Unfortunately, she does not always exercise that sort of temperance in her discussions of Russia itself. Her emphatic rejections of conspiracy thinking around Russiagate in her New York Review of Books pieces particularly stand out. has injected a much-needed dose of calm and logic into the current US hysteria over Russia. 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. But portraying the politics of totalitarianism does not call for a romantic filter.
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. The characters’ personal histories add life and nuance to Gessen’s narrative. 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. Powerful and urgent, The Future Is History is a cautionary tale for our time and for all time.a magisterial, panoramic overview of Russia under Putin. 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. 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. In The Future Is History, she follows the lives of four people born at what promised to be the dawn of democracy.
Hailed for her "fearless indictment of the most powerful man in Russia" (The Wall Street Journal), award-winning journalist Masha Gessen is unparalleled in her understanding of the events and forces that have wracked her native country in recent times. Putin's bestselling biographer reveals how, in the space of a generation, Russia surrendered to a more virulent and invincible new strain of autocracy.
Winner of the 2017 National Book Award for Nonfiction. The Future is History : How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia Masha Gessen € 23.99 If not in stock, the expected delivery time for this item will be 2 - 4 weeks
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