MixedBookforum[Gessen] has injected a much-needed dose of calm and logic into the current US hysteria over Russia. Her emphatic rejections of conspiracy thinking around Russiagate in her New York Review of Books pieces particularly stand out. Unfortunately, she does not always exercise that sort of temperance in her discussions of Russia itself ... The bulk of Gessen’s narrative describes the ways in which these people try to make sense of the larger events happening around them. A gifted writer, Gessen is at her best when she’s recounting her characters’ experiences ... Leaving aside the inherently problematic notion that Russians are powerless to understand their world without a separate class of intellectuals to explain it to them, the picture Gessen paints of them as lacking the capacity for individual thought and action has a particular history. The depersonalized figure of Homo sovieticus, a kind of Communist golem unable to shake its slavish mentality or embrace the 'inner freedom' of liberal democracy and capitalism, has been around for a long time ... Gessen deserves much credit for her sensitivity to the plight of Russians seeking to figure out who they now were and who they should become. Yet her suggestion that trauma can be—and has been—deliberately used as a political instrument of the state seems less persuasive.
