To the Point
Lessons from a 'totalitarian mafia state' (Part II)
Masha Gessen was born in Russia but emigrated with her parents to the United States. She returned to Moscow in the early 1990s when political change was afoot. And since then, she’s become a leading observer -- and critic -- of Russian president Vladamir Putin. So much so that she fled Russia again in 2013.
By Warren Olney • • 1 min readMasha Gessen was born in Russia but emigrated with her parents to the United States. She returned to Moscow in the early 1990s when political change was afoot. And since then, she’s become a leading observer -- and critic -- of Russian president Vladamir Putin. So much so that she fled Russia again in 2013. But she says that Putin was able to solidify his power by leveraging a Soviet bureaucracy that was never dismantled. Gessen's latest book is The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia. (Listen to Part I.)
