So you have a nation of people who have been conditioned not to trust their own minds, not to analyze their own society, and to be deeply cynical about everything. Michael: Yes. And that sets the stage for what happens next. Because a person who cannot examine their own life is tragically unprepared for the shock of having that life completely fall apart.

Kevin: Okay, so you have this society that's been deliberately kept in the dark about itself. What happens when the walls suddenly come down in the 1990s? Is it a rush of enlightenment? Michael: Gessen argues it was more like a rush of trauma. The collapse of the Soviet Union wasn't a clean break. It was chaos. And the Homo Sovieticus, this person conditioned for stability and dependence, was thrown into the deep end of radical, unpredictable freedom and brutal market economics. Kevin: I can see how that would be terrifying. But they also got things they never had before, right? Freedom of speech, new goods, the ability to travel. Michael: They did. And this is the paradox that Gessen, drawing on the research of sociologist Lev Gudkov, so brilliantly explains. It’s a phenomenon called "relative deprivation." Gudkov's surveys in the 90s showed that even as Russians' real incomes and living standards were objectively rising, they reported feeling poorer and more miserable. Kevin: That's so counterintuitive. They have more freedom, more stuff, but they're unhappier? Why? Michael: Because for the first time, they could see what the West had. The "Legs of Bush"—the American chicken quarters that flooded the market—were a symbol of both salvation from hunger and national humiliation. They were no longer comparing themselves to their neighbors in the communal apartment; they were comparing themselves to a lifestyle they saw in Western movies, and the gap felt immense. They felt like losers on the world stage. Kevin: So freedom didn't feel like a victory; it felt like a confirmation of their own inferiority. That’s a heavy psychological burden. Michael: It's a huge burden. And it was compounded by another critical failure: the inability to process the past. Gessen calls it "arrested grief." The country never had a real reckoning with the horrors of the Stalinist era. Victims and perpetrators, and their children, lived side-by-side. Family histories were full of secrets and voids. Kevin: Was there any attempt to lead a national conversation about this? Michael: There was a moment. Gessen describes Boris Yeltsin's powerful speech in 1998 at the reburial of the last Czar and his family, who were executed by the Bolsheviks. Yeltsin said, "As we bury the remains of these innocent victims, we seek redemption for the sins of our fathers... The blame belongs with all of us." It was a call for national penitence. Kevin: That sounds like a major turning point. Michael: But it wasn't. The idea of shared responsibility never took hold. It was too painful, too complex. People didn't want to dig into the past; they wanted to escape it. And this created a powerful, toxic nostalgia for the Soviet era—not necessarily for communism, but for the certainty it provided. The stability, the sense of national pride, the feeling of being a superpower. Kevin: They missed the cage because the open field was too scary. Michael: A perfect way to put it. And this psychological state—this feeling of humiliation, this un-grieved trauma, this yearning for a strong hand to restore order and national pride—created the perfect vacuum. A vacuum that Vladimir Putin was masterfully able to fill. Kevin: So he didn't just seize power. In a way, the society was calling for a figure like him. Michael: Gessen's argument is that the new totalitarianism wasn't just imposed; it was reclaimed. It rose from the ashes of that unresolved history. It offered a simple narrative: the 90s were a time of chaos and humiliation brought on by the West, and he was there to restore Russia's greatness. He gave them an enemy to blame and a past to be proud of, even if that past was a fiction.

Kevin: So it's a vicious cycle. The old regime creates a person who can't self-reflect, and when that regime collapses, that same person can't handle the chaos of freedom and yearns for the certainty of the cage they just left. Michael: Exactly. And that's the tragedy Gessen lays bare. The future becomes history. Russia's path wasn't a simple slide back into dictatorship; it was a reclamation. The unexamined past created a vacuum, and a new, more sophisticated form of totalitarianism was ready to fill it. It's a system that offers the illusion of choice, which Gessen shows through the story of Seryozha, a young man who flies to Moscow to vote in a sham election just to feel like he's participating, even as he knows it's meaningless. It's a system that thrives on that arrested development. Kevin: It’s a profound and deeply pessimistic argument, but it feels so logical. It’s not just about one bad leader; it’s about the psychological soil that allows such leaders to grow, again and again. Michael: That's the core of the book. It's a warning that democracy isn't a destination you arrive at. It's a practice. It requires a society that is willing and able to look at itself, warts and all. Without that, the ghosts of the past will always be waiting to reclaim the future. Kevin: It makes you wonder, what are the 'unexamined histories' in our own societies that might be shaping our future in ways we don't even see? Michael: That's a powerful question. We'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Join the conversation on our social channels. What parts of this story resonated with you? Kevin: This is Aibrary, signing off.