Journalist and author Masha Gessen discusses ways of surviving an autocracy. Rule #1? Believe the autocrat. For this week’s episode of the e-flux podcast, we are featuring Masha Gessen’s lecture, "How We Survive an Autocracy," originally given on May 24, 2017 as part of an ongoing e-flux lectures series dedicated to discovering the protocols of twenty-first century truth, assuming that these still exist. Launched in February 2017, most e-flux lectures are live streamed on e-flux.com/live and archived at e-flux.com/video.   Masha Gessen is a journalist and author, whose most recent book, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, won the 2017 National Book Award for Nonfiction. Gessen is also the author of the national bestseller The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin (2012). Gessen is a staff writer at The New Yorker.