4
" One evening, we were sitting in his apartment, and he says, ‘Little friend, by now you know what I’m like. I am basically not a very convenient person.’ And then he went on to describe himself: not a talker, can be pretty harsh, can hurt your feelings, and so on. Not a good person to spend your life with. And he goes on. ‘Over the course of three and a half years you’ve probably made up your mind.’ I realized we were probably breaking up. So I said, ‘Well, yes, I’ve made up my mind.’ And he said, with doubt in his voice, ‘Really?’ That’s when I knew we were definitely breaking up. ‘In that case,’ he said, “I love you and I propose we get married on such and such a day.’ And that was completely unexpected. "
― Masha Gessen , The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin
6
" Looking from the outside in, one cannot see, for example, whether people attend a parade because they are forced to do so or because they so desire. Researchers generally assumed one or the other: either that people were passive victims or that they were fervent believers. But on the inside, both assumptions were wrong, for all the people at the parade (or any other form of collective action) and for each one of them individually. They did not feel like helpless victims, but they did not feel like fanatics either. They felt normal. They were members of a society. The parades and various other forms of collective life gave them a sense of belonging that humans generally need. ... They would not be lying if they said that they wanted to be a part of the parade, or the collective in general - and that if they exerted pressure on others to be a part of the collective too, they did so willingly. But this did not make them true believers in the ideology, in the way Westerners might imagine it: the ideology served simply as a key to unity, as the collective's shared language. In addition, the mark of a totalitarian ideology, according to [Hannah] Arendt, was its hermetic nature: it explained away the entire world, and no argument could pierce its bubble. Soviet citizens lived inside the ideology - it was their home, and it felt ordinary. "
― Masha Gessen , The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia
8
" As Trump marches on to the rhythm of near-daily twitter rants, daily outrages, and weekly embarrassments, it remains unimaginable—even if it is observable. To think that a madman could be running the world’s most powerful country, to think that the commander in chief would use twitter to mouth off about whose nuclear button is bigger or to call himself a ‘very stable genius’ verges on the impossible. This can’t be happening. This is happening – The thought pattern of nightmares and real-life disasters has become the constant routine of tens of millions of people. Every Trump tweet, televised statement, and headline causes a form of this reaction. If the word ‘unthinkable’ had literal meaning, this would be it: thinking about it makes the mind misfire; it makes one want to stop thinking. It brings to mind the psychiatrist Judith Herman’s definition of a related word: ‘certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud,’ she once wrote. ‘This is the meaning of the word unspeakable.’ The Trump era is unimaginable, unthinkable, unspeakable. It is waging a daily assault on the public’s sense of sanity, decency, and cohesion. It makes us feel crazy, and the restrained tone of the media compounds this feeling by failing to acknowledge it. "
― Masha Gessen , Surviving Autocracy
9
" What options did this frightening country offer its intolerably anxious citizens? They could curl up into total passivity, or they could join a whole that was greater than they were. If any possession could be summarily taken away, no one felt any longer like anything was truly their own. But they could rejoice alongside other citizens that Crimea was 'theirs.' They could fully subscribe to the paranoid worldview in which everyone, led by the United States, was out to weaken and destroy Russia. Paranoia offered a measure of comfort: at least it placed the source of overwhelming anxiety securely outside the person and even the country. It was a great relief to belong, and to entrust authority to someone stronger. The only thing was, belonging itself required vigilance. One had to pay attention: one day Ukraine was where the important war was being fought, the next day it was Syria. In the paranoid worldview, the source of danger was a constantly moving target. One could belong, but one could never feel in control. "
― Masha Gessen , The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia
14
" 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 [Yuri] Levada, in 'the falling standards of education, culture, morality, in the degradation of all of society. "
― Masha Gessen , The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia
17
" It was not the artists' or the politicians' fault, this desolate state of affairs. To a large extent, it was the Soviet Union's fault. In all societies, public rhetoric involves some measure of lying, and history—political history and art history—is made when someone effectively confronts the lie. But in really scary societies all public conversation is an exercise in using words to mean their opposites—in describing the brave as traitorous, the weak as frightening, and the good as bad—and confronting these lies is the most scary and lonely thing a person can do. These are the societies of Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World," or Yevgeny Zamyatin's "We," which preceded it. In Zamyatin's utopia, the guillotine was known as the Machine of the Benefactor, people were known as Numbers, and the power of words was well understood: "Whoever feels capable must consider it his duty to write treatises, poems, manifestos, odes, and other compositions on the greatness and beauty of the United State," Zamyatin had based his dystopia on the Soviet state he witnessed being constructed. Half a century after this death, real words that corresponded to actual facts and feelings broke through in a sudden, catastrophic flood and brought down the Soviet Union. But that heady period of Russian history was winding down by the time Petya and Nadya were learning to talk. Voina faced a challenge that perhaps exceeded challenges faced by any other artist in history: they wanted to confront a language of lies that had once been effectively confronted but had since been reconstructed and reinforced, discrediting the language of confrontation itself. There were no words left. "
― Masha Gessen , Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot
20
" Are you going to believe your own eyes or the headlines? This is the dilemma of people who live in totalitarian societies. Trusting one’s own perceptions is a lonely lot; believing one’s own eyes and being vocal about it is dangerous. Believing the propaganda—or, rather, accepting the propaganda as one’s reality—carries the promise of a less anxious existence, in harmony with the majority of one’s fellow citizens. The path to peace of mind lies in giving one’s mind over to the regime. Bizarrely, the experience of living in the United States during the Trump presidency reproduces this dilemma. Being an engaged citizen of Trump’s America means living in a constant state of cognitive tension. One cannot put the president and his lies out of one’s mind, because he is the president. Accepting that the president continuously tweets or says things that are not true, are known not to be true, are intended to be heard or read as power lies, and will continue to be broadcast—on Twitter and by the media—after they have been repeatedly disproven means accepting a constant challenge to fact-based reality. In effect, it means that the two realities—Trumpian and fact-based—come to exist side by side, on equal ground. The tension is draining. The need to pay constant attention to the lies is exhausting, and it is compounded by the feeling of helplessness in the face of the ridiculous and repeated lies. Most Americans in the age of Trump are not, like the subjects of a totalitarian regime, subjected to state terror. But even before the coronavirus, they were subjected to constant, sometimes debilitating anxiety. One way out of that anxiety is to relieve the mind of stress by accepting Trumpian reality. Another—and this too is an option often exercised by people living under totalitarianism—is to stop paying attention, disengage, and retreat to one’s private sphere. Both approaches are victories for Trump in his attack on politics. "
― Masha Gessen , Surviving Autocracy
