Gessen, a well-respected journalist and an activist herself, is all grit and groundwork, and zero slouch she plumbs the depths of her subjects' lives, unearthing grievances big and small, laying bare their insecurities and desires and, for some, the way their rights as citizens are repeatedly stomped on by Vladimir Putin's ongoing crackdowns. Yet her suggestion that trauma can be-and has been-deliberately used as a political instrument of the state seems less persuasive. Gessen deserves much credit for her sensitivity to the plight of Russians seeking to figure out who they now were and who they should become. The depersonalized figure of Homo sovieticus, a kind of Communist golem unable to shake its slavish mentality or embrace the 'inner freedom' of liberal democracy and capitalism, has been around for a long time. Leaving aside the inherently problematic notion that Russians are powerless to understand their world without a separate class of intellectuals to explain it to them, the picture Gessen paints of them as lacking the capacity for individual thought and action has a particular history. A gifted writer, Gessen is at her best when she’s recounting her characters’ experiences. The bulk of Gessen’s narrative describes the ways in which these people try to make sense of the larger events happening around them. 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. a magisterial, panoramic overview of Russia under Putin.

The future is history gessen