The photographer Ivan Sigal documented post-Soviet life in Moscow during the 1990s.

In 1997, Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, the Clinton administration’s lead official on all matters Russia, gave a speech at Stanford University on American policy toward Moscow. He admitted, in not so many words, that persuading the erratic President Boris Yeltsin to keep on course with economic reform and progress toward democracy was a daunting task. But Talbott declared himself optimistic nonetheless. His main reason, he said, was “generational,”

or to be even more blunt, biological. The dynamic of what is happening in Russia today is not just Westernizers versus Slavophiles; it is also young versus old—and the young have a certain advantage in at least that dimension of the larger struggle.

I was a correspondent in Moscow at the time I read Talbott’s speech, and I remember being struck by its obtuseness—a feeling that has remained with me since. I wondered how younger Russians would react to a U.S. diplomat openly expressing the hope that their grandparents and parents would die off as quickly as possible and so open the path to an American vision of progress.

There was nothing especially original about my question. Communists and ultranationalists were already trading widely in conspiracy theories that the country’s startling demographic collapse, unprecedented in peacetime, was the direct result of American-engineered plots “to weaken Russia.” In reality, of course, a “weakened Russia” was much more likely to lose effective control over its vast arsenals of weapons of mass destruction, drastically increasing the possibility that some might fall into terrorist hands. Such an outcome hardly seemed to be in the interests of the West or anyone else. A stable Russia, prosperous and democratic, made for a much better bet—assuming, of course, that someone had a viable plan for bringing it about.

By the time of Talbott’s speech, such a scenario was looking distinctly improbable. During my years in Moscow, I did meet quite a few Russians who placed their faith in the principles of political and economic freedom, though they were clearly members of a small minority. Strikingly little evidence, however, supported the notion that young people were the self-evident constituency for a liberal future. Most of the 20-somethings I met—and especially those from outside of Moscow and St. Petersburg—expressed strongly nationalist views. Though they welcomed the freedom to travel and consume, they just as often mourned the collapse of the Soviet Union. For those with little memory of the privations of the socialist system, and who had experienced the Gorbachev and Yeltsin period primarily as a time of political chaos and economic upheaval, such seemingly paradoxical positions made perfect sense.

In her excellent new book on Russia’s transition from the faltering democracy of the 1990s to the Putinist present, Masha Gessen shares the tale of the sociologist Yuri Levada, who conducted a wide-ranging survey of Soviet public opinion over this time. No one had dared undertake a project of this kind in the Soviet Union before. But perestroika gave Levada a rare chance. In 1987, he and his colleagues sent out thousands of questionnaires to citizens, filled with queries (When did people like to celebrate? What were their greatest fears?) designed to tease out evidence of changing mentalities. From their answers, Levada concluded that the Soviet citizen of the 1980s—or “Homo Sovieticus,” as some rather archly referred to it—was an inherently endangered species. The generations shaped by Stalinist terror and Brezhnevite stasis were now giving way to a younger, more confident cohort. Concluding that Homo Sovieticus was “a dying breed,” whose demise would spell the collapse of the USSR itself, he set out to chart the shift in attitudes that, he predicted, would accompany this dramatic transformation.