In her book, “The future is history” follows the journalist, the way of Russia from Perestroika until today. For your ingenious work, she receives the Leipzig book award for European understanding.
Masha Forgotten not one of the people who believe that Russian influence has brought Trump to Power. The journalist, who writes for the magazine “The New Yorker” was described recently on Twitter as a “paid Propagandist for Putin”, as her journalistic work brother Keith told the magazine. The Paradox: in fact, Masha is part of Forget to the fiercest Putin critics in the United States.
On Wednesday (20. 3. 2019) will be honored, the well-known publicist in the context of the opening of the book fair the Leipzig book award for European understanding. In her latest book, “The future is history,” analyzes, “how Russia won the freedom and re-lost”, so the German subtitles. The award recognizes this work, the in 2017, with the English title “The Future is History. How Totalitarism Reclaimed Russia” appeared in the United States, and is known to be conclusion, with the subtitle: Putin was in the process of creating again a totalitarian state.
A Russian-American life
Book cover of “The future is history”
Masha, a multiple migration history has Forgotten. 1967 born in Moscow, emigrated with her Jewish intellectual family in 1981 in the USA. As an aspiring journalist, she reported at the end of the eighties, impressed by the supposed departure of their first home country to freedom and democracy. In 1994, she returned to Russia and writes for the Russian and American print media.
She finds a partner in Russia their lives, adopted a boy whose parents had died of Aids, is a fighter for democracy and human rights, LGBT activist, and she starts to write books. 2011 unveiling of a biography of Vladimir Putin, “The man without a face”. As one of the few journalists she has spoken with the Russian President, and until today, you followed any of his public Statements. To lose 2013, you have to fear, against the Background of a new law against homosexuals and adoptions by Americans, their son, emigrated with her family again. She lives with her wife and three children in Manhattan. Since some years she works for “The New Yorker”. A Russian passport she still has, next to the American.
Forget documented the death of Russian democracy
“For twenty years I have documented the death of Russian democracy, which was never really viable,” writes the author in the prologue of your in the United States with the National Book Award-winning book. Why the freedom was not taken, why the democracy in Russia was really desired, is the question of “The future is history”. To answer you, you have seven main characters at the centre of its more than 600 pages thick book: Shanna, Masha, Seryozha, and Ljoscha who were born in the first half of the eighties and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, as children, experienced.
Shanna Nemtsova Forget in conversation with Masha
In addition, she spoke with three scientists, who analyze as a conversation partner, the loss of knowledge, tools, people and society, signs, of the tools they acquired in Soviet and post-Soviet time: the psychoanalyst Marina Arutyunyan, the sociologist Lev Gudkov, the philosopher, and political activist Alexander Dugin. These protagonists have, apart from Dugin, the right-nationalist thinkers of the Russian reaction was, the author reports on a year long, in many conversations of your life.
Analysis of society from a subjective perspective
Unlike the white Russian literature Nobel prize-winner Svetlana Alexievich you to the changes in the Soviet to post-Soviet Russian society with the means of literary Reportage. Masha Forgotten that documented the lives of their protagonists, although from their subjective, detailed perception, but it embeds them in historical, political, and intellectual-historical analysis. Widely fanned-out strands until the early 20th century. Century and a number of historic personnel is woven. The extensive note apparatus assigned to these shortcuts, the book sometimes reads like a scientific work – and not as a “social novel”, as it is suggested by the publisher, in the blurb.
None of the life of Gessens four young heroes was a straight-forward or trouble-free. One of the women, whose life traces the author, is the 1984-born Shanna Nemzowa, whose father, Boris Nemtsov, four years ago, during a walk in sight of the Kremlin walls, was murdered. Under Boris Yeltsin, the former Governor of Nizhny Novgorod still had hope and a possible successor been considered. The daughter of Putin-critic came out in 2015 as a 31-Year-old to Germany and since then has been working for the Russian television program of the German wave.
The “Homo sovieticus” is not extinct
Masha, the other main female character, by with semi-legal shops before you groups to join the protest punk girls from Pussy Riot and other opposition. Seryozha, whose grandfather Alexander Nikolayevich Yakovlev to the top officials of the party and belonged to the early reforms demanded, grew up behind a wall of privileges. He is going under Putin to critics of the government, the opposition politician Alexei Navalny on the street. The homosexual Ljoscha fights after his courageous Coming Out in a provincial University for LGBT persons-to establish topics in the syllabus. He loses his job as a lecturer in Perm.
Masha Forgotten describes the development of Russia as slipping into a Mafia state with Putin as godfather. Plays a decisive role in the post-Communist vacuum of the nineties, the return to nationalist values, the rule expansion of the secret service and organised crime. The type of man of “Homo sovieticus” was never overcome, and the dawning of freedom have been prevented.
Masha Forgotten: “The future is history. How Russia won the freedom and re-lost”, Suhrkamp 2018, 639 pages