Quotes from Masha Gessen

The Bolsheviks placed a premium on the "creative intelligentsia," as it was termed—writers, artists, and, especially, filmmakers—as well as scholars and scientists. Military officers ranked even higher. But most of all, the Bolsheviks valued themselves: privileges and benefits for "political workers" exceeded those of all other groups.

By mid-2010, a thirty-four-year-old attorney named Alexey Navalny was drawing tens of thousands of daily hits on his blog

Rigidity is always the opposite of the search for truth.

Amalrik had argued that Marxist ideology had never had a firm grip on the country, that the Russian Orthodox Church had lost its own hold, and that without a central unifying set of beliefs, the country, pulled in opposite directions by social groups with different desires, would eventually self-destruct.

And with this, the transformation of Russia back into the USSR was, for all Putin's intents and purposes, complete.

He spent months explaining Nietzsche's concept of the Dionysian to Evgenia; she loved the idea of embracing chaos—it seemed the perfect antidote to the stifling regimented boredom that surrounded them.

And what did Boris Yeltsin himself know about his soon-to-be-anointed successor? He knew this was one of the few men who had remained loyal to him.

Yeltsin also knew, or thought he knew, that Putin would not allow the prosecution or persecution of Yeltsin himself once he retired. And if Yeltsin still possessed even a fraction of his once outstanding feel for politics, he knew that Russians would like this man they would be inheriting, and who would be inheriting them.

The word "deterrence" comes from the language of crime prevention, and its use reinforces the view of asylum seekers as criminals.

On August 9, 1999, Boris Yeltsin named Vladimir Putin prime minister of Russia. A week later he was confirmed in that position by a wide majority of the Duma: he proved just as likable, or at least unobjectionable, as Yeltsin had intuited.

The message to Georgia—and any other post-Soviet country that might have wanted to follow its example—was, If you try to ally with NATO, you will lose lives and territory and will be assured NATO limbo in perpetuity.

America was the very definition of modernity; it was the country that Russia had failed to become.

fortochka. It is a tiny window cut inside a larger pane. Even when windows have been sealed for the long winter, the fortochka can remain in use, being opened regularly to allow air to circulate. The Soviet university, as it turned out, had its fortochkas, and the way to learn was to hunt for them and then to stick your whole face in them and breathe the fresh air as though one's lungs could be filled up with reserve supplies.

Trump's campaign promise of a return to the imaginary past was largely a promise to transport Americans to a time when racism, misogyny, and xenophobia were mainstream attitudes. More than that: it was the promise of a new history in which a greater inclusivity not only had not happened but would never happen.

Three political scientists from Texas compared hate-crime statistics from counties where Trump had held campaign rallies to demographically similar counties where rallies were not held—and concluded that Trump rallies were correlated with a 226 percent rise in hate crimes.

The same day, Putin made one of his first television appearances. "We will hunt them down," he said of the terrorists. "Wherever we find them, we will destroy them. Even if we find them in the toilet. We will rub them out in the outhouse.

Russian law in fact gives the prime minister no authority over the military.

For a number of years, perhaps since the end of the Cold War, the language of ideals and principles had been fading from American political discourse too, giving way to the language of realism and action.

In his farewell speech, President Obama addressed the "work of democracy," the daily grind of change and the importance of the belief in the American experiment rather than the ideals on which the experiment is based.

There is only one right answer to any given question at any given time, and how can I tell when the time has come to know the difference?

Here the state described by Magyar met the society described by Gudkov. When the state used force and ideology as mere tools, society responded as it had over the course of previous generation to both force and ideology: by mobilizing. Russia had a mafia state ruling over a totalitarian society.

This is not another Cold War that we're entering into," he said. "After all, unlike the Soviet Union, Russia leads no bloc of nations, no global ideology." He was tragically wrong.

the peculiar ability to see triangles and hexagons where others see only a party.

he seemed to see himself as a king barricaded in his castle, with thousands of soldiers in the battlement, the sights of their rifles trained on potential intruders.