Warren Olney here with today's talking point, our guest Masha Gessen, whose books and opinion columns feature dire warnings about Russia.

She was born in the Soviet Union, came to the U.S. with her parents as a child. When political change was underway, she returned to Moscow in the 1990s.

There she became a leading journalist and a critic of President Vladimir Putin.

So much of a critic, she fled back to the U.S. in 2013.

She says the Soviet bureaucracy was never dismantled and that it's become a tool for the former KGB

agent to solidify power.

He's basically built a mafia state on the ruins of a totalitarian regime, and as a result,

a lot of the totalitarian habits have sort of reconstituted themselves, and a lot of the

totalitarian society's institutions have reconstituted themselves.

And so it's now a mafia state that rules over a totalitarian society.

Masha Gesson's latest book is called The Future is History, how totalitarianism reclaimed Russia.

She explains the history of her home country through the stories of four different people.

Ultimately, I wanted to write a book about trauma.

I was trying to show something fairly complicated, which is not trauma that is based on

a living memory, but rather something that's passed on from generation to generation,

what we now call intergenerational trauma.

And it's not specific to the four people I'm describing.

It is the story of the entire society.

But I wanted to focus on four people who grew up in the 90s.

And sort of by looking out from the inside of their heads, I thought I could show what happened.

One of the characters, sort of an observing character that you use is a Russian psychoanalyst

who diagnoses mother Russia as depressed and suicidal. You quote her as saying, this country

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