If 1989 marked the downfall of the Soviet Union, why does contemporary Russia feel so much the same? In this winner of the National Book Award, journalist Masha Gessen follows the lives of four people born at what promised to be the dawn of democracy. Each of them came of age with unprecedented expectations, some as the children and grandchildren of the very architects of the new Russia, each with newfound aspirations of their own—as entrepreneurs, activists, thinkers, and writers. Gessen charts their paths against the machinations of the regime that would crush them all, which has ensured the unobstructed reemergence of the old Soviet order in the form of Putin's terrifying and seemingly unstoppable mafia state.