The future is history: how totalitarianism reclaimed Russia
2017; Oxford University Press; Volume: 93; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/ia/iix209
ISSN1468-2346
Autores Tópico(s)Eastern European Communism and Reforms
ResumoMasha Gessen is a talented writer and journalist, and a formidable critic of the Putin regime. Following on from The man without a face: the unlikely rise of Vladimir Putin (London: Granta, 2012), her new book offers a more ambitious, all-embracing analysis of what happened—and did not happen—in Russia after 1984, and how Russians coped—or did not cope—with the extraordinary events of the Gorbachev, Yeltsin and Putin years. The book is at once a political epic, a collection of family sagas, an essay on Russians' relation to power and a form of autobiography, as the trajectory of the author's life served as a guiding thread throughout. Gessen builds on individuals' stories in order to reconstruct a dense period in Russian history. She writes in a manner familiar to readers of Russian literature: the book includes a rich cast of characters whose fates criss-cross; an abundance of flashbacks, used to make sense of past and current events; as well as the sharp, yet compassionate, reflections of the writer. In this The future is history echoes Svetlana Alexievich's Secondhand time (London: Fitzcarraldo, 2016), although it differs in many ways from the Nobel Prize winner's compelling journey into the minds and hearts of men and women. Gessen selected seven individuals to focus on—four sons and daughters of special families and three leading intellectuals: sociologist Lev Gudkov, psychoanalyst Marina Arutyunyan and the far-right philosopher and ideologue Alexander Dugin. ‘As I wove those stories together, I imagined I was writing a long and Russian (nonfiction) novel that aimed to capture both the texture of individual tragedies and the events and ideas that shaped them’ (p. 4).
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