My memories of my standard preschool include playing a lot outside, eating and taking naps and doing arts and learning songs and dancing and going to the beach! There is no attempt to be objective here, vitriol in every sentence, where even the most innocuous things are described as depressing and dire and BAD - free, government sponsored, mind you, preschools portrayed as a 'cross between baby prisons and warehouses' - really? how did we all make it then after attending them? this is just one of the most ridiculous exaggerations. It is clearly written by an emigrant from Russia who hates EVERYTHING about Russia. I feel about this book the way I felt about The Bronze Horseman. Powerful and urgent, The Future Is History is a cautionary tale for our time and for all time. Gessen charts their paths against the machinations of the regime that would crush them all, and against the war it waged on understanding itself, which ensured the unobstructed reemergence of the old Soviet order in the form of today’s terrifying and seemingly unstoppable mafia state. Each of them came of age with unprecedented expectations, some as the children and 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.

In The Future Is History, Gessen follows the lives of four people born at what promised to be the dawn of democracy.

The essential journalist and bestselling biographer of Vladimir Putin reveals how, in the space of a generation, Russia surrendered to a more virulent and invincible new strain of autocracy.Īward-winning journalist Masha Gessen’s understanding of the events and forces that have wracked Russia in recent times is unparalleled.

Gessen the future is history