Finally, after all the books I’ve read in the past year and even before, to try to understand the Putin’s inexplicable impulse to invade Ukraine, Masha Gessen’s book explains not just what’s motivating the Russian leader, but the mindset that allows Russians to accept the unforgivable. 60,000 to 70,000 Russians killed in the first year of war, plus 8000 Ukrainian civilians, but the war goes on. Gessen published this book in 2017, after the seizure of Crimea, and her analysis still holds. She follows seven Russians and their families, from the fall of the Soviet Union to the invasion of Crimea in 2014, minutely dissecting their experiences navigating the creation of a new society that ends up looking remarkably like the old. She also draws on insights from Erich Fromm, Hannah Arendt, Victor Frankl, and others trying to understand totalitarianism. She describes Yuri Levada’s Homo Sovieticus,’ “the successful member of Soviet society…[who] believed in self-isolation, state paternalism, and what Levada called ‘hierarchical egalitarianism,’ and suffered from an ‘imperial syndrome’” (59). These qualities created a society incapable of the trust necessary to sustain a democratic system; again and again, Gessen describes corrupt elections, abuse of citizens,and capricious laws, all of which make Russians hunger for a strong man to depend upon, whether he lives up to his promises or not. “Perhaps terror was necessary for the establishment of a totalitarian regime,” Gessen writes, “but once established could it be maintained by institutions that carried within them the memory of terror” (205). The harassment of LGBT people, journalists, and intellectuals incapacitated anyone who might challenge Putin’s rule, strategies that Republicans are beginning to transplant to the U.S. An important and incredibly well-researched book that has lessons for Americans.