![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() This is a devastating, timely, and necessary reminder of the fragility and preciousness of all institutions of freedom. Most disturbingly, she suggests that the rise of this new “mafia state” was accepted and even facilitated by a general population that neither embraced nor desired freedom or democracy. Gessen also views these developments through the prism of several young Russians who were born in the mid–1980s and can bear witness to the despair and even hopelessness that now infect those who envisioned something much better. The economy is again under government control, as are the mass media. Opposing voices are silenced by murder, intimidation, or exile. Opposition political parties are marginalized. She has now written an angry and sorrowful account of the gradual but relentless destruction of aspirations for democracy and freedom under Putin, tracking the broad outlines of what she sees as a descent into a new and vicious totalitarianism. Do we need Munslow One has to admire Munslow’s resilience. On the contrary, it is a joyous celebration of the immense achievements of professional history We need an understanding of the distant past as well as the recent. as a teenager, then, drawn by the optimism of the 1990s, returned to Russia, only to come back to America after the nascent democratic movement was crushed by Putin and his cronies. According to Munslow my book is a sour diatribe against my fellow historians. Award-winning journalist and author of a scathing biography of Vladimir Putin ( The Man without a Face, 2012), Gessen is a Soviet-born daughter of dissidents who came to the U.S. ![]()
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