The Future is History | Granta

  • Published: 26/10/2017
  • ISBN: 9781783784004
  • 153x20mm
  • 528 pages

The Future is History

Masha Gessen

In The Future is History Masha Gessen follows the lives of four Russians, born as the Soviet Union crumbled, at what promised to be the dawn of democracy. Each came of age with unprecedented expectations, some as the children or grandchildren of the very architects of the new Russia, each with newfound aspirations of their own – as entrepreneurs, activists, thinkers and writers, sexual and social beings. Gessen charts their paths not only against the machinations of the regime that would seek to crush them all (censorship, intimidation, violence) but also against the war it waged on understanding itself, ensuring the unobstructed emergence of the old Soviet order in the form of today’s terrifying and seemingly unstoppable mafia state. The Future is History is a powerful and urgent cautionary tale by contemporary Russia’s most fearless inquisitor.

Indispensable

Pankaj Mishra, Guardian

The Future is History is a beautifully-written, sensitively-argued and cleverly-structured journey through Russia's failure to build democracy. The difficulty for any book about Russia is how to make the world's biggest country human-sized, and she succeeds by building her story around the lives of a half-dozen people, whose fortunes wax and wane as the country opens up, then closes down once more. It is a story about hope and despair, trauma and treatment, ideals and betrayal, and above all about love and cynicism. If you want to truly understand why Vladimir Putin has been able to so dominate his country, this book will help you

Oliver Bullough

Masha Gessen is a brave and eloquent critic of the Putin regime

Edward Lucas, The Times

The Author

Masha Gessen is a staff writer at the New Yorker and the author of several books, among them the National Book Award-winning The Future is History and the Samuel Johnson prize-longlisted The Man Without a Face. The recipient of numerous other awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Carnegie Fellowship, Gessen lives in New York City.

More about the author →

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Masha Gessen on Granta.com

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We knew Trump’s range: government by gesture; obfuscation and lying; self-praise; stoking fear and issuing threats.

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‘Once I came home at the end of August, it was as if nothing had ever happened. Indeed, nothing had.‘

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‘With a disease as unpredictable as cancer, the opportunity to blame an actual person is an unexpected temptation.’