Masha, you not only anatomize the corrosion of the institutions and cultural norms we hope would save us, but you also tell us the story of how, a few short years ago, well, it 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, as you inventory the ravages and a call to account, but also bring us hope about what is possible, what is next. Can you lay out for us, first of all, your excellent new preface to the book, and what you see here, here in the United States, where you live and you teach, at Bard College, to where you grew up, in the Soviet Union at the time?
MASHA GESSEN: Yeah. You know, actually, what I’ve been thinking about for the last few months is not even so much the Soviet Union or Russia, but the other Soviet autocracies, namely Hungary and Poland. And the reason I’ve been thinking about them specifically is because they had an aspiring autocrat come to be elected to office, then they voted the aspiring autocrat out of office. They had what in the taxonomy invented by the Hungarian scholar Bálint Magyar is, they had an autocratic attempt, they reversed the autocratic attempt through electoral means, and then they reelected the aspiring autocrats and have been descending into autocracy since.
And so, I actually called Magyar and said, “OK, talk me through that interim period, the period when the aspiring autocrat is out of office. Like, how does that work?” And he said it’s — he described Hungary, in particular, where Viktor Orbán, when his party was originally voted out of office, went the route of saying
— source democracynow.org | Jun 16, 2021