Surviving Autocracy

by Masha Gessen

A logical fallacy becomes inevitable. If this can’t happen, then the thing that is happening is not it. What we see in real life, or at least on television, can’t possibly be the same monstrous phenomenon that we have collectively decided is unimaginable. In Russia, people who know Vladimir Putin and his inner circle will insist that they are not monsters. Yes, they have overseen assassinations, imprisonments, and wars, but they are not thoroughly terrible, these people will claim—they are not like Stalin and his henchmen. In other words, they are not the monsters of our collective historical imagination. They are today’s flesh-and-blood monsters, and this makes them seem somehow less monstrous. Every time a commentator calls Trump “presidential,” every time a politician accepts his terms of debate, or every time a journalist simply covers Trump’s actions and statements as one would normally cover politics, the message is the same: Trump does not live up—or down—to the stature of a history-book monster. Time itself is complicit. Anything that happens here and now is normalized, not solely through the moral failure of contemporaries but simply by virtue of actually existing.