The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

By Masha Gessen

Subjects: Russia (federation), social conditions, Biography, Politics and government, Intellectual life, Russia (federation), politics and government, Russia (federation), social life and customs, New York Times reviewed, Totalitarianism, History, POLITICAL SCIENCE / World / Russian & Former Soviet Union, HISTORY / Modern / 21st Century, HISTORY / Russia & the Former Soviet Union

Description: Journalist Masha 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.