Name: The Future is History
Rating: 3.909090909090909 (11 reviews)
ISBN: 9781594634536

Masha Gessen

Putin's biographer reveals how, in the space of a generation, Russia surrendered to a more virulent and invincible new strain of autocracy.

How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

The Future is History

Greg Talbot

“Mid its prisons swung gray Leningrad. And, when mad from the tortures’ succession, Marched the army of those, who’d been doomed, Sang the engines the last separation With their whistles through smoking gloom, And the deathly stars hanged our heads over And our Russia writhed under the boots – With the blood of the guiltless full-covered – And the wheels on Black Maries’ black routes.” Requiem - Anna Akhmatova Perestroika, a beginning in Russian since the totalitarian state had clamped down during the Great Patriotic War, became an idea, was the beginning or Russia beginning to look into it’s a collective mirror. The reform program, lead by politicians like Alexander Yakovlev and scholars such as Zbiginiew Brzezinski tried to lead the peaceful transition from the Soviet Union. Principles of the Movmeent for Democratic Reform included renouncing the USSR asa unitary state, a transition to a market system and a safety net for those hit by economic reform (p.86). How Russian leadership ultimately failed at reform, and found itself in the grip of an authoritarian state is the study of Masha Gessen’s work. Through multiple stories of young people who grew up in the USSR, and how concealing their ethnic or sexual backgrounds were neccesary to survive. With the rise of Putin, and the end of true democratic institutions (elections, court systems), the unraveling of a western style of democracy comes to an end. Anti-homosexual legislation, lack of assembly, invasions into Crimea, banning of media that does not serve the Kremlin. It fits with the terror state described by Hannah Arendt in her seminal work “The Origins of Totalitarianism” as a double helix of “ideology and state terror (p. 291). Gessen writes broadly about the sociological understanding of the russian people. Many of her profiles are on activism, the social sciences or the history as told by outsiders (psychologist Eric Fromm’s work on totalitarism), and the grappling with the terror that persists in Russia’s history and future. Buduschengo Net, the future is history, the repetition of the state sponsored control and terror inflicted on change agents. This book attempts to pull together research and literature on and from Russian society since the Stalin purges, to make sense of Russia’s current state of the world. Overall, a fantstic read, and a part of history that is still being shaped by the bold men and women striving for a better Russia.

Lisa Miller

Excellent book looking at the recent history of Russia from Perestroika in the early 1980's up until 2017 and Putin's crackdowns. It blends the stories of 4 Russians born in the early 80's and the overall political and social history of Russia so you see the big and the small. Gessen explains the how and why without excusing the horrific choices and changes that have happened in Russia under Putin. What an eye opener.

Navouhodonosavrost

WINNER OF THE 2017 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN NONFICTION FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDS WINNER OF THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY'S HELEN BERNSTEIN BOOK AWARD NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2017 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, LOS ANGELES TIMES, WASHINGTON POST, BOSTON GLOBE, SEATTLE TIMES, CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, NEWSWEEK, PASTE, and POP SUGAR The essential journalist and bestselling biographer of Vladimir Putin reveals how, in the space of a generation, Russia surrendered to a more virulent and invincible new strain of autocracy. Award-winning journalist Masha Gessen's understanding of the events and forces that have wracked Russia in recent times is unparalleled. In The Future Is History, Gessen follows the lives of four people born at what promised to be the dawn of democracy. Each of them came of age with unprecedented expectations, some as the children and grandchildren of the very architects of the new Russia, each with newfound aspirations of their own--as entrepreneurs, activists, thinkers, and writers, sexual and social beings. Gessen charts their paths against the machinations of the regime that would crush them all, and against the war it waged on understanding itself, which ensured the unobstructed reemergence of the old Soviet order in the form of today's terrifying and seemingly unstoppable mafia state. Powerful and urgent, The Future Is History is a cautionary tale for our time and for all time.

The Future is History How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

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