The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia
Masha Gessen tells the story of post-Soviet Russia through four people born around the time the old system collapsed. Their generation grew up expecting democracy, open borders, and ordinary lives, then watched all three be pulled back under Vladimir Putin. Gessen weaves their biographies together with portraits of older intellectuals, including a sociologist, a psychoanalyst, and a political philosopher, who try to understand what is happening. The book reads as both group biography and political history, asking how a country can slide from openness back into fear without firing many shots. It won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and became a key text for anyone trying to understand modern Russia.
What you might want to know about The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Masha Gessen follows four Russians born around the fall of the Soviet Union to trace how Putin's Russia slid back toward totalitarian rule.
On his One Grand Books list Hanks framed it as current events, ongoing, recognizable, and important to realize, recommending it as a guide to how Russia got where it is.
It is both. Gessen follows four individual lives in close detail and uses them to track the broader political arc of post-Soviet Russia.
The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia was written by Masha Gessen, published in 2017 by Riverhead Books.
The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia is 528 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia takes most readers 8 to 11 hours to finish.
The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.