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Masha Gessen
discusses
The Future Is History:
How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia
in conversation with ALEXANDRA VACROUX
This event includes a book signing
There will be a standby line at the door
DateOct
4
Wednesday
October 4, 2017 6:00 PM ET (Doors at 5:30) |
LocationBrattle Theatre
40 Brattle St., Cambridge, MA 02138 |
Tickets
SOLD OUT. View our Sold Out Event FAQ.
|
Harvard Book Store and Mass Humanities welcome award-winning journalist MASHA GESSEN—author of The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin and The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy—for a discussion of her latest book, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia.
About The Future Is History
Putin’s bestselling biographer reveals how, in the space of a generation, Russia surrendered to a more virulent and invincible new strain of autocracy.
Hailed for her “fearless indictment of the most powerful man in Russia” (The Wall Street Journal), award-winning journalist Masha Gessen is unparalleled in her understanding of the events and forces that have wracked her native country in recent times. In The Future Is History, she follows the lives of four people born at what promised to be the dawn of democracy. 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.
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. Powerful and urgent, The Future Is History is a cautionary tale for our time and for all time.
Praise
“Masha Gessen is humbly erudite, deftly unconventional, and courageously honest. At this particular historical moment, when we must understand Russia to understand ourselves, we are all very lucky to have her." —Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny
”A fine example of journalism approximating art. Necessary reading for anyone trying to understand the earthshaking events of our time: how in one country after another individual aspirations for wealth and power mutated into collective cravings for strongmen.” —Pankaj Mishra, author of An End to Suffering and Age of Anger
"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, author of Let Our Fame Be Great and The Last Man in Russia
UPDATE: Tickets for this event are sold out. Please note, we are often able to accommodate additional attendees from a standby line for sold out events. View our Sold Out Event FAQ for more information.
Tickets are non-refundable and non-returnable.
Walking from the Harvard Square T station: 10 minutes
As you exit the station, cross Mass. Ave. and proceed along Brattle St. Follow Brattle St. as it curves to the right in Brattle Square (follow the sidewalk on the right side of the street). The Brattle will be on the left-hand side of the street. The building is shared with Algiers Cafe and Alden & Harlow Restaurant, and the theatre entrance is on the left side of the building—look for the sidewalk poster case and marquee.
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