What is the main message of The Future Is History?

The main message of The Future Is History is the disintegration of democracy in post-Soviet Russia.

How long does it take to read The Future Is History?

The reading time for The Future Is History varies depending on your reading speed. However, the Blinkist summary can be read in just 15 minutes.

Is The Future Is History a good book? Is it worth reading?

The Future Is History is worth reading for its insightful exploration of Russia's political landscape. It provides a valuable perspective on the country's complex history and current challenges.

Who is the author of The Future Is History?

The author of The Future Is History is Masha Gessen.

The Future Is History Summary of Key Ideas and Review

Name: The Future Is History
Rating: 4.2 (109 reviews)
Author: Masha Gessen

Introduction

What’s in it for me? Get a better understanding of the contradictions behind modern Russia.

Are humans doomed to repeat their past mistakes? Sometimes it can certainly feel like this is the case. We have history teachers in school to help prevent this from happening. But there’s another reason to understand our past; to better understand our future and where we’re headed.

Those unfamiliar with Russian history might wonder how a nation could throw off the cloak of authoritarian rule, dismantle the Soviet Union and the Communist Party, and then end up with Putin’s regime? Indeed, it’s an unlikely and complicated fate, but when we begin to look at how little knowledge and education the people of Russia had about their own history and sociology, we can begin to see how another totalitarian ruler could take control.

In these blinks, you’ll discover

the terrible things some Russians did for money and food in the 1990s;
why Old Songs About the Most Important Things was a hit movie in Russia; and
how a brand of cheese can end up being seen as homosexual propaganda.

Key idea 1 of 10

Russia’s lack of self-reflection put the nation at a disadvantage when society began to change in the late 1980s.

Marina Arutyunyan was a rarity in Russia. In the 1970s, she studied psychology at Moscow University and went on to start her own practice. It was extremely rare to find a female psychoanalyst in Russia given that hardly anyone was practicing psychology, sociology or anything of the sort.

To understand why, we need to go back in time to the period after the Bolshevik Revolution in the 1920s.

This revolution was fueled by Marxism, which promoted a new kind of ideal man – one who had no use for the kind self-reflection which is at the heart of these disciplines, since individuality was seen as insignificant. The new man found sufficient pride and purpose in life by being a cog in the Soviet machine.

This is why, in 1925, Moscow University’s Psychological Society was dissolved, and the work of leading thinkers like Sigmund Freud was placed in the restricted area of the library. By 1931, all social sciences and humanities had been censored from Russian universities.

But the tide began to turn in the 1960s, and, by 1968, psychology and the humanities were making a comeback at Moscow University. However, since materials had been very hard to come by for the past few decades, most Russian professors were woefully out of touch and unaware of the progress that had been made.

This lack of knowledge contributed to the mess that followed in the late 1980s and 1990s when the rules of society drastically changed.

Most governments value sociology, especially in the form of polls that are conducted in an effort to understand what people want and how they may react to certain policies.

But, remarkably, the Soviet Union had not conducted any research polls before 1987, and even when they began, it was a rough start since there wasn’t any data to compare it against or even an understanding of how to write useful questions.

This lack of sociological understanding was especially unfortunate in the mid-1980s when General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev began a series of reforms aimed at opening up Russia and moving away from the terror of previous regimes. These reforms would set off decades of psychological and political consequences for a citizenship little understood by the country’s leaders.

Key idea 2 of 10

As the Communist Party collapsed, attempts were made to understand the typical Russian.

Gorbachev’s period of reforms was known as perestroika or the restructuring. In 1988, Gorbachev appointed Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev as his “chief ideologue,” which meant he would have the unenviable task of sorting out the finer details of perestroika and getting the Soviet people on board.

Alexander Nikolaevich had spent much of the seventies in Canada as a political exile due to his criticisms of the Soviet Union under past leadership, but Gorbachev’s reforms were very much in line with his thinking. However, he found his job frustratingly futile because Gorbachev had few allies in the government. For the most part, government officials were either in direct conflict with perestroika, or they were far more concerned with how the Communist Party was falling apart.

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Key idea 3 of 10

In the 1990s, following the end of the Soviet Union, the stage was set for an authoritarian takeover.

On 19 August 1991, a tense three-day standoff began between Boris Yeltsin and a group led by Gorbachev’s vice president, Gennady Yanayev. What followed rocked the Soviet state to its foundations.

Yanayev’s group had essentially held Gorbachev hostage in Crimea during this crisis. But when he returned, Gorbachev did what everyone had thought impossible: he officially shut down the Communist Party.

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Key idea 4 of 10

In post-Soviet Russia, people experienced new levels of poverty and class stratification.

In the Soviet Union, there was an unspoken agreement between citizens and the government. The joke was: people pretend to work, and the government pretends to pay them.

The legalization of private commerce didn’t change the fact that some people made more money than others, but it did make the differences far more apparent. The early 1990s marked the first time groups of people were suddenly getting rich while others were falling through the cracks.

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Key idea 5 of 10

Nostalgia for the Soviet era grew as the war in Chechnya damaged Yeltsin’s presidency.

One of Yeltsin’s priorities was to expose the Soviet atrocities that had remained hidden for decades. The brunt of this job fell to Gorbachev’s former colleague, Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev, who dug through the old files and soon found that this job wasn’t going to be so straightforward.

Many of the acts Alexander Nikolaevich uncovered defied logic, making them ill-suited for public release. For example, there was evidence of Stalin’s staff using a train ride to race each other and see who could process execution paperwork the fastest. Because they were so difficult to explain, many of the Soviet crimes would continue to go unrecognized by the public.

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Key idea 6 of 10

Faced with economic collapse and bombings, Vladimir Putin grabbed the spotlight with determination.

Russians have a saying: budushchego net, which means “there is no future.”

You may think that having your options greatly reduced would lead to a budushchego net moment, but for many Russians, it was having their narrow options greatly expanded that resulted in the budushchego net feeling.

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Key idea 7 of 10

In the name of stabilization, Putin quickly took steps to move toward authoritarianism.

Lyosha learned the word “gay” from movies on cable TV. After some emotional confusion and getting beaten up at school, he eventually knew that this term applied to him.

Luckily, he was about to head off to college, where attitudes toward homosexuality were much more understanding than those of his homophobic stepfather or anyone else in his hometown.

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Key idea 8 of 10

After leaving the presidency, Putin reclaimed it amid controversy in 2012.

By 2008, Vladimir Putin had reached his constitutional limit after two consecutive terms as president and moved into the position of prime minister.

While some saw this as a blatant disregard for the tenets of the Russian constitution, Putin was coming in at number five in the yearly poll asking citizens to name the greatest Russians who’d ever lived.

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Key idea 9 of 10

As the Kremlin cracked down on protests, new anti-homosexual laws were proposed.

After attending her first anti-corruption protests in 2011, Masha quickly became seen as a leader among the activists. She was the kind of person who went to the detention center after an event to provide water and support to the people who had been arrested. This was how she met the members of activist art group Pussy Riot after they were arrested during a demonstration on 4 March 2012, just before the polling stations for the presidential election opened up.

But it was a demonstration during Putin’s 2012 inauguration that would reveal just how big the protests were getting, and just how far the Kremlin would go to crackdown on the activists.

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Key idea 10 of 10

As new laws were enacted and people were killed, feelings of stability gave way to fear.

During the televised debate on the proposed anti-homosexuality legislation, the audience was given the opportunity to vote. Nearly 34,951 were in favor of the new laws, and only 7,375 were against.

But Lyosha’s hope that reason would prevail wasn’t fully crushed until later in 2013 when homosexuals were being targeted online, and videos were posted of gay men being tortured without any police intervention. At this point, Lyosha knew for sure that the new laws were going to pass.

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