“When Gessen speaks about autocracy, you listen.” —The New York Times
“The Platonic ideal of the anti-Trump Trump book.” —The Washington Post
As seen on MSNBC’s Morning Joe and heard on NPR’s All Things Considered: the bestselling, National Book Award–winning
journalist offers an essential guide to understanding, resisting, and
recovering from the ravages of our tumultuous times.
In the
run-up to the 2016 election, Masha Gessen stood out from other
journalists for the ability to convey the ominous significance of Donald
Trump’s speech and behavior, unprecedented in a national candidate.
Within forty-eight hours of his victory, the essay “Autocracy: Rules for
Survival” had gone viral, and Gessen’s coverage of
Trump’s norm-smashing presidency became essential reading for a
citizenry struggling to wrap their heads around the unimaginable. Thanks
to the special perspective that is the legacy of a Soviet childhood and
two decades covering the resurgence of totalitarianism in Russia,
Gessen has a sixth sense for signs of autocracy—and the unique
cross-cultural fluency to delineate its emergence to Americans. This
incisive book provides an indispensable overview of the calamitous
trajectory of the past few years. Gessen not only highlights the
corrosion of the media, the judiciary, and the cultural norms we hoped
would save us but also tells us the story of how a short few years have
changed us from a people who saw ourselves as a nation of immigrants to a
populace haggling over a border wall, heirs to a degraded sense of
truth, meaning, and possibility. Surviving Autocracy is an inventory of ravages but also a beacon to recovery—or to enduring, and resisting, an ongoing assault.