National Book Award Non Fiction Winner
The Future Is History
by Masha Gessen
Summary
A history of Russia after the Soviet collapse told through the entwined lives of four people born around the time of the USSR's end, alongside profiles of a sociologist, a psychoanalyst, and an ideologue of the far right. Gessen tracks how a brief opening in the 1990s gave way to surveillance, propaganda, and the steady restoration of authoritarian habits under Vladimir Putin. The book diagnoses a society where political possibility was foreclosed before it could mature.
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Historical Context & Significance
Gessen is a prominent critic of Vladimir Putin; the book explores how the Russian mind was steered back toward Soviet habits under the current regime.