I obviously should have read this book before I read Masha Gessen’s other book The Future is History, as that one ends up being a kind of sequel to this one, but alas. Having also read Timothy Snyder’s The Road to Unfreedom also acts as a kind of accidental primer for this one, but in reverse. This book catalogues the rise of Putin, after first detailing the general history of Russian democratic politics of the 1990s. Putin was more or less installed in 2000 with […]

This book is structured as a kind of oral history (though written in the third person) in which four main characters and their lives tell the story of Russia and the Soviet Union from the 1970s through 2015 or so. The subtitle “How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia” is answered through these stories as well as through Masha Gessen’s narration as historian and journalist adding historical detail and context as necessary. Gessen spends a lot of time in this book discussing definitions and how they do and […]