a modern country to the outside world yet the nation is deeply divided for her book marsha gessen conducted interviews with russian men and women who were born in the one nine hundred eighty s. and lived with an inner turmoil to this day. i wanted to look at that generation i wanted to look at people who grew up in the ninety s because i think it s a very specific condition that hasn t been described that the condition of being a child in an extremely unstable society they need to remember the collapse of the sage and when they were just seven years old they needed to be from different backgrounds from different cities but also different class backgrounds with a different relationship to power i want to use them in the sense as a vehicle to understanding some of the politics both of the perestroika era and of the ninety s i. guess since family immigrated to the u.s. from the soviet union in the one nine hundred eighty s. jewish intellectuals who saw no future there musher was fourteen