Experimental Blog # 229

Quotations from and comments about "The Future is History" - How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia by Masha Gessen

"I spent my thirties and forties documenting the death of a Russian democracy that had really never come to be. Different people were telling different stories about this: many insisted that Russia had merely taken a step back after taking two steps toward democracy; some laid the blame on Vladimir Putin and the KGB; others on a supposed Russian love of the iron fist, and still others on an inconsiderate, imperious West."

"Perestroika was an impossible idea on the face of it. The Party was setting out to employ its structures of command to make the country, and itself, less command-driven. A system whose main afflictions were stagnation and inflexibility was setting out to change itself. < > The leaders of many of the Soviet Union's constituent republics were becoming lax in monitoring and containing nationalist forces..."

"The cliche' of the era was "floodgates." Everyone in every field was claiming that the floodgates had opened."
"For over a generation before Gorbachev came to power, Politburo membership had generally been a lifetime appointment.  <> Gorbachev started reshuffling the Central Commottee's membership several times a year ..."
"One after another, the Eastern European states allowed protests < > In Romania, where the Party would not budge, a rebellious army seized and executed the Communist dictator and his wife. But the revolutions elsewhere were described by both local and Western press as "velvet.""

"Soviet society had been forbidden to know itself, and had no native language to describe and define what had happened."

"..Yeltsin might have appeared to be tackling the pillars of the totalitarian system, its machines of ideology and terror. < > By the end of 1991, Yeltsin had a country to run. But even with the former institutions of the Soviet state under his control, he faced a dire deficit of instruments of governance, and of people to use them."

"When Mikhail Gorbachev, as Party leader, looked at some of the secret archives for the first time in the 1980s, he felt shock, disgust, and disbelief - not only because of what had been done but because it had been done by his own Party and in its name."

"On January 2, 1992, the government lifted price controls on consumer goods, with the exception of bread, milk, and alcohol. < > Within a month, prices had gone up 352 percent..."

"Yeltsin no longer had the strength, or the popular support, to continue fighting the Communist Party. < > With resentment the dominant emotion in the land, Yeltsin could afford no public confrontation with the past."

The author's sources, as well as the author herself, perhaps, seem to become more removed from government actions during the leadership of Vladimir Putin. She writes about a "Nation Divided" and the assassination of Boris Nemtsov on February 27, 2015, who was the father of one of her sources, besides being a very important politician, who became a leader of anti-government demonstrations.

"So this was how it worked. The famous got a bullet in the heart and the less famous got poison in their tea."