![]() This idea of a people held captive by its own past is the dominant theme of the Russian-American journalist and author Masha Gessen’s wide-ranging and ambitious new book, which has just won the prestigious National Book award for non-fiction.Īn outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin, Gessen tracks the toxic legacy of the Soviet era and the ways it has infiltrated and undermined hopes for a liberal, democratic, law-bound Russia. Her behaviour was finally explained when it emerged that she was a former guard in the Gulag: “The family was now recast as a camp, complete with dead-end make-work, the primacy of discipline, and the total abolition of personal boundaries.” Cases such as this led Arutyunyan to a wider diagnosis of Russia as a traumatised society unable to free itself from the psychological subjugation fostered during the long decades of Soviet rule. ![]() ![]() The grandmother tyrannised her daughter and granddaughter with demands for needless work and repeated invasions of their privacy. I n her clinical practice during the 1990s, Moscow psychoanalyst Marina Arutyunyan encountered three generations of women living under the same roof. ![]()
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