Masha Gessen Books

The Soviet Union’s fall in 1991 was, for many, both a liberation and a trauma. I was there, watching the statues of Lenin and Dzerzhinsky come down, hearing the chants of freedom, and feeling the dizzying sense that anything was possible. For the first time in seventy years, Russians could speak the...

From The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

The 1990s were Russia’s laboratory of extremes. On paper, the country was becoming a democracy; in reality, it was careening into chaos. The rapid privatization programs of the Yeltsin era dismantled the old command economy but replaced it with a new oligarchy. Wealth became concentrated in the hand...

From The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

Putin’s childhood was marked by hardship and survival. Born in Leningrad in 1952, he grew up in communal housing, in a city still haunted by the siege’s ghosts. That environment imprinted upon him a credo of vigilance and loyalty — values reinforced when he discovered the KGB. For Putin, the organiz...

From The Man Without A Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin

The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 was, for millions, a liberation. But for Putin, it was a humiliation — an event that stripped Russia of its empire, its authority, and, in his view, its dignity. Masha Gessen traces how that trauma became an ideological core for Putin: the belief that Russia was ...

From The Man Without A Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin