The Future Is History How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia BY MASHA GESSEN (Riverhead)

Vladi­mir Putin has inspired a number of books seeking to explain his remarkable rise — and his remarkable hold on power. Few accounts are as ambitious, insightful and unsparing as Gessen’s “The Future Is History.” This is a sweeping intellectual history of Russia over the past four decades, told through a Tolstoyan gallery of characters. It makes a convincing if depressing case that Homo Sovieticus, the unique species created a century ago with the Bolshevik Revolution, did not die out along with the Soviet Union. What makes the book so worthwhile are its keen observations about Russia from the point of view of those experiencing its heavy-handed state. Gessen’s provocative conclusion that Putin’s Russia is just as much a totalitarian society as Stalin’s Soviet Union or Hitler’s Germany may not convince all readers. But you don’t need to agree with this assessment to find her book a sad, compelling indictment of the country where she was born, a country so traumatized by its monstrous past that it seems intent on repeating it.