Long, sweeping book alternately told through the daily life of four young people who grew up as the Soviet Union fell, and through the work of sociologists, psychologists and historians who are trying to work out what is happening as it happens around them. The approach is ambitious, and I think Gessen manages to land it. There are a lot of moving pieces in this book, and I personally don't remember a lot of the details from when this happened, but I never felt lost or confused as to who anyone was, and the timeline was a clear through line. (Despite my MP3 player's attempt to put the last 50 tracks on shuffle.)

We have as our point of view characters two men and two women, all born around the same time I was, one gay, several with children, all of varying degrees of political involvement at various times, all wondering if there can possibly be a future in Russia, or slowly realising there cannot. Gessen could very likely have a solid career as a fiction writer, if they ever decide to switch gigs, as they have a wonderful eye for depicting emotion and making the mundane significant. But I already knew that from the book about their grandmothers.

A lot of the focus of the book is various theories of totalitarianism, and how they fit or don't fit with current life in Russia, including a historical overview of the topic, and various criticisms of its application to the current regime, which sounds pretty dry, but seeing how the relationships of power affect the protagonists keeps the book grounded.

Quite a bit of the book discusses the rise of the anti-queer movement in Russia (a movement that eventually drove Gessen themself out of a country that had been their home for decades), and how the seeming foreignness of homosexuality as a category of people made queer people the ideal scapegoat. There are a couple of graphic depictions of gay bashing and murder, and a lot of very depressing descriptions of the prevalence of associating homosexuality with paedophilia, and how common accusing a political enemy of paedophilia has gotten (much of which reminded me of discourse going on in certain corners of tumblr, but with more state-sanctioned violence).

Gessen does not especially describe a way forward for Russia. (Though I loved the bitter comment about how the responsibility for change is constantly laid on the shoulders of the next generation, currently the Gen Z crowed. Good luck, guys!) I don't think they know how to fix something like that, but that might be their next book.