Abstract
Having already discussed the significance of ideology, cultural dynamics, and society’s historical memory in Russia, Langdon and Tismaneanu establish Putin’s Russia as a totalitarian democracy that normalizes the abnormal. Through examinations of authoritarianism, fascism, and totalitarianism in the context of modern Russia, the authors conclude that Putin’s political success is not guaranteed by personality alone: it requires the consent of the masses, plus some sort of imposed ideology. This trend, as well as other tenets of Putinism, is not just limited to Russia, either. This final chapter reaffirms the worldwide need to question governments, to think individually, and to understand—but not necessarily accept—how and why nation-states, parties, and masses turn to populism, nationalism, authoritarianism, and even fascism or totalitarianism in modern times.
Bitches always hate decent people.
—Boris Nemtsov
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Notes
- 1.
Stephen Kotkin, “Comment: From Overlooking to Overestimating Russia’s Authoritarianism?” Slavic Review, Vol. 68, No. 3 (Fall 2009), p. 549.
- 2.
Jacob L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London: Secker and Warburg, 1952), pp. 1–2.
- 3.
Ben Judah, Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In and Out of Love with Vladimir Putin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), p. 325.
- 4.
M. Steven Fish, “The Kremlin Emboldened: What is Putinism?” Journal of Democracy, Vol. 28, No. 4 (October 2017), p. 71.
- 5.
Karen Dawisha, Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? (New York: Simon and Schuster Paperbacks, 2014), pp. 349–350.
- 6.
Lev Gudkov and Eva Hartog, “The Evolution of Homo Sovieticus to Putin’s Man,” The Moscow Times, 13 October 2017.
- 7.
Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2018), p. 278.
- 8.
Nerses Isajanuan, “Russia: Decriminalization of Domestic Violence,” The Library of Congress, June 2017; Yulia Gorbunova, “Law Not on Side of Russia’s Domestic Violence Victims: One Year Since Legislative Changes Weakened Protections,” Human Rights Watch, 14 February 2018.
- 9.
The Patriarchate of Moscow, “Patriarshaja komissija po voprosam sem’i vyrazhaet obespokoennost’ v svjazi s prinjatiem novoj redakcii stat’i 116 Ugolovnogo kodeksa,” The Patriarchate of Moscow, 4 July 2016.
- 10.
Natalya Kozlova, “Ruku Opusti,” Rossiiskaia Gazeta, 9 February 2017.
- 11.
Umberto Eco, “Ur-Fascism,” The New York Review of Books, 22 June 1995; Jason Kottke, “Umberto Eco Makes a List of the 14 Common Features of Fascism,” Open Culture, 22 November 2016.
- 12.
Jeffrey T. Schnapp, “Fascinating Fascism,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 31, No. 2 (April 1996), p. 238. Alexander J. Motl, “Is Vladimir Putin a Fascist?” Newsweek, 27 April 2015.
- 13.
Peg Birmingham, “A Lying World Order: Political Deception and the Threat of Totalitarianism,” in Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics, eds. Roger Berkowitz, Jeffrey Katz, and Thomas Keenan (New York: Fordham University, 2010), p. 74; Hannah Arendt, “The Seeds of a Fascist International,” in Essays in Understanding 1930–1954, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), p. 145.
- 14.
Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian books, 1958), pp. 447 and 452.
- 15.
Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996), p. 22; Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 380.
- 16.
Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, pp. 45 and 79–80.
- 17.
Alain Besançon, interview by Marius Stan and Vladimir Tismaneanu, “I’m for the Cold War!” Contributors.ro, 28 June 2015.
- 18.
Vladimir Tismaneanu, The Devil in History: Communism, Fascism, and Some Lessons of the Twentieth Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012), p. 49.
- 19.
Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, p. 230.
- 20.
Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, pp. 8, 62, and 227.
- 21.
Tony Judt, Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century (New York: Penguin Books, 2008), p. 261.
- 22.
Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2017), p. 123; Yuri Burtin, “Zhivoe i Mertvoe,” Literaturnaya gazeta, No. 34 (1990), p. 7.
- 23.
Karen Dawisha, Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? (New York: Simon and Schuster Paperbacks, 2014). We again refer readers to Karen Dawisha’s excellent examination of the shocking depth of corruption embedded within the Russian state at the behest of its top leaders.
- 24.
Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 474.
- 25.
Again, this calls attention to modern Russia’s invocation of a heroic, romanticized Soviet past. Russians today continue to ritualize worship for the Soviet soldiers who sacrificed their lives in World War II in the fight against fascism, but several million of them did not identify as Russian—a trait that heavily influences the culture of Putin’s Russia. Grigori Krivosheyev Rossija i SSSR v vojnah XX veka: poteri vooruzhennyh sil. Statisticheskoe issledovanie (Moscow: Voennoe izdatelstvo, 1993).
- 26.
Victor Zaslavsky, Class Cleansing: The Massacre at Katyn (Candor: Telos Press Publishing, 2008) and Katyn, DVD, dir. Andrzej Wajda (Warsaw: ITI Cinema, 2007).
- 27.
Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Benetti and Cesar Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), pp. 97 and 98.
- 28.
V. Fadeev, M. Rogozhnikov, A. Mekhanik, Yu. Polunin, and A. Smirnova, Oppozitsii nashego vremeni: Doklad Instituta obshchestvennogo proyektirovaniya o sostoyanii i perspektivakh politicheskoy sistemy Rossii (Moscow: Institut Obshchestvennogo Proyektirovaniya, 2011), p. 5.
- 29.
Vladimir Voinovich, The Anti-Soviet Soviet Union, trans. Richard Lourie (San Diego, New York, and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985), pp. 312–314. While the authors were revising this manuscript, Vladimir Voinovich passed away on 27 July 2018. Vladimir Tismaneanu had earlier reviewed his book The Anti-Soviet Soviet Union; Tismaneanu reread—and Kate Langdon, having been born in 1995, read for the first time—Voinovich’s book and found it enormously applicable to the culture of Putinism. The content of Voinovich’s book offers the perfect diagnosis of Putinism and Russian society’s larger ills, on the one hand; on the other hand, the later actions of the author—who accepted from Putin’s Kremlin both the State Prize of the Russian Federation in 2000 for his book Monumental Propaganda (about the Stalinist legacy’s survival into modern Russia) and the Andrei Sakharov Prize for Writer’s Civic Courage in 2002—reveal a continuation of the very contradictions expressed in The Anti-Soviet Soviet Union. It is difficult to reconcile Voinovich’s acceptance of these awards under Putin’s administration, the leader whom he did not stop criticizing until his recent death. It was obvious from the start of the Second Chechen War in 1999 that Putin’s regime had been based on genocide and racism, and the Voinovich of 1985 would have viewed the decision to accept an award from that kind of government as the despicable choice of an indoctrinated believer. Even though he spent the next several years of his life calling out Putin’s authoritarianism, Voinovich did not remedy his choice to accept the awards. The fact that such an otherwise outspoken person did not renounce the prizes is demonstrative of modern fascists’ abilities to transform angst about authoritarianism into support for authoritarianism. In a way, the dichotomy between Voinovich’s critical thoughts about authoritarianism and his acceptance of an authoritarian government’s awards is an accurate depiction of Putinism’s beguiling tactics and facades. Now that we are coming to the conclusion of our book and have explained the Voinovich conundrum to readers, we hope readers can remember this book as a dialogue informed by both Voinovich’s courage and his behavioral dilemma.
- 30.
Norman Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons: An Enquiry Inspired by the Great Witch-Hunt (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1975), pp. 224 and 259.
- 31.
Leszek Kołakowski. Freedom, Fame, Lying and Betrayal: Essays on Everyday Life, translated by Agnieszka Kołakowska (London and New York: The Penguin Group, 1999), pp. 36–37.
- 32.
Hannah Arendt, The Last Interview and Other Conversations (Brooklyn and London: Melville House Publishing, 2013), p. 61; Walter Laqueur, Putinism: Russia and Its Future with the West (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2015).
- 33.
Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, p. 219.
- 34.
Tony Judt, The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 126.
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Langdon, K.C., Tismaneanu, V. (2020). The New Dark Times. In: Putin’s Totalitarian Democracy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20579-9_8
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