M Gessen is an opinion columnist at The New York Times and the author of 11 books, including The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, which won the National Book Award in 2017, and Surviving Autocracy. They are also the recipient, among other honors, of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, a Nieman Fellowship, the Hitchens Prize, the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought, and a George Polk Award for commentary.