...a magisterial, panoramic overview of Russia under Putin ... While the people she singles out are often vociferous opponents of the rearward direction of the New Russia, she gives at least equal time to the group the perestroika historian Yuri Afanasyev dubbed 'the aggressively obedient majority' and to the tens of millions of ordinary Russians who would be happy to go back to the USSR, more or less ... The characters’ personal histories add life and nuance to Gessen’s narrative. But it takes a while to get a handle on all of the players, who are as numerous as the cast of a Tolstoy novel, if less romantically clad. But portraying the politics of totalitarianism does not call for a romantic filter. Gessen’s reconstruction of the ongoing saga of Russia’s reversion to vozhdizm makes for thrilling and necessary reading for those who seek to understand the path to suppression of individual freedoms, and who recognize that this path can be imposed on any nation that lacks the vigilance to avert it.
...[a] fascinating and deeply felt book ... The story of the three older intellectuals is both poignant and frightening ... Gessen returns repeatedly to the question of what sort of regime exists in Russia today. As the subtitle of her book suggests, she believes that totalitarianism has reclaimed the country. Western political science associated totalitarianism with several features, including state terror, total absence of civil society outside the state, a centrally planned economy and domination by a single party. Gessen successfully shows how Putin’s Russia has gradually acquired these characteristics, though in muted and less extreme forms ... The one area where I wish Gessen had spent more time was in a deeper analysis of ordinary Putin backers.
...Masha Gessen’s remarkable group portrait of seven Soviet-born Russians whose changing lives embody the changing fortunes and character of their country as it passed from the end of Communist dictatorship under Mikhail Gorbachev to improvised liberalism under Boris Yeltsin and then back to what Gessen sees as renewed totalitarianism under Putin ...deft blending of these stories gives us a fresh view of recent Russian history from within, as it was experienced at the time by its people ... Through the eyes of her characters, Gessen manages to restore those possibilities, to convey how it felt to imagine that life in the new Russia could go in any direction ... She alternately zooms in on the lives of her characters and zooms out to give more general accounts of the major events of the time.
The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia is a remarkable portrait of an ever-shifting era, as told through the experiences of four people who were born in the waning years of the USSR ...two men and two women at the heart of this rich and deeply reported book are neither famous nor blessed with unique talents. But taken together, their life stories form an extraordinarily detailed picture of the country’s fraught recent past ... Gessen weaves her characters’ stories into a seamless, poignant whole. Her analysis of Putin’s malevolent administration is just as effective ... Her ambition has resulted in a harrowing, compassionate and important book.
[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.
Gessen takes turns focusing on four particular earnest brave resisters to the totalitarianism of their country, Zhanna, Masha, Seryozha, and Lyosha. It never becomes exactly clear, though, why Gessen chose these four. She seems to have known them all for many years, since their childhoods, but are they random representatives of Russian life? No. They’re more similar to Greek mythic tragic heroes, like Antigone, Electra, and Orestes – smart and capable, admirable for their persistence and integrity, and for their necessary courage in opposition to tyranny ... All of which leaves the reader asking: Can Russia save herself? It's not clear that even the courage of resisters like Zhanna, Masha, Seryozha, and Lyosha offer grounds for cautious hope.
In The Future is History, Gessen argues that nationalism and reactionary ideology arrived through the backdoor of a Soviet system that had never really collapsed ... Gessen chronicles the political crackdown that began after Putin’s return for a third term as president through the lives of four people who were among the first victims, their lives drastically changed for the worse ...the book flits vertiginously, almost manically, between their stories. This nevertheless works, the way a Russian novel weaves history through the lives of its characters ... Much of the book focuses on the decline of social sciences and the corruption of higher learning amid political projects.
This is by far Gessen’s best book, a sweeping intellectual history of Russia over the past four decades, told through a Tolstoyan gallery of characters. It makes a convincing if depressing case that Homo Sovieticus, that unique species created a century ago with the Bolshevik Revolution, did not die out along with the Soviet Union … Many, including Gessen’s characters, hoped for the best, a yearning I often heard expressed as the wish that Russia might finally be on its way to becoming a ‘normal, civilized country.’ The Future Is History is the story of how that hope died. To tell it, Gessen offers up a nonfiction Russian novel of sorts, a sprawling narrative with four main characters and three intellectual protagonists … At its heart, this is a book about the Moscow intelligentsia by one of its own, and Gessen manages to write compellingly about the wonky academic types who tried to understand the seismic changes in their country, while trying to imagine a new one.
...[a] brilliant and sobering new book about totalitarianism’s takeover of contemporary Russia ... Gessen fears that Russian society is dying under Putin — even life expectancy is shorter than in many developing countries. It’s hard to imagine how any creativity, originality or innovation can survive such a societal straitjacket. And yet — perhaps most amazing is the resilience of the Russian resistance. Harassed, jailed, beaten, murdered — Russians still march against and protest the outrages of Putin’s regime. Will they prevail? Hard to say ... Gessen vividly chronicles the story of a mortal struggle.
It is difficult not to view Masha Gessen’s The Future is History through the scrim of concerns about Russian tampering in the recent US presidential election ...its interest and reason for being extend beyond our national preoccupations to broader questions about the power of history and the malleability and resilience of the human psyche ...is several books in one, a complexity that accounts for its weaknesses and its strengths ... an intimate nonfiction narrative that shows how individuals are buffeted by the forces of history and, to a lesser extent, help shape those forces through (for example) protest, political involvement, and journalism.
[Gessen] writes brilliantly about the weight of history and the precariousness of Russian nationhood in grimly kaleidoscopic detail. Beginning around perestroika and glasnost and ending with Putin’s totalitarian consolidation, Gessen’s book admirably weaves the soul-searching of post-Soviet Russia into a tapestry of remarkably distinct narratives … It’s remarkable how shatteringly real Masha Gessen’s great book is. It’s not merely a journalistic or historical account of national collapse and the Putin regime’s strangulation of Russia. It’s also a profoundly novelistic account that should be considered part of the great Russian literary tradition — a tradition through which Russians could possibly pierce the obscuring trauma of their past and trace possibility on the void of their future.
A fine writer and storyteller, Ms. Gessen adopts the pose of omniscient narrator, drawing upon interviews to voice her subjects’ inner thoughts. The intricate narrative builds to Russia’s 2011 mass protests—which followed Mr. Putin’s declaration that he would become president again—and the crackdown that came the following year … Even as Ms. Gessen poignantly traces compelling lives, her account of Russian society as a whole puts forth a reductionist argument full of psychospeak about ‘energies’ and an entire society succumbing to depression. She begins with the dubious assertion that one of Soviet society’s decisive troubles derived from the state prohibition against sociology and psychoanalysis, which meant the society ‘had been forbidden to know itself’ … Ms. Gessen is right that ordinary Russians are to an extent complicit in their own oppression, but is the society the part that is totalitarian?
In her excellent new book on Russia’s transition from the faltering democracy of the 1990s to the Putinist present... All seven come from a well-educated, relatively prosperous milieu that gives them the skills and self-awareness to comment on their own experiences with a sense of clarity ...Gessen’s cast of characters tell a powerful story of their own, giving us an intimate look into the minds of a group crucial to understanding the country’s brief experience of democracy and of the authoritarian regime that follows ...the most powerful parts of Gessen’s book are moments of individual revelation ... Even though I often felt nauseated by Gessen’s dissections of the workings of Putinism, I finished the book with an unexpected sense of hope.
[Gessen] has now written an angry and sorrowful account of the gradual but relentless destruction of aspirations for democracy and freedom under Putin, tracking the broad outlines of what she sees as a descent into a new and vicious totalitarianism ... This is a devastating, timely, and necessary reminder of the fragility and preciousness of all institutions of freedom.
Gessen, a well-respected journalist and an activist herself, is all grit and groundwork, and zero slouch; she plumbs the depths of her subjects' lives, unearthing grievances big and small, laying bare their insecurities and desires and, for some, the way their rights as citizens are repeatedly stomped on by Vladimir Putin's ongoing crackdowns. Through diligent research into the fields of philosophy and sociology, she tracks decades-long trends in collective thought and action, illuminating nationalistic, anti-Western tendencies that created fertile ground for 'recurrent totalitarianism' ... When two or more of these three main threads, tied together primarily by the forward march of time, are interwoven successfully, the effect can be delightfully literary and intellectually rousing. But most stirringly wrought are the narratives of protests that emerge from the more personal stories. They are the bright flames that burn against the dying light of democracy and against the dark forces that, for many Russians, have rendered the very act of living in the present futile. They are also the voices raised for us all. Rightfully, they deserve our full attention.
A brilliant if somber look at modern Russia ... A superb, alarming portrait of a government that exercises outsize influence in the modern world, at great human cost.
Readers gain a deeply personal view into 'what it has felt like to live in Russia' ... Throughout, Gessen expounds on Russia’s development into a 'mafia state' with elements of totalitarianism—a state fueled by a revanchist nationalism wherein each member of society must become 'an enforcer of the existing order.' She presents the somber peculiarities of modern Russia in a well-crafted, inventive narrative.
