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greg_talbot 's review for:
The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia
by Masha Gessen
“Mid its prisons swung gray Leningrad.
And, when mad from the tortures’ succession,
Marched the army of those, who’d been doomed,
Sang the engines the last separation
With their whistles through smoking gloom,
And the deathly stars hanged our heads over
And our Russia writhed under the boots –
With the blood of the guiltless full-covered –
And the wheels on Black Maries’ black routes.”
Requiem - Anna Akhmatova
Perestroika, a beginning in Russian since the totalitarian state had clamped down during the Great Patriotic War, became an idea, was the beginning or Russia beginning to look into it’s a collective mirror. The reform program, lead by politicians like Alexander Yakovlev and scholars such as Zbiginiew Brzezinski tried to lead the peaceful transition from the Soviet Union. Principles of the Movmeent for Democratic Reform included renouncing the USSR asa unitary state, a transition to a market system and a safety net for those hit by economic reform (p.86).
How Russian leadership ultimately failed at reform, and found itself in the grip of an authoritarian state is the study of Masha Gessen’s work. Through multiple stories of young people who grew up in the USSR, and how concealing their ethnic or sexual backgrounds were neccesary to survive.
With the rise of Putin, and the end of true democratic institutions (elections, court systems), the unraveling of a western style of democracy comes to an end. Anti-homosexual legislation, lack of assembly, invasions into Crimea, banning of media that does not serve the Kremlin. It fits with the terror state described by Hannah Arendt in her seminal work “The Origins of Totalitarianism” as a double helix of “ideology and state terror (p. 291).
Gessen writes broadly about the sociological understanding of the russian people. Many of her profiles are on activism, the social sciences or the history as told by outsiders (psychologist Eric Fromm’s work on totalitarism), and the grappling with the terror that persists in Russia’s history and future. Buduschengo Net, the future is history, the repetition of the state sponsored control and terror inflicted on change agents. This book attempts to pull together research and literature on and from Russian society since the Stalin purges, to make sense of Russia’s current state of the world.
Overall, a fantstic read, and a part of history that is still being shaped by the bold men and women striving for a better Russia.
And, when mad from the tortures’ succession,
Marched the army of those, who’d been doomed,
Sang the engines the last separation
With their whistles through smoking gloom,
And the deathly stars hanged our heads over
And our Russia writhed under the boots –
With the blood of the guiltless full-covered –
And the wheels on Black Maries’ black routes.”
Requiem - Anna Akhmatova
Perestroika, a beginning in Russian since the totalitarian state had clamped down during the Great Patriotic War, became an idea, was the beginning or Russia beginning to look into it’s a collective mirror. The reform program, lead by politicians like Alexander Yakovlev and scholars such as Zbiginiew Brzezinski tried to lead the peaceful transition from the Soviet Union. Principles of the Movmeent for Democratic Reform included renouncing the USSR asa unitary state, a transition to a market system and a safety net for those hit by economic reform (p.86).
How Russian leadership ultimately failed at reform, and found itself in the grip of an authoritarian state is the study of Masha Gessen’s work. Through multiple stories of young people who grew up in the USSR, and how concealing their ethnic or sexual backgrounds were neccesary to survive.
With the rise of Putin, and the end of true democratic institutions (elections, court systems), the unraveling of a western style of democracy comes to an end. Anti-homosexual legislation, lack of assembly, invasions into Crimea, banning of media that does not serve the Kremlin. It fits with the terror state described by Hannah Arendt in her seminal work “The Origins of Totalitarianism” as a double helix of “ideology and state terror (p. 291).
Gessen writes broadly about the sociological understanding of the russian people. Many of her profiles are on activism, the social sciences or the history as told by outsiders (psychologist Eric Fromm’s work on totalitarism), and the grappling with the terror that persists in Russia’s history and future. Buduschengo Net, the future is history, the repetition of the state sponsored control and terror inflicted on change agents. This book attempts to pull together research and literature on and from Russian society since the Stalin purges, to make sense of Russia’s current state of the world.
Overall, a fantstic read, and a part of history that is still being shaped by the bold men and women striving for a better Russia.