Gessen narrates her own work in this production, which focuses on four individuals who were born when Communism fell in the Soviet Union. Gessen sees their lives as being illustrative of how the “oligarchic corruptocracy” of the Soviet Union was replaced by an “oligarchic corruptocracy” of post-Soviet Russia. Plus ça change, plus la mème chose . . . Gessen, a native speaker of Russian, has spent many decades in the West, and her Russian-accented English is not as heavy as some might expect. Her delivery is clear and easy to understand, though somewhat staccato. Her enunciation is quite good. Although Gessen’s reading is not all that expressive, it’s not monotonous. This is a somewhat long production, but those who are interested in Russia will want to listen. M.T.F. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

Any American who has watched the news, absorbing — first skeptically and, latterly, with outraged acceptance — the agglomerating hulk of evidence of Kremlin interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election can see that reports of the death of the Cold War were grossly exaggerated. And so, argues a magisterial, panoramic overview of Russia under Putin, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, by the Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen (she holds both nationalities) were reports of the death of what might be called the Soviet mind-set. That way of thinking, the author suggests, has endured for a quarter century, as the country formerly known as the USSR sought to regain its footing and its superpower status, with the support of a majority of its citizens.

After the Soviet Union officially expired on Christmas Day, 1991, when the hammer-and-sickle flag was lowered from the Kremlin and replaced by the Russian tricolor, Russia retreated significantly from international headlines. When Boris Yeltsin, the first post- Soviet president, retired from politics on New Year's Eve, 1999, he said in his departing address, "Russia will never go back to the past. From now on, Russia will be moving forward." Many Kremlinologists — and businessmen excited by the prospect of a new frontier for investment — were tempted to agree with him. But three months later, in March 2000, a former KGB man, Vladimir Putin, became Russia's president. Swiftly, Gessen writes, "He moved to reassert executive-branch control not only over the media but also over the judiciary and, broadly, the economy."

Rising oil prices brought the country new wealth, and some of the richest and most influential men in the New Russia — "oligarchs"— soon found themselves exiled or imprisoned, their assets seized, while Putin consolidated power. As Putin's years in office extended, the reforms that Yeltsin and his democratizing predecessor, Mikhail Gorbachev, had tried to implement began melting away. But it wasn't until February 2014, when the then three-term President Putin swaggeringly presided over the Olympic Games in Sochi, broadcasting his nation's reclamation of imperial pretensions (which he would soon assert in Crimea and Ukraine) that the world woke up to the fact that Russia had other plans than Yeltsin had anticipated, and that they were well underway.

For outside observers in the 1990s, and long after, it had been convenient to think that, under the reins of perestroika, with the carrot of a market economy, the wayward troika of Russia at last would take a new direction. But in The Future Is History, Gessen shows that the Russian troika did in fact take a new direction: backward. To explain how this happened, Gessen relays the stories of inside observers — actual Russians, of three intertwined generations, who have struggled to chart a course through a landscape of endlessly shifting signposts. 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. Why would such a large proportion of the populace support this turnabout? Do they miss the gulag? Not exactly, Gessen explains. Rather, they have been overtaken by "epidemic nostalgia" for the paternalist "stability" of the iron-fist Soviet past — the sort of totalitarian stability that, Gessen writes, uses "periodic purges or crackdowns" to create what Hannah Arendt described as "a state of permanent instability" that keeps the populace pliant. But Russians weren't thinking of such constraints when they went to the polls, she contends. To borrow a contemporary American rallying cry, they yearned for a leader who could Make Russia Great Again. In Putin, they found that leader. Gessen reports that in a public opinion poll released in June 2017, conducted by Moscow's Levada Center (a creditable institution that has been harassed by the Kremlin and labeled a "foreign agent"), Russians named Putin the second "most outstanding person of all time in the entire world." More telling is who came in first: Stalin.

The deep-set Russian passion for dictators — vozhdizm, the "leader principle," it's called — bewilders the West and, Gessen shows, also bedevils progressive-minded Russians who hoped for a more democratic outcome of the upheavals of the 1990s. "We are afraid of freedom. We don't know what to do with it," the late Alexander Yakovlev, once a senior advisor to Gorbachev, told a journalist in 2005. Five years earlier, on New Year's Eve, 1999, watching Yeltsin's farewell speech with his grandson, Seryozha, Yakovlev had told the boy that Putin had some good ideas; his main worry was that Putin might fall prey to "the nomenklatura monster" — the grey cadres who controlled Soviet life and who remained, under new titles, in the post-Soviet hierarchy. By 2005, Yakovlev saw that his fears had been misplaced. Putin had been the head of the monster all along. For twenty years, progressive-minded Russians hoped that the first generation born, like Yakovlev's grandson, with no memory of Stalin's terror would fight the resurgence of a Soviet-style nomenklatura and overcome Russia's totalitarian legacy. But by 2017, as members of that generation either emigrated or found a way to get by in Putin's notional "illiberal democracy," diehards began putting their hopes in activist Russian teenagers from "the generation of kids born under Putin." Seryozha, no rabble-rouser, had ceased communicating with the author.

Seryozha Yakovlev is one of the young characters in Gessen's tri- generational recapitulation of the last thirty years. Understanding that the transformations of this epoch are dizzyingly complex and difficult to interpret — even for reporters who worked in Yeltsin's Russia in the 1990s and returned to Putin's Russia in the 2000s (I am one such reporter) — Gessen has endeavored to put a human face on the tick-tock, attempting to make felt emotionally what cannot be easily reconciled intellectually. Her cast is divided into three contingents. The first is the youngest: four children, Zhanna, Masha, Seryozha, and Lyosha, who were born amid the reformist tumult of the mid-'80s but came of age as the nation was slipping back into authoritarianism. Call them Generation P: young people shaped by the collision of perestroika and Putin.

The next group Gessen weaves in is members of their parents' generation — like Boris Nemtsov (Zhanna's father), the reformist politician and activist who was murdered in sight of the Kremlin on February 27, 2016; wary oligarchs like Boris Berezovsky, Mikhail Prokhorov, and Mikhail Fridman; and sociologists like the psychoanalyst Marina Arutunyan, whose clients began suffering from "anxiety" and "panic attacks" in Putin's last two terms, as limits on their freedoms multiplied; the sociologist Lev Gudkov (who now works for Moscow's Levada Center); and the idiosyncratic nationalist fulminator Alexander Dugin, who opposes Western values, publicizes revanchist visions of effective ideologies for the New Russia, and is known as a "Putin whisperer."

The third contingent is mostly represented by Yakovlev, the Soviet- and Gorbachev-era official whom Gessen identifies, in formal Russian style, by his first name and patronymic: Alexander Nikolaevich. As the book unfolds, the characters' experiences thicken, melding with the signal acts that favored Putin's rise and assured his hold: the thwarted 1991 attempt by hard-liners to overthrow Gorbachev; the siege of the Russian White House and Moscow's central television station by hard-liners in 1993 (Yeltsin quelled it, with help from the army); the wars in Chechnya; the 2002 Chechen terrorist takeover of a Moscow theater; the 2004 Beslan school massacre; assassinations of anti-government journalists and activists; mass arrests of protestors; the demonization of LGBT community by the Russian parliament; the annexation of Crimea and the war in Ukraine. 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. In the Soviet era, Gessen writes, "Not only did the country shield all essential and most nonessential information behind a wall of secrets and lies," it also "waged a concerted war on knowledge itself." This book, in laying out the essential knowledge that is so hard to synthesize, represents a victory for knowledge, a tank shell fired at the wall that hides truth. Liesl Schillinger is a New York–based writer and translator. Her Penguin Classics translation of The Lady of the Camellias, by Alexandre Dumas Fils, appeared in the summer of 2013. In the fall, her illustrated book of neologisms, Wordbirds, was published by Simon & Schuster.

Reviewer: Liesl Schillinger

…[a] fascinating and deeply felt new book…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.

08/28/2017
Gessen (The Brothers), the esteemed Russian-American journalist, takes an intimate look at Russia in the post-Soviet period, when the public’s hopes for democracy devolved within a restricted society characterized by “a constant state of low-level dread.” She structures the book around the experiences of four principal individuals who came of age in the aftermath of the U.S.S.R.’s collapse: Masha, whose activism led her to become a “de facto political prisoner”; Seryozha, the grandson of Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev, the politician who spearheaded the reforms of the Gorbachev era; Lyosha, a homosexual academic in a homophobic society; and Zhanna, the daughter of murdered opposition leader Boris Nemtsov. Three other figures also make regular appearances: psychoanalyst Marina Arutyunyan, sociologist Led Gudkov, and far-right ideologue Alexander Dugin. Readers gain a deeply personal view into “what it has felt like to live in Russia”—Lyosha, for instance, has had to grapple with media that “equated pedophilia and sexual violence with homosexuality”—and are presented with unique perspectives on the country during “the privations of the 1980s, the fears of the 1990s, and... the sense of shutting down that pervaded the 2000s.” 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. Agent: Elyse Cheney, Elyse Cheney Literary. (Oct.)

"Fascinating and deeply felt." -The New York Times Book Review

“Forceful and eloquent on the history of her native country, Gessen is alarming and pessimistic about its future as it doubles down on totalitarianism.” -Los Angeles Times

“A remarkable portrait of an ever-shifting era…Gessen weaves her characters’ stories into a seamless, poignant whole. Her analysis of Putin’s malevolent administration is just as effective…a harrowing, compassionate and important book.” -San Francisco Chronicle

“Ambitious, timely, insightful and unsparing … By far Gessen’s best book, a sweeping intellectual history of Russia over the past four decades, told through a Tolstoyan gallery of characters. … What makes the book so worthwhile … are its keen observations about Russia from the point of view of those experiencing its return to a heavy-handed state. It helps that Gessen is a participant, and not just an observer, able to translate that world adeptly for Western readers. … You feel right there on the streets.” -Washington Post

“It’s great and written in a direct, blunt style appropriate for the subject.” –Bill Clinton, New York Times "By the Book"

“Gessen’s masterful chronicle of how post-Soviet optimism turned to disappointment amid the return of repression and corruption is a book as fascinating as it is urgently relevant today.” – Boston Globe

“[R]eads almost like a Tolstoy novel...Gessen outlines the failure of Russia's reform with precision and humanity, thoroughly explaining the strength of an authoritarian government's hold on its citizens' psyche. It's not just history; it is an urgent awakening.” –Buzzfeed

“[Gessen’s] essential reportage traces her homeland’s political devolution through the dramatic real stories of four citizens who now face ‘a new set of impossible choices.’” –O Magazine

“Current events, ongoing, recognizable, and important to realize.” – Tom Hanks

“Remarkable…Gessen’s deft blending of…stories gives us a fresh view of recent Russian history with from within, as it was experienced at the time by its people. It is a welcome perspective.” –New York Review of Books

“An essential resource in helping us understand just what kind of threat we are dealing with.” – Interview Magazine

“Excellent…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.” –New Republic
 
“One of Putin’s most fearless and dogged critics tracks the devastating descent of post-Soviet Russia into authoritarianism and kleptocracy through the lives of four disillusioned citizens.”  –Esquire

“Given the current political atmosphere involving the U.S. and Russia, there’s no more relevant journalist than Masha Gessen . . . her reporting should continue to inform any discussion of Russia throughout her lifetime and beyond.” –Kirkus

“One of our most urgent and iconoclastic journalists...few...are better placed to understand the parallels between the two egomaniacs who now dominate world affairs.” –Out Magazine

“Starting with the decline, if not the disintegration, of the Soviet regime, Masha Gessen’s The Future is History tracks totalitarianism through the lens of generation raised in post-Communist Russia.” -Vanity Fair, "Hot Type"

“Gessen, the sterling Russian-American journalist and activist, has been outspoken in recent press articles about the threat of totalitarianism in America. But in her latest book, Future Is History, she never mentions America’s problems. Here, instead, she examines what is wrong in her native country and lets readers, wide-eyed, draw the parallels." -Christian Science Monitor

“Brilliant and sobering…writing in fluent English, with formidable powers of synthesis and a mordant wit, Gessen follows the misfortunes of four Russians who have lived most of their lives under Putin…Gessen vividly chronicles the story of a mortal struggle.” -Newsday

“Gessen is an exemplary journalist who knows when to sit back and let facts speak for themselves…[and] The Future Is History just might be the culmination of [her] life’s work... If you’ve been confused by all the talk about “Russia stuff,” this might be the most important book you’ll read all year.” –Seattle Times
 
“Impressive...The Future Is History warns us of what will become of the United States if we don’t push against our burgeoning authoritarian government and fight for democracy…A chilling read, but a necessary one.” –Bitch Media 

“A lively and intimate narrative of the USSR’s collapse and its aftershocks, through the eyes of seven individuals… A gifted writer, Gessen is at her best when she’s recounting her characters’ experiences.” -Bookforum

“A thoroughly-reported history of a dismal sequence of events with a strong, engaging narrative and central set of characters.” –Forward

“A brave and eloquent critic of the Putin regime … For anyone wondering how Russia ended up in the hands of Putin and his friends, and what it means for the rest of us, Gessen’s book give an alarming and convincing picture.” –The Times
 
“Gessen makes a powerful case, arguing that Putin reconstituted the political and terror apparatus of the Soviet state and that ideology was the last block to fall into place.”  –Financial Times

“Russia is more at the forefront of our minds now than it’s been in all the time since the Cold War, and who better to enlighten us on the evolution of this complicated nation than journalist and Putin biographer Masha Gessen? Through her profiles of various Russians including four born in the 1980s, Gessen crafts a narrative that deciphers the Soviet Union’s move toward – and retreat from – democracy.” -Signature Reads

"A devastating, timely, and necessary reminder of the fragility and preciousness of all institutions of freedom." -Booklist (starred)

"Brilliant...A worthwhile read that describes how Putin’s powerful grip on Russia developed, offering a dire warning of how other nations could fall under a similar spell of state control." -Library Journal

"An intimate look at Russia in the post-Soviet period, when the public’s hopes for democracy devolved within a restricted society characterized by “a constant state of low-level dread"...a well-crafted, inventive narrative." -Publisher's Weekly

“Masha Gessen is humbly erudite, deftly unconventional, and courageously honest.  At this particular historical moment, when we must understand Russia to understand ourselves, we are all very lucky to have her."
- Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny

”A fine example of journalism approximating art. Necessary reading for anyone trying to understand the earthshaking events of our time: how in one country after another individual aspirations for wealth and power mutated into collective cravings for strongmen.”
- Pankaj Mishra, author of An End to Suffering and Age of Anger
 
‘The Future is History is a beautifully-written, sensitively-argued and cleverly-structured journey through Russia's failure to build democracy. The difficulty for any book about Russia is how to make the world’s biggest country human-sized, and she succeeds by building her story around the lives of a half-dozen people, whose fortunes wax and wane as the country opens up, then closes down once more. It is a story about hope and despair, trauma and treatment, ideals and betrayal, and above all about love and cynicism. If you want to truly understand why Vladimir Putin has been able to so dominate his country, this book will help you.’
- Oliver Bullough, author of Let Our Fame Be Great and The Last Man in Russia

★ 09/01/2017
In this latest work, journalist and author Gessen (Where the Jews Aren't) unmasks how Russia, often port rayed as an enigmatic country, reverted back to its totalitarian roots. The author brilliantly details how the Soviets undertook the political movement Perestroika in the 1980s to the entrenchment of the current President Vladimir Putin. The narrative focuses on both the large-scale political processes and the people who were impacted by the new government policies. What is understood is that Russian citizens were ill-prepared for the emergence of democracy. The volatile 1990s created a Russian state yearning for a simpler time when the state controlled daily life. This nostalgia fed the rise of a hard-line political narrative that Putin has used to curtail liberal opposition. Gessen portrays a stark picture of why Russia is bellicose toward the West and the United States, which complements her earlier work The Man Without a Face, and Ben Judah's Fragile Empire. VERDICT A worthwhile read that descries how Putin's powerful grip on Russia developed, offering a dire warning of how other nations could fall under a similar spell of state control.—Jacob Sherman, John Peace Lib., Univ. of Texas at San Antonio

Gessen narrates her own work in this production, which focuses on four individuals who were born when Communism fell in the Soviet Union. Gessen sees their lives as being illustrative of how the “oligarchic corruptocracy” of the Soviet Union was replaced by an “oligarchic corruptocracy” of post-Soviet Russia. Plus ça change, plus la mème chose . . . Gessen, a native speaker of Russian, has spent many decades in the West, and her Russian-accented English is not as heavy as some might expect. Her delivery is clear and easy to understand, though somewhat staccato. Her enunciation is quite good. Although Gessen’s reading is not all that expressive, it’s not monotonous. This is a somewhat long production, but those who are interested in Russia will want to listen. M.T.F. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

★ 2017-08-06
A brilliant if somber look at modern Russia, a failed democracy, by prizewinning journalist Gessen (The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy, 2015, etc.). First there were the serfs, and then "Homo Sovieticus," the gloomily obedient men, women, and children who waited in bread lines and slaved in mines and factories. Are they the avatars of the good old days? With Vladimir Putin's rise and increasingly absolutist rule, there may be something to the old saw that the Russian soul craves authoritarianism. Yet, as Gessen, who has written extensively on Putin, writes, that may flat out not be so. As she notes in this urgent chronicle, examining the Russian character through sociological instruments was frowned on, even banned, until the late 1960s, when Yuri Levada, who turns up at several points in this long narrative, began to look at how ordinary Russians thought about their society. For one thing, later surveys showed that although some wanted "rockers," "hippies," and "pederasts" (read: homosexuals) to be "liquidated," a far larger number advocated tolerance, especially younger Russians. Those younger Russians are the focus of the author's character-driven approach, a kind of nonfiction novel that compares favorably to the work of Svetlana Alexievich. One of Gessen's cases in point, a still-youngish woman named Masha, has learned to work every angle thanks to a resourceful mother who, among other things, figured out ways to "teach Soviet Jews to beat the anti-Semitic machine." By all rights, Masha, entrepreneurial and smart, ought to be in the forefront of Russian development, but having run afoul of Putin's regime, she is effectively a nonperson, "a de facto political prisoner." So it is with Zhanna, whose father, opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, was gunned down on a Moscow bridge in 2015, "with the Kremlin as the backdrop for the murder." All Gessen's players harbor the low-level dread on which totalitarian regimes thrive—and all, a refrain has it, believe that their country is dead. A superb, alarming portrait of a government that exercises outsize influence in the modern world, at great human cost.