The Future is History by Masha Gessen

Masha Gessen’s “impassioned” new book – winner of the US National Book Award for Nonfiction – charts “Russia’s journey from Soviet totalitarianism to another, subtler totalitarianism under Vladimir Putin”, said Sam Kitchener in The Daily Telegraph. Gessen, a journalist and LGBT rights activist who fled Russia in 2013, fearing that the government may attempt to take away her adopted son, opens her account in the early 1990s, when it briefly seemed as if the country might be governed “along liberal, democratic lines”. That hope, however, soon perished: the “free-for-all” of the immediate post-Soviet period gave way to the economic crisis of the late 1990s, which prompted a “wave of Soviet nostalgia”. This was cannily exploited by the “ex-KGB colonel” Putin, who succeeded Boris Yeltsin as president in 2000.

Central to this “fascinating” book is the idea that the Russian people themselves willed totalitarianism’s return, said Daniel Beer in The Guardian. Gessen draws on the concept of the Homo Sovieticus citizen – first developed by the sociologist Yuri Levada – to argue that the illiberal, stability-craving mindset fostered in Soviet times clung on tenaciously even after that regime’s collapse. And its persistence has helped facilitate the “mounting intolerance, xenophobia and social conservatism” seen in contemporary Russia – the growing hostility towards homosexuals, for example. “Totalitarianism is a big word,” said Edward Lucas in The Times, and Gessen’s book doesn’t quite justify the claim made by its subtitle, which is that it has “reclaimed Russia”. The country today is “clearly not totalitarian in the Stalinist sense”. All the same, The Future is History is an intelligent and absorbing work that paints an “alarming and convincing picture” of Russia’s recent past.