Surviving Autocracy

Masha Gessen is the author of eleven other books, including the National Book Award winning The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia and The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. A staff writer at The New Yorker and the recipient of numerous awards, including Guggenheim and Carnegie fellowships, Gessen teaches at Bard College and lives in New York City.

When Gessen speaks about autocracy, you listen.   The New York Times

A reckoning with what has been lost in the past few years and a map forward with our beliefs intact.   Interview

As seen on MSNBC s Morning Joe and heard on NPR s All Things Considered: the bestselling, National Book Award winning journalist offers an essential guide to understanding, resisting, and recovering from the ravages of our tumultuous times.

This incisive book provides an essential guide to understanding and recovering from the calamitous corrosion of American democracy over the past few years. Thanks to the special perspective that is the legacy of a Soviet childhood and two decades covering the resurgence of totalitarianism in Russia, Masha Gessen has a sixth sense for the manifestations of autocracy and the unique cross-cultural fluency to delineate their emergence to Americans. Gessen not only anatomizes the corrosion of the institutions and cultural norms we hoped would save us but also tells us the story of how a short few years changed us from a people who saw ourselves as a nation of immigrants to a populace haggling over a border wall, heirs to a degraded sense of truth, meaning, and possibility. Surviving Autocracy is an inventory of ravages and a call to account but also a beacon to recovery and to the hope of what comes next.

STELLAR RECEPTION: Critics, booksellers, and readers have embraced Surviving Autocracy like a thrown life preserver, hailing their writing as "ambitious, timely, insightful, and unsparing" (Washington Post), "essential" (O Magazine), and "harrowing, compassionate, and important" (San Francisco Chronicle).THE VOICE THAT TRANSLATES OUR ERA TO US: Gessen's trenchant and extremely influential essays and commentary have definitively shaped our understanding of how we have arrived at our current moment. Readers look to them to make sense of our complicated, upsetting, often overwhelming geopolitical world. No matter the outcome of the 2020 election, readers will turn to them for perspective and guidance.MEDIA ROCK STAR: Gessen is on the A-list NPR, MSNBC, CNN, Samantha Bee, Jonathan Van Ness, and more. In an insanely crowded 24-hour news cycle, in the leadup to the election, they remain in high demand.PRIZEWINNING: A winner of the National Book Award for their previous book, The Future is History, Gessen is the recipient of numerous additional accolades, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, a Nieman Fellowship, the Hitchens Prize, and the Overseas Press Club Award for Best Commentary.