How democracy died
Given the tense and perplexing relationship between the United States and Russia, journalists who can explain Vladimir Putin’s regime to the American public are in great demand. Foremost among them is Masha Gessen, a courageous New York-based reporter who grew up in the Soviet Union and has lived for extended periods in Moscow.
To date, Gessen’s bestknown work has probably been “The Man Without a Face,” an unflinching and widely praised 2012 biography of the Russian president. Her new book is about to catapult her to another level of acclaim.
“The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia” is a remarkable portrait of an ever-shifting era, as told through the experiences of four people who were born in the waning years of the USSR. A decade shy of middle age, they’ve witnessed the collapse of the Soviet state, the economic and social upheavals of the 1990s and, in this century, the ascent of a next-generation autocrat.
In Putin’s Russia, Gessen writes, millions have once again “agreed to live under a sort of dictatorship in exchange for stability.” It’s a situation that sometimes leaves her subjects feeling hopeless: “There was a specific Russian expression: budushchego net, ‘There is no future.’ As though it could indeed be canceled.”
The two men and two women at the heart of this rich and deeply reported book are neither famous nor blessed with unique talents. But taken together, their life stories form an extraordinarily detailed picture of the country’s fraught recent past.
Lyosha is the youngest of Gessen’s core group, all of whom were born between 1982 and 1985. He grew up eating what his mother called “Legs of Bush,” dark-meat chicken parts imported during George H.W. Bush’s presidency. As a teen, he realized that he’s gay. He was often bullied. Eventually, Lyosha became an independent-minded gender studies professor.
One semester, Gessen writes, “Lyosha had the class watch and write about ‘The Times of Harvey Milk,’ a 1984 documentary about the openly gay San Francisco city supervisor who was assassinated by another legislator. One of the two young men in the class turned in a paper arguing that gays, not being real men, could not be politicians.”
In the 2010s, when Putin’s forces consolidated power with new antigay laws, Lyosha was increasingly hounded by rightwing thugs. He’s since moved to Brooklyn and lives near other Russians who’ve left for similar reasons.
Another of the book’s important figures is named Masha (not to be confused with the author). She liked Putin when the ex-spy became president 17 years ago. To a teen back then, Gessen writes, “Soviet intelligence officers were a special breed. Masha had binge-watched films about” their exploits. In the early 2000s, as oil profits lifted the Russian economy, Masha took a job with a chemical company and “learned to give bribes” to government officials.
But later, when her son turned 4 and still wasn’t talking, she felt stuck. “If Masha did not want him shunted to the mentally disabled track,” Gessen says, “she had to shred his medical records, (and) bribe someone to make him a pristine but believable new chart.” Masha started going to anticorruption marches. Soon, Gessen writes, she was a fixture at “every action, protest (and) planning meeting.”
Zhanna, another main character, is the daughter of Boris Nemtsov; a government official during Boris Yeltsin’s presidency, he became a fierce Putin opponent. Like Boris, Zhanna was politically engaged, and she believed that the Crimea incursion signaled that “disaster” was imminent.
She was right, but not in the way she expected. In February 2015, Nemtsov was shot to death in public, near the Kremlin. Authorities “arrested a Chechen man,” Gessen writes, but Zhanna “said that she had no trust in any Russian investigation.” The president, Zhanna told the press, had publicly vilified Nemtsov, and “she held Putin personally responsible for her father’s death.”
Seryozha rounds out the book’s primary subjects. His grandfather was an adviser to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, and as a boy Seryozha enjoyed unusual perks. “On weekends,” Gessen writes, “a black government Volga — the top model among Soviet-made cars — equipped with flashing lights that entitled it to ignore traffic regulations carried Seryozha’s family” to a state dacha.
Later, increasingly disgusted by Putin’s dishonesty, Seryozha had a political awakening. A few years ago, Gessen says, he bought “hundreds of yards” of white ribbon and cut it into six-inch strips. These were distributed to the public and, fastened to countless lapels and handbags, became a unifying symbol among those opposed to Putin.
Gessen weaves her characters’ stories into a seamless, poignant whole. Her analysis of Putin’s malevolent administration is just as effective. The “gray little man” has acquired virtually limitless power through tainted parliamentary balloting and other schemes; launched a series of military campaigns, galvanizing Russians who long for the days of Soviet might; and used the power of the state-run media to target gays, intellectuals and other opponents. Then there’s the matter of the Kremlin’s meddling in foreign elections.
Recently, “The Future Is History” made the list of five finalists for the National Book Award for nonfiction, an honor that recognizes its scope and nuance. In the book’s prologue, Gessen admits something that most authors probably wouldn’t — she set out to craft a big, timeless piece of journalism: “I imagined I was writing a long Russian (nonfiction) novel that aimed to capture both the texture of individual tragedies and the events and ideas that shaped” her four main subjects. Her ambition has resulted in a harrowing, compassionate and important book.