When a Superpower Declines, Shared Reality Dissolves
When the Soviet Union fell, Russians lost their sense of past and future at once. Collective hallucinations flourished in the void. In the United States, our reality is now disintegrating in a similar way.
Russians in the 1990s felt themselves without a past or a future: the Soviet past felt like a fading dream, and the capitalist present was a nightmare. (Pascal Le Segretain / Sygma via Getty Images)
Following the Soviet collapse, millions of Russians came to doubt that there had ever been a Mongol invasion. The reality of the Mongols’ conquest of northern Eurasia, previously taken to be the defining event of the Middle Ages in the region, was cast into doubt not by a historian but by the renowned Soviet Russian mathematician Anatolii Fomenko, who reached these conclusions by mathematical means. Fomenko distilled hundreds of history books and manuscripts to their numerical essence (as he understood it), fed them into a Soviet supercomputer (running an algorithm of his own design), and connected the dots. He did the math, and the history did not add up.
Fomenko published his theory in dozens of blockbuster volumes throughout Russia’s hypercapitalist 1990s. Together they revealed a forgotten Slavic-Turkic “Great Empire” that ruled most of Eurasia from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, and ruled well, such that Russians in the 1990s could take pride. The Great Empire was marked by peaceful development and ethnic and religious tolerance, including between Mongols and Slavs, although Fomenko just as often denied any distinction between the two. The Mongol “invasion,” he argued, was invented in a conspiracy between the usurper Romanovs and their Western accomplices to sully the Great Empire’s legacy and legitimize their seizure of the throne.
The theory’s unlikely success was a quintessential product of the Soviet collapse and transition — of capitalist “victory,” as seen from the West, and the attendant cascade of material and spiritual crises inside Russia. The bindings of the earliest volumes, for instance, bore the imprint of Moscow State University, once the premier university of the socialist world, now desperate and helpless before the popular book market.
More generally, Russians in the 1990s felt themselves without a past or a future: the Soviet past had been so embellished by the Communist Party that it now felt like a fading dream, and the capitalist present was a nightmare. Fomenko’s success coincided with soaring unemployment and inequality; widespread, stress-induced pathologies like alcohol abuse and cardiovascular disease; murder and suicide rates doubling or in some places tripling; and mortality rates outpacing births. Fomenko’s theory offered readers solace in a lost national golden age, untouched by Western liberty and its frenetic cruelties.
By the sociological metrics above, Russia conformed to many countries of the developing world, but even that understates the crisis. From what was Russia developing? In the lifetimes of the baby-boom generation, the predecessor Soviet Union had led the world into space; it had won more than twenty Nobel Prizes; it had competed at the highest levels of international sports; and even five years before the collapse, it had guaranteed free health care, housing, employment, and education to a population of 300 million people.
To be sure, these accomplishments rested on shaky foundations, but such caveats are academic: in addition to the material crisis, Russian people felt themselves stripped of their dignity, of pride in their country, and of any sense of direction in the world. To the spiritual injury, then, Fomenko offered a stable identity and some orientation in the dark.
The Capitalism Russia Got
Soviet successes, largely forgotten in the West, are the key to understanding both the Cold War and what came after — for both the winning and losing sides. In short, we forget that in the 1950s and early 1960s, both systems seemed viable, and nobody knew who would win. The Soviet postwar era was one of boundless hope, wrapped up in Sputnik and, above all, Yuri Gagarin — the triumphs of the space age seemed to signal not only scientific progress but also the possibility of social progress, once science and technology were decoupled from the profit motive.
Fomenko the mathematician embodied the era as it is remembered by most Russians. Born of the working class and possessed of a singular intellect, he was elevated by a system that was ushering its people and resources toward the long-term public good. The Soviet Union was headed upward, and people like Fomenko were out front.
Cold War competition also had great implications for America, whose postwar self-confidence was always paired with anxiety before the Soviet challenge. The result was capitalism on its best behavior: high public investment, unionization, income compression, and meaningful, if hard-won, social and racial progress. This had the effect of undermining the domestic left, but it was just as much a display for the decolonizing world, which by and large found Soviet socialism more attractive.
Yet by the time of America’s “victory” in the Cold War, the real contest was over and American capitalism had stopped trying to impress. The political system had long since accepted austerity, inequality, and stagnation in civil rights as the cost of booming business — and while there’s no sense rehashing the entire neoliberal turn (not to Jacobin readers anyway), one cause is too often overlooked.
While neoliberalism responded in many ways to the troubled 1970s at home, it might also reflect a sort of predatory optimism as the Soviet challenge receded — capitalism no longer crouching but instead stretching its legs. This is the capitalism that Russia got, and with it, Fomenko the historian, a plausible and familiar authority to alienated and atomized people, willing to believe anything that challenged the miserable consensus.
Conspiracy Theories and Reactionary Nostalgias
Fomenko’s theory was translated into English in the 1990s but attracted no readers, because for a while, history appeared to have ended in America’s favor. We still had some shared authorities, some shared identity, some residual sense of historical direction. But already then, and plainly obvious now, capital was clawing back each and every concession.
It is no coincidence that the questions that racked Russian society at the Soviet collapse are today racking ours. Conspiracy theory is now a primary mode of discourse, alongside a breakdown of any shared intellectual authority. Anxiety about identity has bred various reactionary nostalgias all over the West. Vanishingly few of us look ahead with hope.
How easy it is to imagine that, in the near future, a patriotic sh*t-stirrer might start feeding key documents of early American history — royal charters, Aztec codices, plantation records, ship manifests, Puritan sermons — into their preferred anti-woke LLM (large language model), toward a revisionist history of this country. And when they find that Jamestown was settled by Slavic-Turkic colonists as early as the fourteenth century, thus antedating the formation of the Powhatan Confederacy (if we can distinguish between these peoples at all); when they reconstruct a direct paternal lineage from Christopher Columbus to Thomas Jefferson to Charlie Kirk; when they uncover the communist-Democrat conspiracy to obscure this history and to divide and conquer the lost white utopia; who in America will have the intellectual authority to dispute it?
With a sufficiently charismatic salesman, who could doubt such a theory would find an audience? Indeed, who could doubt that it would find an academic publisher and not just one in Florida? One Ivy League university already springs to mind. Nobody won the Cold War. Or more precisely, it’s plain to see that capitalism won, but who could believe that we did?