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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
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 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
Hannah Arendt maintained that any ideology can become totalitarian, but for that to happen it needs to be reduced to a single simple idea, which is then turned into a single simple idea from which the ostensible “laws of history” are derived—and enforced through terror.5 What distinguishes a totalitarian ideology is its utterly insular quality. It purports to explain the entire world and everything in it. There is no gap between totalitarian ideology and reality because totalitarian ideology contains all of reality within itself.
The economy of force in totalitarian societies is achieved through terror. Totalitarianism establishes its own social contract, in which most people will be safe from violence most of the time, provided they stay within certain boundaries and shoulder some of the responsibility for keeping other citizens within the same boundaries
Respondents did not exactly want to return to the Soviet Union, from what Gudkov could tell: the memory of food shortages, poverty, and airlessness was still raw. What Russians wanted was certainty, a clear sense of who they were and what their country
We know the difference between authoritarian and totalitarian regimes: the former rewards passivity and the latter rewards mobilization
A totalitarian regime demands participation: if you do not march the march and sing the songs, then you are not a loyal citizen. An authoritarian regime, on the other hand, tries to convince its subjects to stay home.
America. It contained the “worshipping of the past” that Fromm had believed to be key to fascist ideology
The word “values” was new, and it was key. The fledgling ideology now had all its components: the nation, the past, traditional values, an external threat, and a fifth column
Russia had a mafia state ruling over a totalitarian society
He had been taught that totalitarian ideology had to include a vision of the future. But this was never a key characteristic of Nazism. Its vision had been archaic, and its promise was simplicity, the return to an imaginary past when laws were instincts and the nation was a tribe
Hannah Arendt wrote that an ideology was nothing but a single idea taken to its logical extreme
Totalitarian leaders, she wrote, were interested less in the idea itself than in its use as the driver and justification of action
Dugin had spent years waiting for Russia to claim its place as the leader of the anti-modern world
It was the oldest trick in the book—a constant state of low-level dread made people easy to control, because it robbed them of the sense that they could control anything themselves.