The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia. By Masha Gessen. Riverhead Books; 528 pages; $28. Granta; £20.

HANNAH ARENDT, in “The Origins of Totalitarianism”, cautioned against the glib application of the T-word. The distinction between totalitarianism and authoritarianism in political theory is not one of degree—with totalitarianism at the top of an ascending scale of evil—but one of kind. Totalitarianism combines a system of terror, single-party rule, a centrally planned economy, command over the army and the media, and an all-encompassing ideology. Such states exercise total control of their citizens’ lives, whereas authoritarian ones stipulate the observance of certain rules and allow limited liberty as long as it does not challenge political power. Where totalitarianism mobilises the people, authoritarianism breeds passivity.

Despite quoting Arendt extensively, Masha Gessen, a Russian-American journalist, seems not to have taken her warning to heart, arguing in a provocative new book that totalitarianism has “reclaimed” Vladimir Putin’s Russia. She effectively demonstrates how Mr Putin restored the Soviet-era apparatus of police control, renewed state domination of media and the economy, and resurrected one-party rule. Terror, she claims less convincingly, may be necessary only to establish a totalitarian foundation, and can be “maintained by institutions that carry within them the memory of terror”. She argues that the conservative nationalism of Mr Putin’s third term has become a powerful ideology.

For all the book’s genuine emotional force, its main argument rings hollow. Mr Putin’s regime is sinister, as this newspaper has long documented. To say that he is an autocrat rather than a totalitarian is not to excuse his methods or misdeeds, but to advocate a clear-eyed assessment of reality.

The insistence on invoking totalitarianism obscures Ms Gessen’s more insightful observations about how Russians continue to be shaped by the trauma of the Soviet past. A fluent storyteller, she follows four main characters and three intellectual heroes from perestroika to the present day, tracing the sweep of contemporary Russian history through their eyes. This tactic proves effective for showing how politics, with time, consumed individuals who had initially been more concerned with their personal lives. The sample of characters, frustratingly, consists almost entirely of liberals and intelligentsia types from the elites, yet Ms Gessen ably weaves their lives into a gripping, if grim, tapestry.

Her narrative climaxes with the annexation of Crimea, the moment that she identifies as the crystallisation of Russia’s new totalitarianism. “Crimea was Russia’s ideology,” she writes. “Crimea mobilised the nation.” Although the annexation, and the noxious cocktail of nationalism, conservatism and Orthodoxy that went along with it, did consolidate society, any mobilisation proved illusory. Though many Russians gladly cheer the Kremlin’s wars, whether in eastern Ukraine or Syria, as seen on the television screen, they largely do not aspire to become martyrs for the cause. (In fact, the Kremlin has gone to great lengths to hide news of soldiers’ deaths, in contrast to the glorification of fallen heroes during the Soviet era.) Faced with a passive population, the Kremlin now frets about low turnout at pro-forma elections. The defining features of Russian political life are not mobilisation and politicisation, but apathy and apoliticism.

Nor is state control quite as total as Ms Gessen makes it seem. Mr Putin has employed coercion, intimidation and selective political violence, but he has stopped short of unleashing a bloody reign of terror. The state exudes an inordinate influence over the economy, yet people are free to consume, earn and travel in ways unthinkable under Stalin, Hitler or Mao. Civil society, embattled though it is, can still push back against the country’s radical Orthodox activists. (Public protests halted recent attempts to transfer the famed St Isaac’s Cathedral in St Petersburg back to church control.)

Alternative sources of information can be found online. And state control is not so complete that opposition has become unthinkable—as shown by the thousands of young people attending the recent rallies of Alexei Navalny, an anti-corruption campaigner. Even Mr Navalny, who has often faced arrest, has seen his brother imprisoned in Siberia and nearly lost his eyesight after being splashed with acid, contends that “despite the curtailing of political and civil freedoms, the past 25 years have been the freest in Russian history.”

Distinguishing between different types of regimes is important. Language, as Ms Gessen has argued elsewhere, matters. Sloppy use robs terms of their meaning. It also shapes perceptions. Ms Gessen, who has a wide following, has become a respected voice on Russia in the era of Donald Trump. Her book has been warmly welcomed in an America that is keen to know more about Mr Putin’s country and inclined to see it as the reincarnation of the Evil Empire. As the American public and policymakers grapple with the threat from Russia, they would be wise to seek a fuller picture than this book alone offers.