Russian is a language fit for many epithets of despair, with one of the darkest being a phrase that translates to 'no future'. Gessen tracks the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Vladimir Putin through the lives of several extraordinary Russians, extraordinary in the sense that they're gifted with sensitivity and insight into their own lives--though one of her subjects, Zhanna Nemtsova, daughter of murdered opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, would be exceptional in any time.

Gessen's first subject is the twilight of Communism. In her history, the Soviet Union was a society prohibited from knowing itself, except through the stale dogmatism of Marxist-Leninist thought. Rather than the flourishing self-knowledge produced by open media, fair elections, and robust social sciences, the Soviet Union was locked in a totalitarian dyad, between the central authorities of the state, who had the apparatus of terror at their control, and a semi-quiescent population, which took signals from the center to enforce conformity. The ultimate signal was that violence would be used to preserve the status quo, and a combination of Gorbachev's wavering through perestroika and the unwillingness of any political figure to give direct orders to the army and KGB to initiate a crackdown meant that the USSR dissolved, not quite bloodlessly, but without an expected civil war or systematic massacres.

Of course, the promised realities of liberalism, democracy, and capitalism failed to realize for many people. While material measures of quality of life went up, expectations went up even faster, and many Russians missed the surety of the old system. Yeltsin boozed his ways through the 90s, and then selected a little known KGB officer from St. Petersburg as he successor: Vladimir Putin.

Gessen covered Putin's ascent in The Man Without a Face, and this book is more about the consequences. The old Soviet nomenklatura had never really gone anywhere, and Putin brought them to heal. Putin recast the government in the mold of a mafia family, with himself as the patriarch. Oil profits buoyed consumer confidence, which allowed him to dispense benefices.

Meanwhile, Putin amped up a culture war in the name of traditional Russian and Eurasian values. The actual influence of anti-modern philosopher Alexander Dugin is hard to evaluate, but Putin used his language to declare war against homosexuality, and then actual war against Georgia and Ukraine. The most heartbreaking parts of a very sad book concern Lyosha, an openly gay professor of gender studies, who is forced to flee to America after several gay friends are viciously beaten as pedophiles.

Gessen has her own agenda, of course, and her psychoanalytic perspective on the Russian character is sui generis, but it also captures the weird contradictions of the New Right Populist Authoritarianism that more purely materialistic leave fuzzy. Even far outside Russia, it seems like the future is being swept under by a torrent of bitter debris from the failure of neoliberalism.