In The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, she writes brilliantly about the weight of history and the precariousness of Russian nationhood in grimly kaleidoscopic detail. In these capacities, she’s one of the leading voices of opposition to the Putin regime and illiberal and often Putin-fawning political leaders and their movements in the West today. Gessen has written about the politics and culture of her home country for decades, not only as a journalist and author, but also as a prominent LGBT rights advocate. Put in psychological terms she invokes late in her book, Russia’s current totalitarian moment is consistent with Freud’s concept of the death drive, where past trauma and thwarted destructive impulses turn a person (or in this case a nation) toward self-destruction. Seeing now how Putin has aggressively consolidated power by suppressing press freedom, legitimate political opposition, and open society, it seems to journalist and author Masha Gessen that Russia is caught in a repetition of its traumatic past. He pledged to restore order after the upheaval of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ensuing presidency of Boris Yeltsin. “FIRST AND FOREMOST,” Vladimir Putin claimed in 2005, “it is worth acknowledging that the demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” “As for the Russian people,” he went on, “it became a genuine tragedy.” Power can and will prey on a people’s need for order and cultural purpose, and Putin rose to dominate Russia in just this way.

Gessen the future is history