The Book Depository The Future is History by Masha Gessen

Author: Athan

Rating: 5

Review: 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.

Author: Unsung Heroines

Rating: 1

Review: Masha Gessen is amazing. Loved her book on Putin and seeing her in interviews. Never received this order.