Last month I wrote a review of Ludmila Ulitskaya’s most recently translated novel for Public Books. In it, I positioned the novel, The Big Green Tent, in between two historical models of the Soviet Union. One is the totalitarian model of Soviet power, which depicts a unified state structure dictating the terms of existence to a cowering and oppressed populace. The other model—versions of which have been offered by Stephen Kotkin (1995), Sheila Fitzpatrick (1999), and Alexei Yurchak (2005), among others—shows a more complex polity made of individuals who, to varying degrees, believed in the Soviet project.

In my review, I made the argument that Ulitskaya’s sprawling novel, which seems to allow its characters individual choices, nonetheless depicts a totalitarian society, a society in which all the various choices that any individual character makes are nevertheless incapable of freeing them from a more or less predetermined outcome.

The novel follows three boys—Ilya, Mikha, and Sanya—from their school days in the 1950s, through middle age in the 1990s. They are the shestidesiatniki, the much revered and romanticized “sixties generation” of dissident intelligentsia, of steamy kitchen conversations about jazz, samizdat, and forbidden poetry passed hand to hand. This novel does little to question that romantic vision. In fact, it does everything in its power to perpetuate, revive, and update that myth for the Putin era. It is no coincidence that the novel appeared in Russia shortly after the Moscow protest bubble of 2011-12, in which Ulitskaya played a leadership role. The novel’s depiction of late Soviet dissidence, I would like to suggest, can be read as Ulitskaya’s response to those protests, their disappearance, and the state of the post-Soviet intelligentsia.

The novel is almost entirely constructed of dissident tropes, from anecdotes about a manuscript of The Gulag Archipelago unwittingly used as stuffing to hold the form of a pair of boots, and thus overlooked by a KGB search, to the sentence quoted in almost every English-language review of the book: “Tea and vodka poured out in rivers, kitchens basked in the fervent steam of political dispute, so that the dampness crept up the walls to the hidden microphones behind the tiles at the level of the ceiling.” Ulitskaya’s rather light touch with some of these tropes suggests her tongue might have been planted in her cheek while writing some chapters, but others seem to be taken much more seriously.

Among the serious tropes—and the one that saves the novel from sliding into an emotionally hollow version of nostalgia—is the characters’ painful and inevitable fates. Each of the major characters finds the violence of mainstream life untenable. They each escape into a safer enclave—Ilya directly into the dissident underground, where he types up and helps distribute samizdat; Sanya into the rarefied world of music theory; and Mikha out to a country school for the deaf.

Though only Ilya is directly involved in dissident activity, all three are soon drawn in (for Ulitskaya, there is no space between mainstream life and dissidence). From there, it is only one small step to the KGB, and everyone ends up harrassed, interrogated, and eventually faced with the same decision: collaborate or emigrate. I ended my review with this paragraph:

The pattern is hard to miss. Though Ulitskaya seems to give her characters room to make their own choices, the society she depicts gently coerces them all to a similar place. The Big Green Tent suggests that the underground ideal—that it was possible to live outside the Soviet system while physically existing inside the country—was illusory. In Ulitskaya’s novel, escape is possible only through emigration or death. Though the book features no central authority figure (the various General Secretaries are mentioned only rarely, and the KGB has many faces), it nevertheless depicts a totalizing, if diffuse, power. Ulitskaya’s characters are not controlled so much as they are contained, constricted, circumscribed by an authority that leaves its subjects very little room for self-determination. In this way, Ulitskaya’s vision of the epoch doesn’t so much provide an alternative to the totalitarian model of Soviet history as an update. Her sprawling realist novel depicts a sprawling totalitarianism: decentered, complex, but nevertheless total and unrelenting.

Here, I would like to give the argument one more turn: the totalitarian nature of state power, as depicted in The Big Green Tent, not only aesthetically and emotionally saves Ulitskaya’s novel from becoming a comfortably idealized vision of the late-Soviet intelligentsia, it also salvages that idealized vision for a new generation.

Essential to the romanticized ideal of the dissident intelligentsia is victimhood. The dissidents needed to be standing up, at their own personal peril, against a system that held everyone else in its thrall. Totalitarianism, and especially a totalitarianism that works directly counter to the interests of the people, is essential for this model. As scholars have challenged the totalitarian model over the last few decades, many have pointed out how people—normal people, not Marxist philosophers, hardened Stalinists, or party functionaries, but regular people—actually believed in and internalized the ideals of the Bolshevik state. This tarnishes the sheen on the romantic model of Soviet dissidence because it suggests that dissidents might not have been standing up to a monolithic state, but disrupting a collective project.

If dissidents were resisting a regime and an ideology that the populace earnestly believed in, then the late Soviet situation might start to resemble contemporary politics. That is, the intelligentsia—instead of leading the people out from under an oppressive state—begins to appear at odds with the people, opposing a state that everyone else seems perfectly happy to inhabit. This is precisely how the Putin administration depicted the protesters in the 2011-12 “snow revolution”—as an elite capital intelligentsia hopelessly out of touch with the priorities of the populace.

By resurrecting the totalitarian model as something more sprawling, more diffuse, but nevertheless inescapable, Ulitskaya also breathes new life into the ideal of a heroically resistant intelligentsia, a model that she (and her readers, presumably) hopes can apply even in the new landscape of Putin’s Russia.

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