Gessen does not, however, heap all of the blame for the demise of liberalism and democracy at the door of the Kremlin. Photograph: Andrey Smirnov/AFP/Getty Images An unauthorised protest against Russia’s anti-gay legislation takes place in Moscow, 2013. This well-documented and nuanced account is marred only by repeated digressions into a heady cocktail of political science, sociology and psychoanalysis that press Gessen’s extravagant claim: Putin’s regime is a “totalitarian” successor of the murderous dictatorships of Stalin and Hitler. Critics denounced the increasingly hollowed-out rituals of political movements, manifestos and elections as nothing more than “an imitation of democracy” that masked the creation of “a one-party system”. By the birth of the Russian protest movement in 2011, political power and media influence had once again been concentrated in the hands of regime loyalists – many of them drawn from the security services – and the independence of non-governmental organisations was under assault.

In a finely wrought narrative of Russia’s turbulent history since perestroika, she argues that the deep state never really reformed itself and that, after Putin came to power in 2000, it rapidly clawed back the authority it had temporarily yielded under Yeltsin to a new class of oligarchs, an emerging civil society and a cacophonous independent media. This idea of a people held captive by its own past is the dominant theme of the Russian-American journalist and author Masha Gessen’s wide-ranging and ambitious new book, which has just won the prestigious National Book award for non-fiction.Īn outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin, Gessen tracks the toxic legacy of the Soviet era and the ways it has infiltrated and undermined hopes for a liberal, democratic, law-bound Russia. Her behaviour was finally explained when it emerged that she was a former guard in the Gulag: “The family was now recast as a camp, complete with dead-end make-work, the primacy of discipline, and the total abolition of personal boundaries.” Cases such as this led Arutyunyan to a wider diagnosis of Russia as a traumatised society unable to free itself from the psychological subjugation fostered during the long decades of Soviet rule. The grandmother tyrannised her daughter and granddaughter with demands for needless work and repeated invasions of their privacy. In her clinical practice during the 1990s, Moscow psychoanalyst Marina Arutyunyan encountered three generations of women living under the same roof.

The Future Is History by Masha Gessen