This idea of a people held captive by its own past is the dominant theme of the Russian-American journalist and author Masha Gessen’s wide-ranging and ambitious new book, which has just won the prestigious National Book award for non-fiction.Īn outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin, Gessen tracks the toxic legacy of the Soviet era and the ways it has infiltrated and undermined hopes for a liberal, democratic, law-bound Russia. Her behaviour was finally explained when it emerged that she was a former guard in the Gulag: “The family was now recast as a camp, complete with dead-end make-work, the primacy of discipline, and the total abolition of personal boundaries.” Cases such as this led Arutyunyan to a wider diagnosis of Russia as a traumatised society unable to free itself from the psychological subjugation fostered during the long decades of Soviet rule. The grandmother tyrannised her daughter and granddaughter with demands for needless work and repeated invasions of their privacy. I n her clinical practice during the 1990s, Moscow psychoanalyst Marina Arutyunyan encountered three generations of women living under the same roof.
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