Masha Gessen
The Future is History

A self-proclaimed “opposition journalist in Russia,” Masha Gessen is the author of many books, including Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot. As a journalist living in Moscow, Gessen experienced the rise of Vladimir Putin firsthand. In her 2012 bestselling book The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin, she gave a chilling account of how a lowlevel, small-minded KGB operative ascended to the Russian presidency and, in a short time, destroyed years of progress and made his country once more a threat to her own people and to the world. Gessen will speak about her new book The Future Is History, won the National Book Award for non-fiction in 2017, in which she follows the lives of four people born at what promised to be the dawn of democracy in Russia. 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.

Friday
7:00pm Lecture and Q&A
8:15pm Book signing, light supper & wine

Saturday
2:00pm Lecture and Q&A
3:15pm Book signing, dessert & coffee