CEERES of Voices: Masha Gessen - "The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia" - Konstantin Sonin

"Gessen has shown remarkable courage... [An] unflinching indictment of the most powerful man in Russia." --The Wall Street Journal

"[Gessen] shines a piercing light into every dark corner of Putin's story... Fascinating, hard-hitting reading." --Foreign Affairs

"Absorbing." --The New Yorker

"Powerful and gracefully written." --The San Francisco Chronicle

CEERES of Voices presents Masha Gessen on The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia. She will be joined in conversation by Konstantin Sonin.

Presented in partnership with CEERES, the Center for East European and Russian/Eurasian Studies at the University of Chicago.

At the Co-op

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About the book: Putin’s bestselling biographer reveals how, in the space of a generation, Russia surrendered to a more virulent and invincible new strain of autocracy. Hailed for her “fearless indictment of the most powerful man in Russia” (The Wall Street Journal), award-winning journalist Masha Gessen is unparalleled in her understanding of the events and forces that have wracked her native country in recent times. In The Future Is History, she follows the lives of four people born at what promised to be the dawn of democracy. Each of them came of age with unprecedented expectations, some as the children and 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 against the machinations of the regime that would crush them all, and against the war it waged on understanding itself, which ensured the unobstructed reemergence of the old Soviet order in the form of today’s terrifying and seemingly unstoppable mafia state. Powerful and urgent, The Future Is History is a cautionary tale for our time and for all time.

About the author: Masha Gessen is an award-winning Russian-American journalist who is the author of several books, including the national bestseller The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair, Slate, and many other publications, and she has received many awards, including a Carnegie fellowship. She lives in New York.

About the interlocutor: Konstantin Sonin is John Dewey Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. His research interests include political economics, development, and economic theory. His papers have been published in leading academic journals in economics and political science. In addition to his academic work, Sonin writes a blog on Russian political and economic issues and a fortnightly column for the Russian-language newspaper Vedomosti, and contributed to all major Russian media. In 2012, he was an economic advisor to the presidential campaign of Mikhail Prokhorov. Sonin earned an MSc and PhD in mathematics from Moscow State University and an MA in economics at Moscow’s New Economic School, was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, served on the faculty of the New Economic School (NES) and Higher School of Economics (HSE) in Moscow, and was also a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

About the series: CEERES, pronounced /ˈsirēz/, is the acronym for the University of Chicago Center for East European and Russian/Eurasian Studies. Together with the Seminary Co-op Bookstore, we are delighted to announce the launch of the CEERES of Voices Event Series, an author-centered series of readings and conversations on books from or about Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, Central Eurasia, and the Caucasus. The books being discussed are identified in a various ways: through publishers’ contacts with the bookstore or through faculty requests to CEERES to host the author.