Barracks as Fate: On Freedom That Wasn't Chosen
Historiosophical Essay - Claude.ai
There is a special genre of historical thought — the counterfactual. Serious historians usually despise it: history knows no subjunctive mood, they say, and in this refusal, they see a sign of scientific rigor. But it is precisely counterfactuals that expose what the positivist chronicle of events conceals: it shows not what happened, but what was possible. And this is no longer a question of history, but of anthropology. A question about what a person is in the face of freedom.
Andrei Nikulin paints an alternative 2022: a coffin on a gun carriage, red flags, a decrepit Union, eking out its last strength on an oil cushion. Gorbachev the dictator, Gorbachev without glasnost — preserving the system at the cost of renouncing humanity. This imagined picture is strikingly accurate not because it is historically realistic, but because it is psychologically truthful: it describes what a significant part of the people wanted. And this is where the most important part begins.
I. Longing for Unfreedom as a Spiritual Diagnosis
The phenomenon that Nikulin captures with bitter irony has deep roots in what could be called existential infantilism — a state in which freedom is experienced not as a gift, but as a burden, not as an opportunity, but as a threat.
Psychologists have long described this paradox. Erich Fromm, in his major work, called it the "escape from freedom" — and wrote about it in relation to European fascism in the 1930s. But what he described as an anomaly became the norm, almost a cultural code, in the post-Soviet space. Because the Soviet person was formed differently than the European bourgeois: they were raised to believe that the state was the father, the party was the mother, and personal initiative was, at best, amateur activity, and at worst, a crime.
Gorbachev opened the cage. But a bird raised in a cage does not always know how to fly. It knows how to sit on a perch and sing — but the open space frightens it because there are no walls that simultaneously constrict and protect. That is why the "barak" (barracks) Nikulin writes about is not just a political metaphor. It is a psychological, almost ontological metaphor. The barracks is a space where who you are and what you are allowed to do has already been decided. Inside it is "relatively warm, dry, there's a ration" — and this, as frightening as it is to admit, satisfies the basic needs of that part of human nature which fears uncertainty more than injustice.
II. Gorbachev as a Tragic Humanist
In historiosophy, there is a temptation to see great figures either as architects of destiny or as its victims. Gorbachev fits neither of these images. He was something else — a man who tried to trust.
The word "trust" seems too mild for political analysis. But it is precisely this, I think, that most accurately describes the essence of his historical choice. Gorbachev did not use force — not because he couldn't (the apparatus of coercion existed and functioned), but because at some point he decided that the people were capable of more than submission. That glasnost was not a danger, but air. That perestroika was not a reform of the system, but the liberation of the individual.
Was he naive? Undoubtedly. Did he fully understand that he was unleashing forces that could not be controlled? Hardly. But in this naivety, there was something rare and, if you will, worthy of respect — a faith in humanity. A faith that history, it would seem, did not confirm.
This is where the tragedy lies. Not in the collapse of the Union. But in the fact that the freedom given or opened up by Gorbachev turned out — to a large extent — to be unclaimed. There was no Václav Havel, no Adam Michnik emerged. But those who knew how to wait did emerge, and they knew exactly what to do with freedom — namely, to abolish it at the right moment, when the people themselves grew tired of its weight.
III. The Void Between Freedom and Power
Nikulin mentions the "lab heads and warehouse managers" who rose on the wave of change. And this observation is key to understanding what went wrong.
Between the collapse of the old legitimacy and the construction of a new one, there is always a dangerous gap — a historical interregnum, in which anything is possible. Into this gap rush the most diverse forces: some bring ideas, others bring appetites. In 1990s Russia, there were fewer ideas than appetites. Civil society was weak not because Russian people are worse than other peoples — that would be vulgar racism. It was weak because seventy years of systematically destroying any horizontal solidarity had done its job.
Soviet power feared not dissidents — there were few of them, and they were easy to isolate. It feared neighbors talking among themselves. Neighbors creating cooperatives, mutual aid workshops, independent churches, uncontrolled clubs. It destroyed these with particular thoroughness. And when the cage opened, it turned out that the social fabric necessary for the self-organization of free people had been almost completely torn apart.
Into this vacuum stepped those who had a structure — security service, nomenklatura, criminal. They didn't come immediately. They bided their time. They watched the 1990s from their "major's and colonel's pensions" — and they learned. They learned what weakness looked like, what fatigue from freedom looked like, and precisely when to offer the people that same barracks — no longer Soviet, but a new one, with a TV and an oil ration, decorated with St. George ribbons instead of red flags.
IV. Television as Metaphysics
"The TV works around the clock, telling you plenty about greatness and victories" — this phrase from Nikulin deserves separate consideration.
Television in this context is not just a propaganda tool. It is a substitute for reality. It is an ontological prosthesis for those who have lost — or never had — the ability to independently construct the meaning of their existence. A person living in the barracks is deprived not only of freedom of movement — they are deprived of narrative. Their story is written for them. Their enemies are pre-assigned. Their victories have already been won (on TV).
This is a deeply spiritual problem — in the sense that "spiritual" refers to a person's relationship to their own consciousness and its sovereignty. Plato described something similar in the allegory of the cave: people chained to a wall, taking shadows for reality. But Plato believed that a philosopher could free himself and return to free others. The question Nikulin poses — albeit between the lines — is darker: what if the majority does not want to leave the cave? What if the shadows are more comfortable than the sun?
V. On the Nature of Historical Guilt
Here it is necessary to pause and say something uncomfortable.
It is easy to blame "them" — those who herded the people into the barracks. It is easy to mourn that the chance was not used. But historiosophical honesty requires acknowledging: the chance was not used by us. Not by an abstract "people," but by concrete people in concrete circumstances who chose — or did not choose — freedom every day for thirty years.
This does not mean that everyone bears equal responsibility. Obviously, people's opportunities differed, and the price of choice was not the same. But it does mean that the narrative of pure victimhood — "we were deceived," "we were betrayed," "we were herded" — is, for all its emotional truth, incomplete. It relieves the individual of that measure of responsibility without whose acknowledgment no genuine change is possible.
Gorbachev did not "sell out the country" — that's a myth convenient for those who want to explain their own enslavement by someone else's betrayal, rather than by their own choice. Gorbachev opened up a possibility. What was done with that possibility — that is our question, not his.
VI. Timelessness as a Spiritual State
At the end of his imagined obituary, Nikulin writes about "timelessness" (bezvremenye). This word is more accurate than any other. Because what happened to the post-Soviet space is not just a political restoration. It is a stopping of time.
Historical time is time in which development occurs. In which the past is understood, the present is accepted with responsibility, and the future is open. Timelessness is when time moves, but nothing essentially changes. When history reproduces the same archetypes: great power, enemies, victimhood, victory, new victimhood.
The spiritual traditions of different cultures describe something similar as the state of acedia — the dreary inertia of the spirit, in which a person lives but does not grow; exists, but does not become. This state is contagious — it passes from person to institutions, from institutions to culture, from culture back to the person.
The exit from timelessness — if it is possible at all — begins not with political reforms. It begins with someone deciding to call things by their proper names. To acknowledge: a barracks is a barracks, not a "sovereign space." A ration is a ration, not "social guarantees." Shadows on the wall are shadows, not "traditional values."
Instead of a Conclusion: The Lesson Not Learned
Gorbachev is dead. The Soviet Union died long ago — or didn't die, but was reborn into new forms, retaining its birth traumas. History continues.
Nikulin ends his text with a bitter remark about those who ponder "what would have happened if Gorbachev hadn't sold out the country." This is the voice of people stuck in timelessness. People for whom freedom remained an alien, frightening, unwanted thing.
But history knows something else too. It knows that peoples — and people — change. That trauma is not eternal if it is acknowledged. That a cage ceases to be a cage the moment a person realizes the door is open — and decides to step out.
Gorbachev opened the door. That is his place in history. Small or large — it depends on what happens next.
Freedom is not given to peoples as a gift. It is won — slowly, painfully, anew by each generation. And the only alternative to this labor is the barracks. Which, as we now know, can be very cozy.
Andrei Nikulin 03.03.2026 - Continuing from yesterday's Gorbachev anniversary, which was accompanied by a considerable number of texts in which authors tried to comprehend the phenomenon of the last Soviet General Secretary.
If Mikhail Gorbachev had applied the same cruelty and force back then, which are so beloved by our imperialists and supporters of the iron fist, he might very well have managed to prolong the existence of the Soviet Union and galvanize the semi-corpses of the repressive-security and party systems.
And four years ago, the announcers on the central TV channels "First Communist" and "Soviet Union-1" would have shed tears over the departure of the great and mighty General Secretary of the Communist Party, who had gifted us with almost forty years of his insightful and wise rule.
The Warsaw Bloc would likely have collapsed, the restless Balts and Western Ukrainians might have leaked away, but the Union would have stood, groaning, albeit shaken by problems in the Transcaucasus and Central Asia, and tormented by the congenital inefficiency of its economy.
Another question is that communist deities would have blessed the country in the new millennium with two decades of high oil prices, and this success, these last twenty years of Gorbachev's rule, would have been remembered by the inhabitants of the Soviet Union as a well-fed, calm time of the "second seventies."
And then, after the General Secretary's passing in the late summer of '22, a meeting of the Politburo and the Communist Party Central Committee would have been convened, consisting of the remnants of Gorbachev's generation of Kremlin elders and their "young," sixty-year-old successors. And the most ironic thing is that none of today's "new aristocrats" and "great geopoliticians" would have been present — they would have been watching it all, living out their major's and colonel's pensions in departmental rest homes, or discussing their geopolitics over dominoes in garages.
Just as there would be no "great experts," "propagandists," and other talkers on the screens — those who hate Gorbachev so much for giving them the chance to rise from being lab heads and warehouse managers.
There would be a coffin on a gun carriage, red flags, a decrepit but existing Soviet Union, continuing to fumble and with its last strength balance between the West and China. On the Mausoleum would stand a row of elders, opposite them a row of pioneers, and timelessness.
But there would be no geopolitical somersaults, no dreams of the "Russian world" or imperial colonial raids. Because the Soviet Union tolerated none of that, and the state security service worked quickly — and we are, after all, talking about an alternative Gorbachev, with state security, but without humanism, glasnost, and perestroika.
Gorbachev, and later Yeltsin, gave the impetus to the current system, the current world, certainly not imagining what they were doing. Another question is that we did not take advantage of the chance to manage freedom, but "they" — having waited the required time — did not miss the chance to herd the people back into the imperial barracks, where it's relatively warm, dry, there's still a ration for now, and the TV works around the clock, telling you plenty about greatness and victories. And about what would have happened "if Gorbachev hadn't sold out the country"...
