The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia by Masha Gessen (PDF)

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WINNER OF THE 2017 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN NONFICTIONFINALIST 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 SUGARThe 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.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐One of the things that you discover in this book is the use of pedophilia accusations as a political weapon is rife in Putin’s Russia. We already knew that Putin has poisoned the US political system and in particular the Republican Party. But if you were wondering why QAnon and GOP nutcases like Marjorie Taylor Greene are so obsessed with this smear, wonder no longer. This is right out of the Putin playbook. It worked for him in Russia, he’s trying to make it work for him here, both through his poisoning of social media and through his overt links with the religious right.Gessen follows a handful of Russian families from the end of the Soviet era, through the collapse of the Soviet Union, through the chaotic, but free, 1990s and then through the return to totalitarianism after Putin comes from nowhere to become Russian president.For the most part it works very well. It owes a lot to Tolstoy’s War and Peace (don’t be put off by that), which also explored the impact of profound historical change through the lens of its impact on families, except this is non-fiction. Gessen herself admits War and Peace was her model. War and Peace has philosophical sections – Gessen, instead, and I think rightly so, analogously tries to explain the psychological reasons why many Russians have willingly returned to totalitarianism. I found some of the psychology stuff to be a bit heavy going, but ultimately I thought it was worthwhile and it’s very much a minority of the book. You could, if you want, skim that material and still take a lot away.The Soviet era lasted 70 years, at least a couple generations. What happens when you take 150 million Russians who grew up in an utterly stultifying and static environment, where very little was subject to individual initiative, where your place in society was largely fixed based on who your parents were, where very little change was possible, where your entire life was subject to the state and where they were told they were the best in the world – and now, “set them free”, in a country which has been stripped of its empire and is clearly, now, at best, a second-rate power.And the answer is you’ve got a situation ripe for disaster.It’s interesting to contrast (Gessen touches briefly on contrasts with the former Soviet satellite states, but not specifically on East Germany) with the East German experience. Germany was very lucky that East Germany was so small relative to West, that it had only 40 years under a Soviet system (not 70), that it had near constant exposure to the West through West German TV, and that totalitarianism was done by the Soviets to them (rather than being homegrown), that West Germany was rich enough to fund a very generous safety net for East Germany, and that in joining West Germany, East Germany was joining an undoubted success.United Germany has still had to deal with pathologies (extreme right wing/extreme left wing movements) that have taken root in the former East Germany, but, by-and-large, those have been diluted by the healthier west. None of these things were true in Russia.And so, you have an entire country, in Russia, that is unable to reconcile itself to the changes that have occurred, and which is profoundly susceptible to anyone who can spin them a story of recaptured glory. We’ve seen that movie many times before.If you want to understand just how screwed up Russia is, and why it backs Putin in his insane ventures, this is, I think, required reading.

⭐Through the lives of 7 individuals, this book covers the evolution of Russia from communist totalitarianism through a brief inchoate democracy into its current state as some kind of hybrid regime – authoritarianism that relies on a totalitarian infrastructure that remains largely intact. It is not pure political science, not straight current history, and not just personal stories, but a mix of narrative and hard-hitting analyses in these genres. I saw it as a fascinating experiment in journalism that is a complete success, though it may not work for some readers. It riveted me and made my hungry to learn more.Gessen starts with 4 young people born in the mid-1980s, right when Gorbachev had inaugurated perestroika in an effort to liberalize and bring transparency and truth to a dying regime. All are from families with talent and drive and will go on to lead interesting lives during the tumultuous 30 years that follow. But there are also 3 older protagonists: a philosopher, a sociologist, and a psychoanalyst. Their perspectives are incorporated into this flowing narrative, ensuring an anchor of academic and political grounding of depth and intelligence.The USSR’s society was stagnant, in an economic downward spiral. It was a system based on rigid precepts: terror, an omnipotent state, and, given the policy of “doublethink” à la Orwell, a population cowed by the inability to think rationally. The keystone was s signalling system that told those in submission what they were supposed to do at any given moment. Gorbachev, with perestroika and the liberation of all political prisoners, finally obliterated what was left of the system that had survived on obedience and habit. Once breached, it collapsed in an instant.The power that emerged was the populist Yelsin, a buffoon and binge drinker who connected with the people at the right time. Unfortunately, rather than a visionary builder, he consolidated the power of the presidency and failed to dismantle the vast, oppressive infrastructure that undergirded the totalitarian state. Once Putin took the reins, he understood how to exploit the levers of oppression as only a former KGB agent could.Throughout all this, the principal characters make their way. Some were nomenclatura, some simply talented, others normal and of a different class. The way Gessen’s narrative works is to follow their lives and careers as they advance, with clear explanations (up to not only the latest academic debates but also the latest in such disciplines as psychoanalysis and sociology), and as circumstances change in decisive and unpredictable ways. I found most of them compelling, with the exception of Dugin, the philosopher who became an ethno-nationalist firebrand and enabler of Putin.Gesson explores, with brilliant succinctness, the notion of totalitarianism. Though there are many definitions, they can include these elements: 1) a simple ideology that explains everything; 2) party and state are symbiotic, whereby the top dictates all; 3) consensus is imposed via a monopoly on mass media and isolation from the outside world; 4) terror is systematic and sometimes arbitrary, as carried out by a secret police and the judiciary; 5) society and the military are under direct command, completely mobilized; 6) chronic scarcity that is manipulated for political purpose; 7) static social mobility. There is no academic consensus on this and Putin’s version arguably does not quite fit this standard.After nearly 70 years of the Soviet system, Gesson argues, the population has been conditioned in a way that inhibits free thought: in the face of uncertainty, they craved its simplistic clarity. This left them ripe for exploitation by a demagogue. This opportunity arrived for Putin during the economic crisis after 2007, when oil prices fell. What emerged was a new kind of totalitarianism, Gessen posits, though discussion of it remains under-developed in the book. It involves using the state apparatus of oppression, the creation of scapegoats (in particular the LGBT community, a major theme of the book) who are harassed by semi-official thugs, enrichment by corruption, and the shutdown of all dissident opinion in addition to control of virtually all media.Unfortunately, the fates of the protagonists are only sketchily covered. Dugin goes on the a prominent career, similar to Bannon. The others face great hardship and some flee the country, but I was left wondering about all of them. The use of psychoanalysis is also a bit heavy handed, however useful a way it is to look at the psychological implications of what is happening under Putin. Sometimes, with so many threads, the book feels a bit helter skelter, but re-reading it is rewarding.Recommended as a great and informative read.

⭐Brilliant writing and analysis – essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the complexities behind the headlines. Especially valuable for us American readers, who have such a hard time reckoning with current events in Russia.

⭐Bought this on the back of an online recommendation, but it’s a bit too large to read in the tube, so it was gathering dust on my shelf for the better part of a year.A month ago, it was officially banned in Russia!Naturally, and hopefully this is representative of how others will react, I was immediately overcome by an urge to drop whatever else I was reading and pick it up. To say that I was very richly rewarded is an understatement.“The Future is History” is as close as we will ever get to an insider’s account of the domestic resistance movement to Vladimir Putin. From the fall of Communism, all the way to 2016, it traces the lives of six Russians who one way or another were entangled (some deliberately and some by destiny) in the losing battle against the emergence of the modern Russian kleptocratic dictatorship. A cheerleader of the new regime is thrown in for free.Let me get out of the way upfront the one thing that’s negative about this book: with the best of intentions, and with a post-it note affixed to page XII that lists the cast of characters, I found it impossible to remember who is who. Yes, Masha is the girl on the inside cover and Zhanna is Boris Nemtsov’s daughter and Lyosha is the fellow who finds out early on in the book he’s gay, but it’s still a bit of a mess. Like, I finished this and I needed to be reminded that Gudkov is the Levada center and frankly I’m not sure I ever figured out what the psychologist’s deal was. Perhaps all the analysis of totalitarianism comes under the chapters that refer to her. And perhaps not.No matter, this is THE BOOK about what happened in Russia. The history itself was very confusing, the author explains. She, a native Russian, had to sit down and figure out how the 1991 coup was different from the 1993 coup, because she was too young when all that happened and because it really all followed no rhyme or reason. So perhaps the confusion about the characters merely serves to condition the reader to leave the detail to one side and focus on the important stuff!The important stuff is made crystal clear. After providing an excellent, self-conatained, summary of Russia’s post 1985 history, and as much as possible by association to the experiences of her book’s many heros and anti-heros, Masha Gessen picks through Putin’s methods, tactics, and intentions like a surgeon:She rifles through an extensive bibliography of authoritarianism and totalitarianism and the efforts made by previous thinkers to explain the similarities and differences between the two and how they all apply to both the Soviet Union and Putin’s rule, and leads us to the conclusion that what we have here is entirely sui-generis: Russia is run by a post-communist mafia that is better understood by exploring how the underworld works rather by referring to your sources from your PPE course at Oxford.In short, you’ve got to belong to the family. The inner circle are the man’s buddies from his judo days, the slightly further out circle are his colleagues from the KGB and you can still join if you are a pliant billionaire or an ardently pro-Putin apparatchik. But you can never leave.The story is also told, brilliantly, of how Putin manages to pull on the heartstrings of his subjects: he keeps digging up enemies of the state, and they come straight from the list Goebbels totted up half a century before him: it’s the gays, the Jews, the liberals etc. The Ukrainians get thrown in at some point, with a side-order of Nazis, and it really works: the mom of the author (or is it the mom of some other character? I told you this was confusing!) joins in in cheering against the Ukraine; people who talk sense become traitors first and dissidents second.The other aspect that gets covered well is the utterly unmoored, disconnected-from-reality, disconnected-from-science cacophony of superstition and fausse erudition that characterized turn-of-the millennium Russia. In a world where common sense was decidedly not shared among the righteous (because nobody possessed it: a very well-respected thinker believed radiation from space formed the Russian people, for example) a true moral compass was the only common thread binding them together. Nothing more and nothing less.It’s very very good. And very raw. There’s beatings in here and persecutions and lots of torture, at many levels: physical and worse. Kafka’s got nothing on the Soviet-honed reflexes of Russian bureaucracy. Or on the system’s way to hold hostages. The activist brother gets fifteen (well-timed) days in jail. His brother gets three years in jail. The heroes are brave, but they’re real and flawed: multiple lives, multiple wives, sometimes. The tyranny, most importantly, is arbitrary, but random: it could hit you anytime, anywhere and you don’t need to be in the resistance to face the full force of the regime. You merely need to be unlucky.If you do happen to actually belong to the resistance, of course, then you will be eliminated.I have absolutely no idea what drives the resolve of these mad people, but I’m grateful Masha Gessen decided to make her ninth book an autobiography of both herself and her movement.

⭐Is it easy to understand why Russia, after a brief period of hope in the 1990s, has become an authoritarian kleptocracy? Or is it difficult? Sometimes it seems one, sometimes the other. This book is an excellent attempt to illustrate and clarify the process. Read it to understand where Russia is today and, more importantly, why.

⭐Gessen uses an innovatory approach by focusing on individuals, mostly not well known, and how the changes in Russia impacted them. It doesn’t surprise me that, like many of those she writes about, Gessen has moved to the USA to protect herself and her family.

⭐This book follows the lives of four different families (sometimes individuals) who were living in Russia during the old USSR, experienced a brief period of democracy in the 1990s, and then were swept up into Vladimir Putin’s new USSR in the 21st century.It is set out like a novel and reads like one. And like a Russian one too – grim, painful, dark and tragic – something Dostoevsky might write. Often enough, experiencing vicariously the crushing weight of a repressive regime is too much to bear when you are immersed in this work. I took breaks from the book for days at a time. Yet I always returned. The tale is eminently readable, the writing excellent, and I had to find out what happened to all the real-life characters.Unfortunately, the far right is on the rise. The autocracy of Putin’s Russia, its lies and misinformation and conspiracy theories used to snare the innocent and naive, sound all too familiar to events only recently past and still an ongoing part of the present in North America. Putin’s Russia is in the news regularly too, usually for nefarious reasons. Gessen’s book helps us understand not only Putin and his new USSR, but what is happening in parts of the American democracy. It is incredibly relevant in 2021.

⭐To have read this book at this time seems almost prophetic. This easy to read book explains how the political system that allows someone like Putin to seize power and one day fall out of power. I highly recommend this book especially now

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