Hello and welcome to the Book Club podcast. I'm your host, Sam Leith. I'm afraid I'm still away this week.

So until the book club returns next week, here's another one from our archives. This is me talking to

Gray Mashagessen about how Russia descended into totalitarianism.

Hello and welcome to the Spectator Books podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator,

and I'm joined this week by Masha Gessen, the author and journalist whose new book is The Future

is History, How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia. Masha, can you start by telling me a little bit about what you were trying to do in this book?

It sort of follows the lives of seven people through the sort of post-perestroika period,

from about kind of early 80s, right through to the present day.

So I was trying to do a couple of things.

I was trying to write a book about what didn't happen,

which is pretty difficult. It's much easier to write about what did happen. But I was trying

to write about, you know, why what we all, and by we all, I mean Western journalists and

Moscow intellectuals, and I was both. So what we all expected to happen after the Soviet Union collapsed,

where we thought it had collapsed,

which is democracy and the embrace of freedom and Western values and all that sort of thing.

Why that didn't happen?

And the answers to that lay, I think, the most important answer lies, I think,

in trauma or trauma if you use the language of psychology or the persistence of cultural institutions

if you use the language of sociology. And both of those schools of thought are well represented in the book.

But I really wanted to use the horrible phrase, show rather than tell.

You talk about it being a, I don't know when you use the phrase nonfiction novel,

but you talk about trying to do something novelistic.

...