The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

"Then the city ripped up the asphalt on the sidewalks throughout central Moscow and replaced it with pavement tiles. The first freeze showed that the ice that formed on these tiles stayed smooth and clear, unlike most of the ice on asphalt...Some days, the streets looked like scenes from slapstick comedy. Pedestrians kept slipping and falling...It was hard not to laugh, even as people were breaking arms and hips all around you. Then it was time to marvel at the regime's insistence on turning its own metaphors literal: it was determined to break its people" (473).

The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia by Masha Gessen

This engrossing work of “reads-like-fiction” book-length journalism radiates around a small cast of sources who are simultaneously “…‘regular,’ in that their experiences exemplified the experiences of millions of others, and extraordinary: intelligent, passionate, introspective, able to tell their stories vividly” (3). These “sources” quickly come to feel like characters through Gessen’s own extraordinary authorship as she weaves together their family stories, contextualizing historical information about pre-Putin Russia, and their experiences as children and adults living in Russia after the fall of the USSR. These narratives are supplemented by insights gleaned from interviews with numerous Russian psychologists and sociologists as well as Gessen’s own philosophical investigations into the nature of totalitarianism, authoritarianism, individual and societal trauma, and resistance. This book was crushing and enlightening in turn, and highly recommended for anyone interested in Russia, journalism, revolution and governance, and the struggle for queer rights. For those with little knowledge of Russian history, a reading of the Wikipedia or other encyclopedia’s entry on the history of the Russian Revolution, the USSR, Crimea, and Ukraine is recommended as a useful preparation for better understanding The Future is History. Subjects this book includes that some readers may be sensitive to (but which others may be thrilled to find sensitively discussed in their literature): homophobia, hate crimes, police brutality, torture, mass murder, ethnic cleansing.

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