Editor’s note:  Hope Whitmore’s interview with novelist Kazuo Ishiguro — who was just announced as the 2017 Nobel Laureate in Literature — was originally posted in the B&N Review on March 3, 2015.

 

Some novels are magic — not in what they represent, but what they do. They seep into your consciousness and seem to change not only the way you view the world around you, but the incidents that happen within that world. Kazuo Ishiguro’s new book, The Buried Giant is such a novel. Reading my advance copy, I found strange things happening. While reading a book about reconnecting with the past I found fragments of my own past all about me.

Reading the book in a coffee shop, I met my old English professor, someone I had not seen for many years but remembered fondly. Later, as I read the novel on the Megabus to London, the coach veered off its usual course along the East Coast, and I looked up to find myself being driven past Kirkby Lonsdale, the small Lancashire town where I had grown up.

The Buried Giant, set in what Ishiguro calls a never-never land resembling an ancient Britain of knights and dragons, is about things we forget, a past we have left behind which is about to reawaken. Remembering the forgotten thing will profoundly alter the world but remembering is also personal, and the book, like so much of Ishiguro’s work, is imbued with a tantalizing, unsettling sense of something missing.

*

Kazuo Ishiguro opened the door to his London home and welcomed me in from the dreary January afternoon, expressing concern over whether I had been rained on.

He led me through the dining room, where new books lay on the table, including a pristine copy of The Illuminations, the new novel by Andrew O’Hagan.  I was led through to a living room, where the shelves were stacked with DVDs.  These included a shelf of postwar French movies, which Ishiguro and his wife, Lorna, are interested in, he told me, not only because they’re enjoyable just as films but also for what they reveal about France after the war.

The chairs were the color of orange juice, and he invited me to take one, asking if I minded  a chair with a hard back. Lorna offered me cushions before telling me to “have as many biscuits as you like, because otherwise he’ll eat them all.”

Then she left the room, and Ishiguro and I were facing one another.  The following is an edited transcript of our conversation. —Hope Whitmore

The Barnes & Noble Review: The Buried Giant is very much about an old England, an England in the distant past, with knights and ogres and slaying a dragon. Why this setting?

Kazuo Ishiguro: I find that my themes remain very similar, but I like to change the periods in which they are set, and the genre, and I think that’s because I like to start out with the sort of issues or questions that my novel is going to address — it’s almost like location hunting for filmmakers.

I wanted this story to be about a world where people had lost their memories in patches, how whole societies remember or forget and how individuals suppress memory and struggle with remembering or forgetting, but every time I thought about somewhere I wanted the novel to be set I started thinking about Yugoslavia as it broke up and descended into civil war in the 1990s, or France immediately after the Second World War. They (the French) spent most of the war collaborating with the Nazis and being occupied, and in every small village someone did betray someone, and afterward they had to forget and pretend they were all brave resistance fighters. There was a kind of unspoken agreement. “Let’s not go there. Let’s suppress our memory so we don’t fall apart and fall into fighting and disintegration or communism.”

But I wanted it to be more like a historical never-never land, so that it could be applied to all kinds of settings.

BNR: Why medieval England in particular?

KI: Well, what it was, there’s a poem. You know Sir Gawain and the Green Knight — it’s an anonymous poem?

BNR: Where the Green Knight has his head cut off?

KI: That’s right. There’s a bit in Camelot at the beginning where a strange Green Knight turns up in the middle of the Christmas festivities and sets a challenge to Gawain, “We’ll take turns to take a swing with swords at one another’s heads and you can have the first swing, and you can try and chop my head off and if you chop my head off you’ve won, but if for some reason you fail then I get to chop your head off.”

Gawain has first go, and he manages to cut the Green Knight’s head off, so he thinks he’s won, but unfortunately the Green Knight is supernatural, so the head starts to talk and says, “OK, now it’s my turn, I get to take a swing at your head, but as you’re having a Christmas festival right now. I’ll give you a special concession, you come and find me in a year’s time at my castle and I can take a swing at you.”

But what inspired me was just a tiny passage about what England was like at that time. Most of the story takes place in these castles; luxurious, palatial castles, but there’s a tiny bit about — well, I shouldn’t say England, I should say Britain, because it wasn’t England yet — there was a bit about what Britain was like at that point, and its just eight lines or thereabouts, but it says he had a terrible time because there were no inns in those days, because obviously the poet is projecting back centuries as well, he says there were no inns or anything and he had to sleep on rocks in the storm, and sometimes he’d try to get food at a village and he’d be chased away by ogres, and you know, he’ll be woken up by wolves attacking him when he was sleeping on a snowy bit of ground, and it was awful; then he finds this castle and the journey continues.

What struck me was this little description, and I thought actually that might be a really good setting, that it might be what I’d been looking for. I really liked the matter-of-fact way that ogres were mentioned —  it was like farm bulls or street dogs that might bite you, it’s at that kind of level.

BNR: It’s a superstitious world as well.

KI: In this world [the world of the book] people naturally believe in God —  they’re not quite sure what kind of God it is, but they don’t doubt there’s a God and that’s second nature. Some of that we still have. So we don’t call that superstition. You know, if it was what people believed I respected it and allowed it to be real in the world.

I thought, if a person of that time believed in something, in my fictional world I’d let it exist for real. Now that was my rule, but I wouldn’t create something weird that people wouldn’t normally believe in. So a flying saucer wouldn’t land in that world, because that’s not in the imaginary limits of the people. But a belief in spirits — or ogres or dragons or pixies out there in the wild — most people would have half believed or really believed things like that, so I thought in my fictional world I’d let it literally exist. So it is sort of a fantastical world, but it’s not a free-for-all. It’s not a world where anything could exist. It’s superstitious if you like but it’s the superstitions that you know, have existed, that’s how I did it.

I was saying, it should be called Britain rather than England because in the book, the Anglo-Saxons, who’ve been landing in and settling in this country, will become the English — but it’s not England yet. England hasn’t really been invented. So, it’s right at the point where what used to be Roman Britain is falling to pieces after the Romans have left, the point where it’s about to turn “English.” Anglo-Saxon invaders are about to sweep across the country, probably wiping out the Britons, and you know, their language is the language we’re speaking now.

It’s a big blank in history, but there’s been a sort of consensus long held that there probably was some kind of genocide at that point, because it’s called the Anglo-Saxon settlement, and that’s when the foundations of England are laid, at the end of the fifth century.

BNR: And this slaughter is unleashed by the memories released when the mist that causes forgetfulness disappears. So the idea of genocide is really important to the book?

KI: I was very disturbed by what happened in the ’90s in the old Yugoslavia. We’d grown up in the Cold War, always afraid of a nuclear shootout with the Soviet Union, and there was a real sense of relief when the Cold War ended and the Berlin Wall came down, and it felt as if we were  going to enter this really nice period and there was a really optimistic feeling for a while. What then happened in Yugoslavia was horrible, because just within a few years of the end of the Cold War we had concentration camps, we had a massacre, right in the middle of Europe — in a country where some of us had been on holiday, or hitchhiking or backpacking. We had the Srebrenica massacre, the worst European massacre since the Second World War, and it was all to do with one ethnic community wanting to wipe out another —  a very disturbing thing to see happening in the heart of Europe. Then that was very closely followed by the Rwanda massacres.

These episodes had quite an impact on me, and ever since, I’ve wondered how can a country suddenly explode like that? How can it turn into such a bloodbath? And it was particularly disturbing because it was these people who had been living in these villages and towns together, people who’d been babysitting one another’s children went next door and burned their neighbors’ house and hanged the inhabitants.

And one of the things that stood out is the role that suppressed memory has in all this. People have agreed to just forget things that happened in the past, but when somebody deliberately stirs these memories in order to stir awake war or stir awake hatred, people suddenly think “Oh, those people across the road, I thought they were OK, but way back when their lot did horrible things to my lot, and unless we do something now they’re going to do it again.”

Northern Ireland was like that as well. Protestants and Catholics both dragged out these ritualistic things — the marching season, ancient battles, ancient atrocities —  in order to fuel modern-day hatred.

So, that’s partly why I’ve created this old-fashioned, mythical story about memories being suppressed by something magical. Today, memories are controlled by media propaganda. In a country like ours, how do we actually go about looking at the past? It’s something to do with popular entertainment —  books, museums, the royal days we have —  all these things have a huge impact on what one age group of people thinks happened in the past.

BNR: But can’t remembering awful things make them less likely to happen again? Yesterday was Holocaust Memorial Day — I read an article about how a writer’s grandparents were killed in the Holocaust., and I thought at the time how important it was not to forget these things.

KI: I don’t come down on one side or the other about remembering or forgetting. It’s kind of a parallel to an argument about mental illness.  Is it best to go to a therapist and stir awake memories about trauma and childhood, or is it better to leave it alone and move on and all that?

Take somewhere like America. One of their forgotten things, or things they don’t like to think about, is the way they’ve treated African Americans. Just in the past year there were so much protest around a white policeman shooting a black man. Obviously America isn’t at ease as a society over this — someone might say it’s because America never really owned up to how badly it treated African Americans. Until it goes back into its past and really looks at it and tries to address all these grievances it will never be at peace with itself. There will always be these eruptions of violence.

On the other hand someone else might say, you go back through all that, you’re just going to make it worse. You’re just going to make all these people angry that this stuff was done to their ancestors, so we should pretend we all got on really well.

I think this country — Britain — has chosen to remember the whole history of the Empire in a very sanitized way. And Japan has decided to forget that the Japanese army invaded China and most of South Asia and committed atrocities. They’ve completely blocked it out, literally out of their school textbooks, which causes tremendous friction with China now.

I think France is a really interesting case of a country that’s had to work very, very hard to forget something. Like the mist in the story, you know. France is still under some kind of strange mist.

I wouldn’t want to imply that there was something peculiarly wrong with the French, that the French have something wrong with them and the rest of us are far more civilized that the French. I have a problem with that, because I think that’s what all people are like. Whether its about America and Native Americans or America and the African Americans — it’s the human condition.

I think that almost everybody’s got something like this, but I don’t think that there’s an easy answer to the question of when  you should really confront the past. Because sometimes confronting the past can lead to mayhem.

Like South Africa after apartheid, I think it’s a really really delicate balance. So many people were so furious about all those years when they were treated badly by minority whites, but I think Mandela and Co., when they came to power, were determined to avoid civil war or violence of any sort — they were really careful. They set up the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, so people were allowed to come up and express their bitterness and anger, and they got some sense of justice being done in some sort of way. But they tried to not go too far down the road of arresting many people — doing a purge. Too much remembering about what had happened would just lead to civil war and violence, and the country just couldn’t cope.

It’s much the same with a marriage. For Axl and Beatrice [the couple at the center of The Buried Giant], is it better to remember the bad parts of their marriage or is it better to just forget it? Could it destroy their love if they remember too much? I had no answers to this — the story isn’t trying to come down on one side or another, it’s just saying, this is how we lived. We live with these dilemmas.

BNR: So would you consider setting a story like this in a real place, like France or Yugoslavia, say?

KI: I guess the answer is probably not. For a start I think I would have to really become quite expert on that situation. I don’t think it would be fair if I just skirted over those details — I’d have to really know my stuff to talk about one place, what had happened historically. And I’m not sure why would I want to single out one particular place, you know, there’s a kind of like an unfairness to that, I don’t want to make that an example. I don’t want to suggest that that any one kind of place is, you know, different, and this is why I think I often find myself creating worlds which are unrealistic, like in Never Let Me Go or in this book. I’m a novelist as opposed to a journalist, or a reporter or an essayist, I feel my territory is to talk about universal human experiences, not to report on what happened at a particular place at a particular time.

I think if that was what I was doing I would have to do it in a disciplined way. I should research it, I should claim my sources, I should plan my research — like reportage, you know? When you’re making things up in fiction it’s a different kind of thing. You’re appealing to people’s experiences as human beings, and you’re saying, is this something that strikes you as true about human behavior?

BNR: You were born in Nagasaki nine years after it was bombed, and I wondered, did this cast a shadow over your writing in any way?

KI: Well, actually, the odd thing was, I didn’t really understand that Nagasaki was so distinct in having been atom-bombed. It took me some time to realize that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the only places in history to have suffered nuclear attacks.

When I was growing up there people didn’t tend to tell us, a four-year-old, a five-year old, “Did you know what happened?”

But I remember people mentioning it and there was no secret about it.

So I never associated Nagasaki with the atomic bomb. For me Nagasaki is all kinds of other things. I have all these colorful memories of our house, my toys, my kindergarten. I remember all this stuff, but I still don’t think of it emotionally as connected with the atomic bomb.

BNR: I wonder what it will be that overshadows our generation.

KI: Sometimes you don’t see that until you look back. I don’t know. The world is still very volatile.

BNR: Yes — the Twin Towers happened when our generation were children and triggered the Iraq war.

KI: I’m not sure how to say it, but I want to point out that when you say it “triggered the Iraq war” — the war wasn’t inevitable by any means. Saddam Hussein had nothing at all to do with 9/11. There was no link between the two. It was something that a handful of world leaders made happen in the general hysteria and mental chaos after 9/11. They just took the opportunity to attack Iraq. And instead of addressing who had committed this atrocity it was a step backwards, almost certainly because of the amount of effort that went into fighting in Iraq. They weren’t able to pursue Al Qaeda properly in Afghanistan or wherever else they were. I think we’ll look back on that episode in history and it will seem baffling why those people were allowed to take a huge hunk of the West into a war in Iraq.

And that’s coming close to what we were talking about before. This is an example of very recent history and perhaps people aren’t willing to go back there, perhaps because — to put it coldly —  it’s an absolute disaster what the British and Americans did, and we don’t even know the extent of the disaster yet.

BNR: And now it’s horrendous.

KI: Yes — and now, they say, “OK, we did a good job, we’re going to pull out.” And within a few days we have ISIS or IS — those guys emerged within about three minutes of the allies pulling out, just committing atrocities on fellow Muslims, you know, all the way across Syria and Iraq. I mean the whole place is destabilized with groups that even Al Qaeda describe as too extreme, I mean, what a result, hey?

*

BNR: You did creative writing at the University of East Anglia. Creative writing courses have been criticized lately, by Hanif Kureishi among others.

KI: Ah, that’s Hanif, yes. He said something like, if I was one of those students, I’d be better off finding a mentor. Well, that’s just typical Hanif, he often says things that other people are too polite to say, but I think there’s some element of truth in it. My feeling is that the creative writing industry —  which is what it’s become — has to be  regulated better. There has to be something equivalent to “AA” ratings for hotels, or stars or something.

The creative writing world is a Wild West at the moment, and I think there are people actually saving up money and spending it on fees to be taught by someone who’s never published a novel, or published poetry. I know a very reputable one at one of the main universities in London right now where there’s a guy teaching fiction. He’s never published a novel, for all I know he’s never even written a novel.

You certainly can’t teach writing because you’ve read a lot or you’re a distinguished scholar in English literature, any more than a music critic can teach someone to play piano, or someone who can’t swim could coach for the Olympic swimming team, you know? It’s just absurd.

I have a feeling creative writing schools are more mature in America — some of the best names in contemporary literature teach at U.S. universities. People like Toni Morrison, until she retired, was teaching at Princeton, and there’s always been a different attitude in America about teaching writing — a lot of writers feel that if they do it even a little bit, they should do it. Like classical musicians, they’ll take on a few pupils, you know? So it is sort of a different scene — and its much more mature.

*

After the interview, Ishiguro went in search of Lorna. They called me a taxi to take me to the Tube.

I chatted with my taxi driver on the way to the station. He wants to be a writer, but he never shows his work to anyone. It felt like another piece of residual magic, seeping into life from The Buried Giant, now tatty and dog-eared — but nevertheless signed by Kazuo Ishiguro — resting in my bag.

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Every author has a story beyond the one that they put down on paper. The Barnes & Noble Podcast goes between the lines with today’s most interesting writers, exploring what inspires them, what confounds them, and what they were thinking when they wrote the books we’re talking about.

Perhaps no writer is better suited to help us grapple with the tumultuous and unexpected recent history of Russia — a history that has enormous impact on the rest of the world — than the journalist and author Masha Gessen. Her new book, The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia is, in the words of reviewer Liesl Schillinger, a “magisterial, panoramic” look at the end of one era and the beginning of another, and the effect of decades of trauma on a nation. With her book just named a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award for Nonfiction, Masha Gessen joins Bill Tipper on the podcast for a deep dive into a society that many Americans are fascinated by — but which few of us understand.

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Vladimir Putin’s bestselling biographer reveals how, in the space of a generation, Russia surrendered to a more virulent and invincible new strain of autocracy.

Hailed for her “fearless indictment of the most powerful man in Russia” (The Wall Street Journal), award-winning journalist Masha Gessen is unparalleled in her understanding of the events and forces that have wracked her native country in recent times. In The Future Is History, she follows the lives of four people born at what promised to be the dawn of democracy. Each of them came of age with unprecedented expectations, some as the children and grandchildren of the very architects of the new Russia, each with newfound aspirations of their own—as entrepreneurs, activists, thinkers, and writers, sexual and social beings.

Gessen charts their paths against the machinations of the regime that would crush them all, and against the war it waged on understanding itself, which ensured the unobstructed reemergence of the old Soviet order in the form of today’s terrifying and seemingly unstoppable mafia state. Powerful and urgent, The Future Is History is a cautionary tale for our time and for all time.

A Finalist for the 2017 National Book Award in Nonfiction

Click here to see all books by Masha Gessen.

Like this podcast? Subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher to discover intriguing new conversations every week.

Author photo (c) Tanya Sazansky.

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Any American who has watched the news this year, absorbing –first skeptically and, latterly, with outraged acceptance — the agglomerating hulk of evidence of Kremlin interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election can see that reports of the death of the Cold War were grossly exaggerated. And so, argues a magisterial, panoramic overview of Russia under Putin, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, by the Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen (she holds both nationalities) were reports of the death of what might be called the Soviet mind-set. That way of thinking, the author suggests, has endured for a quarter century, as the country formerly known as the USSR sought to regain its footing and its superpower status, with the support of a majority of its citizens.

After the Soviet Union officially expired on Christmas Day, 1991, when the hammer-and-sickle flag was lowered from the Kremlin and replaced by the Russian tricolor, Russia retreated significantly from international headlines. When Boris Yeltsin, the first post-Soviet president, retired from politics on New Year’s Eve, 1999, he said in his departing address, “Russia will never go back to the past. From now on, Russia will be moving forward.” Many Kremlinologists — and businessmen excited by the prospect of a new frontier for investment — were tempted to agree with him. But three months later, in March 2000, a former KGB man, Vladimir Putin, became Russia’s president. Swiftly, Gessen writes, “He moved to reassert executive-branch control not only over the media but also over the judiciary and, broadly, the economy.” Rising oil prices brought the country new wealth, and some of the richest and most influential men in the New Russia — “oligarchs”– soon found themselves exiled or imprisoned, their assets seized, while Putin consolidated power. As Putin’s years in office extended, the reforms that Yeltsin and his democratizing predecessor, Mikhail Gorbachev, had tried to implement began melting away. But it wasn’t until February 2014, when the then three-term President Putin swaggeringly presided over the Olympic Games in Sochi, broadcasting his nation’s reclamation of imperial pretensions (which he would soon assert in Crimea and Ukraine) that the world woke up to the fact that Russia had other plans than Yeltsin had anticipated, and that they were well underway.

For outside observers in the 1990s, and long after, it had been convenient to think that, under the reins of perestroika, with the carrot of a market economy, the wayward troika of Russia at last would take a new direction. But in The Future Is History, Gessen shows that the Russian troika did in fact take a new direction: backward. To explain how this happened, Gessen relays the stories of inside observers — actual Russians, of three intertwined generations, who have struggled to chart a course through a landscape of endlessly shifting signposts. While the people she singles out are often vociferous opponents of the rearward direction of the New Russia, she gives at least equal time to the group the perestroika historian Yuri Afanasyev dubbed “the aggressively obedient majority” and to the tens of millions of ordinary Russians who would be happy to go back to the USSR, more or less. Why would such a large proportion of the populace support this turnabout? Do they miss the gulag? Not exactly, Gessen explains. Rather, they have been overtaken by “epidemic nostalgia” for the paternalist “stability” of the iron-fist Soviet past — the sort of totalitarian stability that, Gessen writes, uses “periodic purges or crackdowns” to create what Hannah Arendt described as “a state of permanent instability” that keeps the populace pliant. But Russians weren’t thinking of such constraints when they went to the polls, she contends. To borrow a contemporary American rallying cry, they yearned for a leader who could Make Russia Great Again. In Putin, they found that leader. Gessen reports that in a public opinion poll released in June 2017, conducted by Moscow’s Levada Center (a creditable institution that has been harassed by the Kremlin and labeled a “foreign agent”), Russians named Putin the second “most outstanding person of all time in the entire world.” More telling is who came in first: Stalin.

The deep-set Russian passion for dictators — vozhdizm, the “leader principle,” it’s called — bewilders the West and, Gessen shows, also bedevils progressive-minded Russians who hoped for a more democratic outcome of the upheavals of the 1990s. “We are afraid of freedom. We don’t know what to do with it,” the late Alexander Yakovlev, once a senior advisor to Gorbachev, told a journalist in 2005. Five years earlier, on New Year’s Eve, 1999, watching Yeltsin’s farewell speech with his grandson, Seryozha, Yakovlev had told the boy that Putin had some good ideas; his main worry was that Putin might fall prey to “the nomenklatura monster” — the grey cadres who controlled Soviet life and who remained, under new titles, in the post-Soviet hierarchy. By 2005, Yakovlev saw that his fears had been misplaced. Putin had been the head of the monster all along. For twenty years, progressive-minded Russians hoped that the first generation born, like Yakovlev’s grandson, with no memory of Stalin’s terror would fight the resurgence of a Soviet-style nomenklatura and overcome Russia’s totalitarian legacy. But by 2017, as members of that generation either emigrated or found a way to get by in Putin’s notional “illiberal democracy,” diehards began putting their hopes in activist Russian teenagers from “the generation of kids born under Putin.” Seryozha, no rabble-rouser, had ceased communicating with the author.

Seryozha Yakovlev is one of the young characters in Gessen’s tri-generational recapitulation of the last thirty years. Understanding that the transformations of this epoch are dizzyingly complex and difficult to interpret — even for reporters who worked in Yeltsin’s Russia in the 1990s and returned to Putin’s Russia in the 2000s (I am one such reporter) — Gessen has endeavored to put a human face on the tick-tock, attempting to make felt emotionally what cannot be easily reconciled intellectually. Her cast is divided into three contingents. The first is the youngest: four children, Zhanna, Masha, Seryozha, and Lyosha, who were born amid the reformist tumult of the mid-’80s but came of age as the nation was slipping back into authoritarianism. Call them Generation P: young people shaped by the collision of perestroika and Putin.

The next group Gessen weaves in is members of their parents’ generation — like Boris Nemtsov (Zhanna’s father), the reformist politician and activist who was murdered in sight of the Kremlin on February 27, 2016; wary oligarchs like Boris Berezovsky, Mikhail Prokhorov, and Mikhail Fridman; and sociologists like the psychoanalyst Marina Arutunyan, whose clients began suffering from “anxiety” and “panic attacks” in Putin’s last two terms, as limits on their freedoms multiplied; the sociologist Lev Gudkov (who now works for Moscow’s Levada Center); and the idiosyncratic nationalist fulminator Alexander Dugin, who opposes Western values, publicizes revanchist visions of effective ideologies for the New Russia, and is known as a “Putin whisperer.”

The third contingent is mostly represented by Yakovlev, the Soviet- and Gorbachev-era official whom Gessen identifies, in formal Russian style, by his first name and patronymic: Alexander Nikolaevich. As the book unfolds, the characters’ experiences thicken, melding with the signal acts that favored Putin’s rise and assured his hold: the thwarted 1991 attempt by hard-liners to overthrow Gorbachev; the siege of the Russian White House and Moscow’s central television station by hard-liners in 1993 (Yeltsin quelled it, with help from the army); the wars in Chechnya; the 2002 Chechen terrorist takeover of a Moscow theater; the 2004 Beslan school massacre; assassinations of anti-government journalists and activists; mass arrests of protestors; the demonization of LGBT community by the Russian parliament; the annexation of Crimea and the war in Ukraine. The characters’ personal histories add life and nuance to Gessen’s narrative. But it takes a while to get a handle on all of the players, who are as numerous as the cast of a Tolstoy novel, if less romantically clad.

But portraying the politics of totalitarianism does not call for a romantic filter. Gessen’s reconstruction of the ongoing saga of Russia’s reversion to vozhdizm makes for thrilling and necessary reading for those who seek to understand the path to suppression of individual freedoms, and who recognize that this path can be imposed on any nation that lacks the vigilance to avert it. In the Soviet era, Gessen writes, “Not only did the country shield all essential and most nonessential information behind a wall of secrets and lies,” it also “waged a concerted war on knowledge itself.” This book, in laying out the essential knowledge that is so hard to synthesize, represents a victory for knowledge, a tank shell fired at the wall that hides truth.

 

 

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