Surviving Autocracy

Masha Gessen — a Russian-American journalist who spent years covering Putin's Russia before relocating to the United States — brings to this book a dual perspective that makes it uniquely valuable: they have watched democratic backsliding from inside an autocracy, and have watched it again from inside what they argue is a democracy undergoing the early stages of the same process. Surviving Autocracy is both a field guide to recognising the signs of democratic erosion and an argument about why liberal societies consistently fail to respond to those signs until it is too late.

The core of Gessen's argument is the danger of normalisation — the process by which citizens and institutions accommodate themselves, step by step, to conditions that would have seemed intolerable if they had arrived all at once. This dynamic is directly relevant to the information environment: disinformation campaigns do not work by making people believe specific lies, but by normalising the conditions in which truth and falsehood become indistinguishable. For practitioners, the book provides a framework for explaining to clients why the information threat is not primarily about specific false claims but about the erosion of the shared epistemic standards on which democratic deliberation depends. Essential and sobering.