masha gessen the future is history review

If you oppose Putin, you may be murdered, like Boris Nemtsov. In 2017, opposition politics in Russia is all but impossible. But the precise meaning is largely beside the point. Hannah Arendt is quoted, along with other writers. The book contains a discussion of the precise meaning of ‘totalitarianism’.

‘Strong and stable’ – where have we heard that lately? Most Russians, the book says, yearn not for change and opportunity (and the responsibility and anxiety that may go with them), but for order, imposed from above, and ‘strength and stability’. Most citizens fear the open expanse of liberal freedom, preferring the ‘narrow corridor’ of the authoritarian State. Putin era youth groups like Nashi differ little from their Soviets equivalents. This character, the opinion polling and (a bit less plausibly) the psychoanalysis suggest, did not fade away after the collapse of the Soviet Union, nor even with the passing of generations. Masha Gessen’s explanation explores, via the lives of seven individuals and through three disciplines which did not exist in the Soviet period – sociology, psychoanalysis and opinion polling – the persistence of what she calls Homo Sovieticus. Why did the Russian people not fasten on to their new freedoms in the way that the citizens of the Baltic republics and, to a lesser extent, those of Ukraine did? Its purpose is to explain how, and why, Russia returned to a state of totalitarianism despite the initial hope and democratisation of the Yeltsin period.

Masha gessen the future is history review