I feel about this book the way I felt about The Bronze Horseman. Powerful and urgent, The Future Is History is a cautionary tale for our time and for all time. 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, Gessen follows the lives of four people born at what promised to be the dawn of democracy. (Oct.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.Īward-winning journalist Masha Gessen’s understanding of the events and forces that have wracked Russia in recent times is unparalleled.
Agent: Elyse Cheney, Elyse Cheney Literary. 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. 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.
Three other figures also make regular appearances: psychoanalyst Marina Arutyunyan, sociologist Led Gudkov, and far-right ideologue Alexander Dugin. 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.
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