Search results for ""author masha gessen""

'An indispensable voice of and for this moment' Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny Many of us are consumed by news cycles reporting on Trump's latest astonishing policy or declaration, and the overwhelming sense we have is one of confusion and incredulity - how could this be happening? As the 2020 US Presidential race takes shape, SURVIVING AUTOCRACY provides an indispensable overview of the calamitous trajectory of the past few years. Drawing on her Soviet childhood and two decades covering the resurgence of totalitarianism in Russia, acclaimed New Yorker journalist and prize-winning author Masha Gessen links together seemingly disparate elements of Trump's regime to offer a roadmap for understanding Trump's approach, policies and ultimate aims. Highlighting an inventory of ravages to liberal democracy, including the corrosion of the media, the justice system and cultural norms, she posits that America is in the throws of an autocratic attempt. Gessen's penetrating analysis offers a new political discourse to replace that which has been so thoroughly degraded, and with it, a clearer path to action. Manifesto-like, Surviving Autocracy is threaded with solutions to the current situation, such as developing a political language that encompasses autocratic impulses, a more agile and honest media, and a visionary moral politics to counter Trump's extraordinary on-going assault.

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On February 21st 2012, five members of an obscure feminist post-punk collective called Pussy Riot staged a performance in Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. Dressed in their trademark brightly coloured dresses and balaclavas, the women performed their song 'Punk Prayer - Mother of God, Chase Putin Away!' in front of the altar. The performance lasted only 40 seconds but it resulted in two-year prison sentences for three of the performers - and has turned Pussy Riot into one of the most well-known and important protest movements of the last five years. This necessary and timely book is an account of the Pussy Riot protest, the ensuing global support movement, and the tangled and controversial trial of the band members. It explores the status of dissent in Russia, the roots of the group and their adoption - or appropriation - by wider collectives, feminist groups and music icons. Masha Gessen has unique access to the band and those closest to them. Her unrivalled understanding of the Russian protest movement makes her the ideal writer to document and explain the rage, the beauty and the phenomenon that is Pussy Riot.

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'A luminous study' Luke Harding, Guardian 'Courageous and shocking' Katy Guest, Books of the Year, Independent on Sunday How did a small-minded, low-level KGB operative come to control the world's largest country and, in an astonishingly short time, destroy years of progress, making Russia once more a threat to her own people and to the world? Masha Gessen shows that when Vladimir Putin, an unimportant, low-level KGB operative, was rushed to power by a group of Oligarchs in 1999, he was a man without a history. Yet within a few brief years, he had dismantled Russia's media, wrested control and wealth from the country's burgeoning business class, and decimated the fragile mechanisms of democracy. Virtually every opposing voice was silenced, with political rivals and critics driven into exile or to the grave. Drawing on information and sources no other writer has tapped, Masha Gessen's fearless account charts Putin's rise from the boy who had scrapped his way through post-war Leningrad schoolyards. Now the 'faceless' man who manoeuvred his way into absolute - and absolutely corrupt - power, has become a threat to the stability of the world, and this important book is more relevant than ever. Now with a new preface by the author. 'A clear, brave book... Gessen offers intriguing details of the scratching, biting, hair-tearing, undersized, brawling boy Putin, refusing to be bullied in the grubby back yards of Leningrad' James Meek, Observer 'Gessen's engaging prose combines a native's passion with a mordant wit and caustic understatement that are characteristically Russian' AD Miller, Daily Telegraph

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In The Future is History Masha Gessen follows the lives of four Russians, born as the Soviet Union crumbled, at what promised to be the dawn of democracy. Each came of age with unprecedented expectations, some as the children or 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 not only against the machinations of the regime that would seek to crush them all (censorship, intimidation, violence) but also against the war it waged on understanding itself, ensuring the unobstructed emergence of the old Soviet order in the form of today's terrifying and seemingly unstoppable mafia state. The Future is History is a powerful and urgent cautionary tale by contemporary Russia's most fearless inquisitor.

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