Wall Street Journal
Examining the psyche of modern Russia, through the eyes of those born at the end of the Soviet era and who grew up at a time of hope. Stephen Kotkin reviews ‘The Future Is History’ by Masha Gessen.
Demonstrations against election fraud in Moscow in 2011. PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS
Russia transfixes the American imagination like no other country, and Moscow’s aggressive authoritarianism has prompted divergent assessments of its causes. Some see it as provoked by Western policies, whether supposedly insufficient aid provided to Russia to overcome Communist legacies in the 1990s or an unnecessarily confrontational expansion of NATO. Others assign primary responsibility to Russian president Vladimir Putin, pointing to either his lust for power and empire or his pique and revanchism.
Masha Gessen, a Russian-American journalist, adopted the second approach in “The Man Without a Face” (2012), which portrayed the strongman as simultaneously lacking talent and lording over all. In her new book, “The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia,” she attempts to reconcile this contradiction, now blaming what she calls Russia’s “totalitarian society.” Her parents fled the Soviet Union with their children in 1981; Ms. Gessen, who had moved back to Moscow 10 years later, fled Russia with her own children in 2013, and here she crafts an indignant lamentation. “I have been told many stories about Russia, and I have told a few myself,” she observes, offering a tale of the “freedom that was not embraced and democracy that was not desired.”
Ms. Gessen selects the lives of four Russians born late in the Soviet Union who came of age in an era, initially, of hope. They are “Seryozha” (Sergei Yakovlev), the grandson of Alexander Yakovlev, one of the shapers of Mikhail Gorbachev’s liberalization; “Zhanna” (Nemtsova), the daughter of Boris Nemtsov, the former Russian reformist official and subsequent democracy activist who was gunned down near the Kremlin in 2015; “Masha” ( Maria Baronova ), another democracy activist; and “Lyosha” ( Alexei Gorshkov ), a gay gender-studies scholar in provincial Perm. All are members of the urban liberal intelligentsia.
The author also folds in the stories of Marina Arutyunyan, a psychoanalyst; Lev Gudkov, a sociologist who worked under and then succeeded Yuri Levada as the head of the country’s leading independent polling organization; and Alexander Dugin, a ubiquitous ideologue of hardline Russian resurgence.
PHOTO: WSJ
THE FUTURE IS HISTORY
By Masha Gessen
Riverhead, 515 pages, $28
Riverhead, 515 pages, $28
A fine writer and storyteller, Ms. Gessen adopts the pose of omniscient narrator, drawing upon interviews to voice her subjects’ inner thoughts. The intricate narrative builds to Russia’s 2011 mass protests—which followed Mr. Putin’s declaration that he would become president again—and the crackdown that came the following year.
The author recounts the buried history of Ms. Arutyunyan’s family, whose grandmother, Anna Pankratova, a rare female member of the Communist Central Committee from 1952 until her death in 1957, had earlier denounced her husband as a Trotskyite.
Pankratova herself was expelled from the party in the 1930s, when her daughter Maya (Ms. Arutyunyan’s mother) was about 10. After Maya died in 1999, Ms. Aruntyunyan found Pankratova’s journals, which showed that she loved the husband she betrayed for the party cause. The betrayal today, Ms. Gessen implies, is carried out by the gray mass of Russians against those who are willing to stand up to the regime.
Her most incisive portrait involves the personal life and professional agony of Lyosha Gorshkov. He wins a competition, sponsored by the Soros Open Society Foundation, to participate in a multiyear project in Ukraine. “Ukraine, he learned, had thirty-seven registered LGBT groups,” Ms. Gessen writes. In Russia, by contrast, his scholarship is criminalized, and his very existence threatened.
Even as Ms. Gessen poignantly traces compelling lives, her account of Russian society as a whole puts forth a reductionist argument full of psychospeak about “energies” and an entire society succumbing to depression. She begins with the dubious assertion that one of Soviet society’s decisive troubles derived from the state prohibition against sociology and psychoanalysis, which meant the society “had been forbidden to know itself.” To this she adds Yuri Levada’s detailed sociological portrait, from polling, of “Homo Sovieticus,” a doublethinker bred by the system, who contrary to expectation did not die out with the system. Yet none of the characters she chose to follow in this book is a “Homo Sovieticus”—even though that is the type she claims explains the staying power of the Putin regime. This book about the alleged indispensability of sociology abjures a representative sampling of individuals in favor of a contrived literary selection.
Ms. Gessen is right that ordinary Russians are to an extent complicit in their own oppression, but is the society the part that is totalitarian? “Maybe Freud was right about the death drive in the first place,” she writes, speaking through the interior thoughts of Ms. Arutyunyan. “And maybe a country could indeed be affected by it just like a person could. Maybe this energy had been unleashed in Russia. . . . This country wanted to kill itself.” Ms. Gessen graphically details the gruesome murder of a man in Volgograd killed by his friends for being gay. Russia’s parliament passes a ban on homosexual “propaganda,” which she suggests is the centerpiece of the regime’s cynical control strategy. She also notes that the Levada Center found that 73 percent of Russians supported the discriminatory law, but she does not examine the social conservatism of the populace, only its manipulation.
Tens of millions of Russians are holding down jobs, raising families, reading books and writing blogs, while living under a dictatorship. A small, resolute number continue to protest, including in what Ms. Gessen calls “the most geographically widespread protest in Russian history” on the country’s national holiday (June 12) in 2017. Meanwhile, Zhanna has decamped to Bonn, where she works for the broadcaster Deutsche Welle, Lyosha has obtained asylum in the U.S., and Seryozha began to take antidepressants, developing a rare side effect: toxic epidermal necrolysis. Masha Baronova remains in Russia, among the ranks of democracy activists, and has avoided prison—for now.
Mr. Kotkin, a professor at Princeton University and fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, is the author of “ Stalin : Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941.”
