The Future is History
How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

Winner of the 2017 National Book Award for non-fiction: The sweeping, urgent, revelatory history of post-Soviet Russia in which the great dissident exile Masha Gessen reveals precisely how the hope of democracy gave way to a devastating new strain of autocracy.

‘A brave and eloquent critic of the Putin regime ... For anyone wondering how Russia ended up in the hands of Putin and his friends, and what it means for the rest of us, Gessen’s book gives an alarming and convincing picture.' - The Times

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.