Last evening, I finished reading Masha Gessen’s The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, published in 2017. I mentioned it a few days ago when I was just about 25% through the book, and I talked about her discussion of the study of the psychology of Soviet citizens (she called them homo sovieticus), a psychology that permitted them to live more or less contently within the Soviet system and how there was thought that homos sovieticus were becoming an extinct species in the 1980s as they were opened up to more of the outside world, and that this change in their mentality opened the way for the Gorbachev perestroika and everything that followed to take place, including the eventual breakup of the USSR.

What I didn’t know at the time was that Gessen would conclude that two decades later that the Russian citizenry had reverted to their previous homo sovieticus status, thus allowing them once again to live in a totalitarian society, this time under the rule of Vladimir Putin.

As this book was published in 2017, Gessen was able to cover the incursions into Ukraine in 2014, but not the full invasion of Ukraine that occurred in 2022. The points the book makes about the Russian/Ukraine relationship are both interesting and prophetic.

First, Crimea. Gessen discusses Crimea’s connections with Russia, how it had been Russian controlled since the late 18th century, and was originally part of the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic, not the Ukrainian SSR, until – for reasons never quite explained – Khrushchev conveyed Crimea to Ukraine in 1954. As Stalin in the 1930s relocated most of the native Crimean Tatars, the population of Crimea was now overwhelmingly Russian and Russian speaking, Crimea was the site of Russia’s largest naval base, and it was the preferred vacation spot for people all over the USSR. Polling showed that well over 90% of the population of Russia supported the takeover of Crimea in 2014.

Next Donetsk, the largest city in the Donbas region now under Russian occupation. One of the four young Russians whose lives Gessen follows in the book visited Donetsk twice. Her first visit was before any thought of a Russian incursion, and Donetsk is described as an up-to-date city, with a thriving nightlife and much activity. Several years later, but before the Russian “green men” entered, the city is described very differently – gray, very tense and very much on guard.

Gessen also refers a number of times to Alexander Dugin, whom she first introduces as an overly studious young man anxious to learn languages, philosophy and everything else. He comes back later in the book as a full fledged philosopher and Russian nationalist, someone who became a public voice and an individual who developed a substantial amount of influence on Vladimir Putin. Sometimes called Putin’s Rasputin. I had never heard of Dugin – but it seems clear that, if I lived in Russia, I would be very familiar with him.

I want to quote from pages 434-435 of the book regarding Dugin:

“Another person to whom Putin’s speech sounded familiar was Dugin. He recognized himself. It had been just over five years since Dugin declared his intention to become his country’s lead ideologue, and it was happening. Putin was using Dugin’s words and his concepts, and he was carrying out his predictions. Back in 2009, Dugin had prophesied the division of Ukraine into two separate states: the eastern portion would be allied with Russia and the west would be forever looking towards Europe. Dugin saw Ukraine as inhabited by two distinct nations – the western Ukrainians, who spoke Ukrainian, and the people of the east, a nation that included ethnic Russians and ethnic Ukrainians who were nevertheless Russian in their language and culture. The two nations, in Dugin’s view, had fundamentally different geopolitical orientations. This meant that Ukraine was not a nation state. It also meant that its division was preordained – the only question was whether it would be peaceful. There might be war, he had warned back then.”

Then, on pages 440-441, Dugin in 2014, was expressing disappointment that Putin was moving too slowly. “By the end of May, he was growing impatient and even disappointed with Putin. Rather than embark in an open, all-out war, the Kremlin seemed intent on creating a quagmire. What was the point of that? It was true that a slow war in the east would serve the purpose of destabilizing Ukraine, sapping its strength and weakening its new government, but these were petty tactical goals. Dugin wanted Putin to invade Ukraine openly, using regular troops, and to aim for a glorious victory that would expand Russia. Indeed, it would be only the beginning of Russian expansion.”

There is all this talk today about how Israel scored an intelligence coup in coming up with the plans for an invasion from Gaza, and how Israel totally blew their coup by ignoring all the warnings, thinking that the Arabs will never be able to pull off something so complex.

But now in Gessen’s book, we see, that as early as 2009 and 2014, one of Russia’s top influencers, was egging Putin on to have a full scale invasion of Ukraine. Our security services must have known this, but, seven years later, as Putin was marching over 100,000 troops towards the border with Ukraine, the United States and the rest of the west seemed to think that this was all for effect, and that the possibility of a full scale invasion was very low.

This is only a very small part of Gessen’s book (a National Book Award Non-Fiction finalist) on Russia from the fall of the Soviet Union onward, through the Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Medvedev, and Putin periods. It is a very detailed book, concentrating on the psychological and sociological aspects of Russian society and not on daily political events, except as they affected Russian life. And this is all done through a unique method. Gessen picks four young Russians – a young woman interested in psychology, a young man who discovered he was gay and becomes a scholar of gender studies, a young woman who became, step by step, a political activist, and a young woman whose father, Boris Nemtsov, was an anti-Putin politician. She follows their lives from their student days throughout the 25 years she covers. It’s a very effective technique, even if a reader would sometimes get confused as to the history of each of these characters as she goes from one to another. At least, this reader got confused.

But I do highly recommend the book, provided that the topic interests you. If it doesn’t……well, that’s a different story.