UCSB Arts & Lectures will present Masha Gessen, Politics of the Past, Politics of the Future, 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, April 14 at UCSB Campbell Hall.
“One of our most incisive observers of democracy, Gessen is the author of 11 books, including the National Book Award-winning ‘The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia,'” Arts & Lectures said.
Gessen examines how autocracies “other” vulnerable groups, tracing this tactic in Putin’s Russia and its personal consequences, which caused Gessen to flee to the U.S. a decade ago.
Today, Gessen draws a through-line to similar currents taking root in the U.S., Arts & Lectures said.
As contemporary autocrats promise a return to an imaginary, safer past, Gessen argues that the antidote to the politics of the past is an inspiring politics of the future. What might that future be, and can we see its early outlines if we look closely?
An opinion writer at The New York Times, Gessen has covered political subjects including Russia, L.G.B.T. rights, Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump and the rise of autocracy.
Gessen’s book “Surviving Autocracy,” is a overview of the calamitous trajectory of American democracy under the first Trump administration.
In the run-up to the 2016 election, they stood out from other journalists for the ability to convey the ominous significance of Trump’s behavior, unprecedented in a national candidate.
“Within 48 hours of his victory, the essay “Autocracy: Rules for Survival” had gone viral, and their coverage of his norm-smashing presidency became essential reading for a citizenry struggling to wrap their heads around the unimaginable,” according to A&L.
Highlighting not only the corrosion of the media, the judiciary and the cultural norms that were supposed to be a salvation, Gessen illuminates how a short few years have changed Americans from a people who saw themselves as a nation of immigrants to a populace haggling over a border wall, heirs to a degraded sense of truth, meaning and possibility.
“Gessen’s understanding of the events and forces that have wracked Russia in recent times is unparalleled,” A&L said.
In the “The Future Is History,” Gessen follows the lives of four people born at what promised to be the dawn of democracy, charting their paths against the machinations of the regime that would crush them all to the unobstructed reemergence of the old Soviet order in the form of today’s terrifying and seemingly unstoppable mafia state.
In the New York Times-bestselling “The Man Without a Face,” Gessen delivers a chilling account of how a low-level, small-minded KGB operative ascended to the Russian presidency and, in an astonishingly short time, destroyed years of progress and made his country once more a threat to his own people and to the world.
As a journalist living in Moscow during Putin’s ascendency, Gessen experienced this history firsthand, even famously being dismissed as editor of the Russian popular-science magazine Vokrug Sveta for refusing to send a reporter to observe Putin hang-gliding with Siberian cranes.
Currently a New York Times Opinion columnist, Gessen was recognized with the George Polk Award for opinion writing in 2024.
Gessen is a founder of the Russian Independent Media Archive, a digital archive focused on preserving the last two decades of independent Russian journalism.
Tickets are $20 general, free for UCSB students with current student ID. For tickets or more information, call UCSB Arts & Lectures, 805-893-3535 or visit www.ArtsAndLectures.UCSB.edu.