The Future Is History (National Book Award Winner): How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

By Masha Gessen

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 159463453X
• ISBN13: 9781594634536
• Release Date: October 2017
• Publisher: Riverhead Books
• Length: 528 Pages
• Weight: 1.73 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.6" x 6.3" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Personal Accounts of the Transition from the USSR to Putin

This book is mistitled, because as it makes abundantly clear, totalitarianism DIDN'T reclaim Russia: Russia abandoned totalitarian internationalism in favor of nationalist authoritarianism. But that isn't the book's real focus anyway: it's the story of several people who lived through the collapse of the USSR, the triumph of Yeltsin, and the emergence of Putin. There's a good deal of historical description, but the narrative is all about how their lives were impacted by the neo-fascism of the Putin regime. It's very interesting, but extremely tendentious as it's told strictly from what might be described as an American liberal perspective intent on painting the new Russia as an evil empire. Only one of the subjects is pro-Putin and is presented in a completely dismissive way. It's all a little too one-sided for me, but nevertheless a fascinating picture of the wheel of history as it cycles back through one of its many phases.