The caller was indeed Putin, and she took the meeting.) All this is to say: There is no better person to help us understand the complexities of the Russian story, and how it’s shaping world politics and American democracy.

Shortly afterward, she received a phone call from a man claiming to be Putin requesting an in-person meeting at the Kremlin. (As an aside, when Gessen was the editor of Vokrug Sveta, a popular-science magazine, she was fired for refusing to send a reporter to cover Putin’s hang-glider flight with endangered Siberian cranes. Gessen, herself, was forced to move to America during this time. Now she shifts perspective and focuses on the lives of seven characters affected by political crackdown of 2012. In her previous acclaimed biography of Putin, Man Without a Face, she targeted the leader of the totalitarian regime. Winner of the 2017 National Book Award in Non-Fiction, Gessen’s latest juggernaut of a book about her native homeland of Russia examines Vladimir Putin’s rogue mafia state. Riverhead The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia by Masha Gessen

Best books to read 2017