Few observers of Russia today display insight to match Masha Gessen’s. Born and raised in Moscow, Gessen later in life returned and became a journalist there and Russia’s leading LGBT activist. And in The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, which won the National Book Award, Gessen demonstrates a profound depth of knowledge about the country’s modern history. The book’s 500 pages trace the roots of Vladimir Putin’s autocratic rule to the legacy left by seventy years of Communism. As Daniel Beer noted in reviewing the book for The Guardian, “The author’s claim that the regime in Russia is ‘totalitarian’ is extravagant, but she has written a fascinating account of the toxic legacy of the Soviet era.” Elsewhere, others have emphasized that Putin is merely Russia’s latest tsar, reflecting centuries of Russian history.
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
Seven central characters at the heart of the story
Gessen traces modern Russian history through the lives of seven people.
Four were born in the final decade of Communist rule and came of age under Vladimir Putin’s presidency. One is the daughter of Boris Nemtsov, the outspoken anti-Putin activist murdered within steps of the Kremlin in 2015. Another’s parents were senior scientists in the space industry, both Party members. A third is the privileged granddaughter of a high-ranking Communist intellectual and advisor to Mikhail Gorbachev. And a fourth also grew up in privilege of sorts but on a collective farm far from Moscow.
Three other characters were adults in the 1980s. They represent a cross-section of Russian intellectual life: a psychoanalyst, a sociologist and pollster, and a philosopher and Right-Wing political activist.
These seven individuals can’t possibly represent the full spectrum of Russia’s sprawling diversity. But they help Gessen construct an honest and engaging account of Russia’s recent history.
The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia by Masha Gessen (2017) 527 pages ★★★★★
Winner of the National Book Award
An in-depth study of how Russia has descended once again into autocracy
Gessen’s account of the fall of Communism and the events that followed over the past three decades comes to life through the lives of these seven people. We gain a front-row seat on the tumultuous years of Gorbachev’s ascendancy and the increasingly chaotic 1990s under Boris Yeltsin. We view the evolution of the slavish homo sovieticus from the time of terror under Stalin through the reformist experiments of Gorbachev and Yeltsin and finally emerging whole again under Putin. And along the way Gessen explores the deeper meaning of the changes. They frequently dive into the work of Western authors such as Hannah Arendt, Erich Fromm, and Robert Jay Lifton as well as Russian intellectuals less well known to us. You won’t find a more penetrating explanation anywhere of how Russia under Vladimir Putin came to be the way it is.
About the author
Masha Gessen was born into a Jewish family in Moscow in 1967. As a teenager, they emigrated to the United States with their family. (Gessen is nonbinary and trans and uses they/them pronouns.) A decade later they returned to what was then (very briefly) still the USSR as a journalist. They worked for two decades in a series of increasingly visible roles as an editor there. They have dual citizenship in Russia and the US.
In Russia, Gessen came out as a lesbian and became prominent in the LGBT movement, about which they have written extensively. Twice married, they have three children but returned to the US in 2013 when new anti-gay legislation under Vladimir Putin threatened to take one of their children from them. (They had adopted him.)
Gessen is the author of thirteen nonfiction books, some written in English, others in Russian.
For related reading
Earlier, I reviewed Masha Gessen’s excellent biography, The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin (Vladimir Putin, the KGB, and the restoration of Soviet Russia).
You’ll find books on related topics at Good books about Vladimir Putin and 20 top nonfiction books about history.
And you can always find my most popular reviews, and the most recent ones, on the Home Page.
