Summary of Masha Gessen's The Future Is History

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 In Russia, baptism is traditionally done at the Church of St. John the Warrior in Central Moscow. Masha was baptized there on the seventieth anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution. Her grandmother, a rocket scientist, had spent her life working on material things that were the opposite of religion.
#2 The Soviet Union had defeated organized religion, but Grandmother knew that this was not entirely true. The new generation was supposed to grow up entirely free of the superstitions of which religion was just a subset. But when the Second World War began, people turned to God.
#3 When Tatiana had her baby, she was surprised to find that she was once again dependent on her parents. She had to make money and pull strings to escape her parental home.
#4 Masha’s mother, Tatiana, was a tutor. She would teach Masha how to tell counterfeit dollars from genuine currency, as well as prepare her clients to face the coffins questions designed for Jewish applicants.

Sujets

• Religion
• modern
• 21st century

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 28 mars 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669368786
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Masha Gessen's The Future Is History
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5 Insights from Chapter 6
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

In Russia, baptism is traditionally done at the Church of St. John the Warrior in Central Moscow. Masha was baptized there on the seventieth anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution. Her grandmother, a rocket scientist, had spent her life working on material things that were the opposite of religion.

#2

The Soviet Union had defeated organized religion, but Grandmother knew that this was not entirely true. The new generation was supposed to grow up entirely free of the superstitions of which religion was just a subset. But when the Second World War began, people turned to God.

#3

When Tatiana had her baby, she was surprised to find that she was once again dependent on her parents. She had to make money and pull strings to escape her parental home.

#4

Masha’s mother, Tatiana, was a tutor. She would teach Masha how to tell counterfeit dollars from genuine currency, as well as prepare her clients to face the coffins questions designed for Jewish applicants.

#5

To achieve anything even close to a level playing field, you had to not be Jewish. Your ethnicity was noted in all important identity documents, from birth certificate to internal passport to personnel file at work or school.

#6

The city was named Gorky, after the Russian writer Alexei Peshkov, who had taken a tearjerker pen name: it meant bitter. Raisa had to spend most of her time hunting for food. Moscow had shortages of its own, but compared with Gorky, where a store might be selling nothing but unidentifiable dark juice in three-liter glass jars with tin covers, Moscow was the land of promise.

#7

In 1985, the new secretary-general of the Communist Party declared what he called a new course. He was not the first secretary-general to say those words, but now something was changing.

#8

The Soviet Union was a totalitarian state, and it was only in the late 1980s that things began to crack. In 1969, a journalist named Andrei Amalrik published a book-length essay titled Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984. In it, he argued that the regime was headed for an implosion.

#9

The Soviet Union, for decades, waged a war on knowledge itself. It shielded all essential and most nonessential information behind a wall of secrets and lies, and it did not encourage the development of philosophy, history, and the social sciences.

#10

In 1984, Evgenia Debryanskaya, a thirty-year-old single mother from Sverdlovsk, was hosting a party in Moscow. She had money, connections, and beauty, which significantly boosted her ambition of becoming someone in Moscow.

#11

Heidegger’s work was not available in Russian until 1986. Dugin had no affiliation with any Soviet institution, so he had no access to any but the smallest neighborhood libraries. He finally procured a copy of Being and Time on microfilm.

#12

The Russian intellectual elite was both a part of and a partner to the European conversation about God, power, and human life. After fifty years of purges, arrests, and unrelenting pressure on an isolated thought universe, the Russian intellectual landscape was populated by barely articulated ghosts of once vibrant ideas.

#13

Soviet psychology professors were required to train their students in statistical and data analysis, as well as the natural sciences. If they learned anything in their first couple of years at university, it was only the basic logic behind this absence.

#14

After the Bolshevik Revolution, the new state set out to create a New Man. The project contained an echo of Nietzsche’s Übermensch idea, but now it was a practical task rather than a philosophical exercise.

#15

The Russian Psychoanalytic Society was shut down in 1925, and the work of the most important Russian student of Freud, Sabina Spielrein, was forgotten. The demise of Russian psychoanalysis spelled the end of any study of the psyche in Soviet Russia.

#16

Arutyunyan became a psychology professor, and her students were amazed by her ability to explain complex ideas in a way they could understand. She eventually realized that the fortochkas around her, which were small windows cut into larger panes, were the source of the air she needed to breathe.

#17

The person is the subject of many psychological studies. The human being is a complicated creature capable of reflection, but he or she is also doomed to make mistakes in the process of reflecting.

#18

Intellectuals aspired to and prized luxuries of a different order: an unburdensome job in a nontoxic environment that left time for thinking and breathing some fortochka air. This was a lot to want, and getting it required luck, brains, and connections.

#19

In 1968, the Soviet Union allowed the existence of a discipline called sociology, and Levada was the head of the theory department of the new structure. He was careful not to call his own work sociology, but instead referred to it as concrete social studies.

#20

The Institute for Concrete Social Studies was established in 1968 to study Soviet society and criticize bourgeois theory. It was charged not only with criticizing bourgeois theory, but also with studying Soviet society.

#21

Levada’s staff met every couple of weeks and discussed Western sociologists. They never published their work, but they assimilated Western sociology. They were eventually kicked out of their institute, and they moved to another one.

#22

In 1984, Arutyunyan began working with families at the Family and Marriage Centers, which were designed to help stem the tide of divorces. She found that by simply listening to people, they were able to help them work things out.

#23

The family was reunited in 1985, when Seryozha was three years old. His parents had sent his sister to Canada, but now she would come home because Seryozha’s grandfather was being allowed to return to the Soviet Union.

#24

Alexander Nikolaevich was a member of the Central Committee by the time Stalin died in 1953. He was a thinker, but he still had to struggle with the idea of what was and wasn’t Soviet. When Khrushchev condemned Stalin as an unworthy successor to Lenin, he lost his ability to reconcile the Party line and his long-shelved doubts.

#25

Seryozha was a grandchild of a top Party official, so he lived in typical Soviet conditions. His family faced shortages of food and other consumer products, but they were still considered middle class.

#26

The Soviet Union was born out of protest against inequality, but in just a few years, the main mechanisms of privilege were established. The state valued the labor of the highly trained and creative intelligentsia the most, and they were paid well for it.

#27

The Soviet economic system made the borders between different groups of citizens more clear and harder to penetrate. Because all of the extra compensation for the privileged was non-monetary, and because it was centrally administered, members of a given caste were grouped together socially and geographically.

#28

Seryozha’s life was spent behind the fences of the dachas. He would spend his weekends with the elite, and on weekdays he would go to a different fence along the same road, where he would attend a preschool for the offspring of the top officials.

#29

Lyosha grew up knowing that his family had privilege, as his grandfather had served a term in the regional Soviet, which gave him a bit of extra pay. His mother, Galina, was a history teacher who saw the principal of another trade school in town. She was pregnant and planned to have an abortion.

#30

The Soviet Union was trying to get as many women as possible to have children, so they created a system that would help single mothers. The state would provide financial subsidies and childcare. Men who fathered children out of wedlock would not be held responsible for child support, but the mother would be.

#31

Galina worked at a correctional school for children whose parents failed to take care of them. She would take Lyosha to visit these students, who were often drunk and pregnant. Lyosha understood that the fact that these words did not apply to his and Galina’s world was a function of privilege.

#32

Lyosha had a close relationship with his mother, who took him to the polls and explained the importance of voting. He loved hearing her explain history, and he was convinced that his birth date was no accident: he was not just born on Victory Day, but on the fortieth anniversary of the end of the Great Patriotic War.

#33

Perestroika was an impossible idea on the face of it. The Party was setting out to employ its command structures to make the country and itself less command-driven. People who had spent their lives securing power were expected to develop change that would dismantle the hierarchy of levers.

#34

Alexander Nikolaevich, who had struggled to learn and think, was sympathetic to the many people who were resisting change simply because they had never been exposed to anything outside the Party’s dogma. He convinced the Central Committee to approve a concerted effort to restore thought and knowledge to the land.

#35

In 1987, Evgenia began to gather around her a group of like-minded people, who began holding protests and seminars to learn about Soviet history. They began to organize protests on every topic they studied.

#36

In 1988, a group called the Democratic Union was formed in Russia. It was a political party, and its platform was extremely anti-Soviet. It called for the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the Baltic states to be allowed to secede from the Union. It abolished the KGB, the death penalty, and the draft.

#37

In the late 1980s,