# Masha Gessen

Masha Gessen (Russian: Мари́я "Маша" Алекса́ндровна Ге́ссен) is a Russian and American journalist, author, and translator. They have written extensively on LGBT rights.
Gessen writes primarily in English but also in Russian. In addition to being the author of several non-fiction books, Gessen has been a contributor to The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, New Statesman, Granta, Slate, Vanity Fair, Harper's Magazine, The New Yorker, and U.S. News & World Report. They have been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 2017, and an opinion columnist at The New York Times, under the byline M. Gessen, since May 2024.

## Early life and education

Gessen was born into a Jewish family in Moscow to Alexander and Yelena Gessen. Gessen's paternal grandmother Ester Goldberg, the daughter of a socialist mother and a Zionist father, was born in Białystok, Poland, in 1923 and emigrated to Moscow in 1940. Ester's grandfather Jakub Goldberg was murdered during the Holocaust in 1943, either in the Białystok Ghetto or a concentration camp.
Gessen's maternal grandmother, Ruzya Solodovnik, was a Russian-born intellectual who worked as a censor for the Stalinist government until she was fired during an antisemitic purge. Gessen's maternal grandfather Samuil was a committed Bolshevik who died during World War II, leaving Ruzya to raise Yelena alone.
In 1981, when Gessen was a teenager, their family moved via the US Refugee Resettlement Program to the United States. As an adult in 1996, Gessen moved to Moscow, where they worked as a journalist. They hold both Russian and US citizenship. Their brothers are Keith, Daniel, and Philip Gessen.

## Journalism career

Gessen was on the board of directors of the Moscow-based LGBT rights organization Triangle between 1993 and 1998 and has led gay rights demonstrations in Moscow.
Gessen served as a volunteer board member at PEN America for nine years, resigning in May 2023after the organization withdrew an invitation to two exiled Russian authors to speak at the PEN World Voices event in the wake of a threatened boycott. Gessen was vice president of the board at the time and continues to be a member of PEN America.
Gessen said they understood the feelings of Ukrainian authors but did not approve of the way PEN handled the situation. Gessen said: "I felt like I was being asked to tell these people [the Russian dissidents] that because they're Russians they can't sit at the big table; they have to sit at the little table off to the side … Which felt distasteful."
In an October 2008 profile of Vladimir Putin for Vanity Fair, Gessen described Putin as "an aspiring thug" and claimed the "backward evolution" of Russia began within days of his inauguration in 2000.
Gessen contributed several dozen commentaries on Russia to The New York Times blog "Latitude" between November 2011 and December 2013 on the Russian gay propaganda law and other related laws, violence towards journalists, and the depreciation of the ruble.
In March 2013, politician Vitaly Milonov promoted the Russian law against foreign adoption of Russian children by saying: "The Americans want to adopt Russian children and bring them up in perverted families like Masha Gessen's."

### Dismissal from Vokrug sveta

Gessen was dismissed from their position as the chief editor of Russia's oldest magazine, Vokrug sveta, a popular-science journal, in September 2012 after Gessen refused to send a reporter to cover a Russian Geographical Society event about nature conservation featuring President Putin, because Gessen considered it political exploitation of environmental concerns. After Gessen tweeted about their firing, Putin phoned them and claimed he was serious about his "nature conservation efforts". At his invitation, Gessen met him and Gessen's former publisher at the Kremlin and were offered their job back. Gessen rejected the offer.

### Radio Liberty

In September 2012, Gessen was appointed as director of the Russian Service for Radio Liberty, a U.S. government-funded broadcaster based in Prague. Shortly after their appointment was announced and a few days after Gessen met with Putin, more than 40 members of Radio Liberty's staff were fired. The station lost its Russian broadcasting license several weeks after Gessen took over. The degree of Gessen's involvement in both of these events is unclear, but has caused controversy.

### Return to the U.S.

In December 2013, Gessen moved to New York because Russian authorities had begun to talk about taking children away from gay parents. In March of that year, "the St Petersburg legislator [Milonov] who had become a spokesman for the law [against 'homosexual propaganda' towards children] started mentioning me and my 'perverted family' in his interviews", and Gessen contacted an adoption lawyer asking "whether I had reason to worry that social services would go after my family and attempt to remove my oldest son, whom I adopted in 2000".
The lawyer told Gessen "to instruct my son to run if he is approached by strangers and concluding: 'The answer to your question is at the airport.'" In June 2013, Gessen was beaten up outside of the Parliament; they said of the incident: "I realized that in all my interactions, including professional ones, I no longer felt I was perceived as a journalist first: I am now a person with a pink triangle." They stated that "a court would easily decide to annul Vova's adoption, and I wouldn't even know it". Given this potential threat to their family, Gessen "felt like no risk was small enough to be acceptable", they later told the CBC Radio. "So we just had to get out."
In a January 2014 interview with ABC News, Gessen claimed that the Russian gay propaganda law had "led to a huge increase in antigay violence, including murders. It's led to attacks on gay and lesbian clubs and film festivals ... and because these laws are passed supposedly to protect children, the people who are most targeted or have the most to fear are LGBT parents."
Gessen wrote in February 2014 that Citibank had closed their bank account because of concern about Russian money-laundering operations.
Gessen worked as a translator on the FX TV channel historical drama The Americans.
As of June 2023, Gessen taught as a distinguished professor at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. From 2020 to 2023, Gessen taught as Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College. Previously at Amherst College, they were named the John J. McCloy '16 Professor of American Institutions and International Diplomacy for the 2017–18 and 2018–19 academic years. In October 2017, they published their 10th book The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia. They were included in the 2022 Fast Company Queer 50 list.

### Arrest warrant by Russia

In August 2023, Russia opened a criminal case against Gessen on charges of spreading "false information" about the Russian army's actions in Ukraine. In December 2023, it was reported that Gessen's name appeared on the Russian Interior Ministry's online wanted list. Gessen was accused of spreading "false information" after discussing atrocities in the Ukrainian city of Bucha during an interview with Russian journalist Yury Dud. In July 2024, Gessen was convicted and sentenced in absentia to 8 years in prison.

### Award controversy

In August 2023, the Heinrich Böll Foundation (HBS) announced that Gessen was the winner of the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought. In December, days before the award was due to be presented, the HBS said that it was withdrawing its support because it objected to Gessen's December 9 New Yorker essay In the Shadow of the Holocaust on German Holocaust memory and the Gaza war. In the essay, Gessen argued that Germany's remembrance culture regarding the Holocaust was being used as a "cynically wielded political instrument" by the Alternative for Germany (AfD) to target Muslim immigrants. Gessen was also critical of the Israeli bombings of the Gaza Strip, which they considered to be highly destructive and comparable to an Eastern European ghetto "being liquidated" by the Nazis. On December 16, Gessen received the Hannah Arendt literary prize award in a scaled-down ceremony.

## Personal life

Gessen is nonbinary and trans and uses they/them pronouns.
Gessen has dual Russian and US citizenship. In 2004, Gessen married Svetlana Generalova, a Russian citizen who was also involved in the LGBT movement in Moscow. The wedding took place in the U.S. Generalova and Gessen later divorced. By the time Gessen returned to the U.S. from Russia in December 2013, Gessen was married to Darya Oreshkina. In 2024, Gessen married Lynne Echenberg, special counsel for restorative justice in the Brooklyn District Attorney's office.
Gessen has three children—two sons and a daughter. Their eldest son, Vova, was born in 1997 in Russia and was adopted by Gessen from an orphanage for the children of HIV-positive women in Kaliningrad. Their daughter, Yolka, was born to Gessen in the U.S. in 2001. Their third child, a son, was born in February 2012.
Gessen tested positive for the BRCA mutation that is correlated with breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy in 2005.
Gessen came out as nonbinary in 2020 and began using they/them pronouns at that time. When speaking of their childhood, Gessen said: "I remember, at the age of five [...] hoping that I would wake up a boy. A real boy. I had people address me by a boy's name. My parents, fortunately, were incredibly game. They were totally fine with it." As a child, Gessen used the male denoting verb forms, a feature of Russian syntax in which past-stem verbs denote the grammatical gender of the subject of the sentence, but as a teenager switched to using female denoting verb forms. In a Russian-language interview, Gessen said that they continue to use the female form of verbs when speaking Russian.

## Awards

* 2005: National Jewish Book Award for Ester and Ruzya: How My Grandmothers Survived Hitler's War and Stalin's Peace
* 2012: Stora Journalistpriset (Swedish Grand Prize for Journalism), Guest of Honor
* 2013: Liberty Media Corporation, Media for Liberty award for their article "The Wrath of Putin," published in the April 2012 edition of Vanity Fair
* 2015: University of Michigan Wallenberg Medal, 24th recipient
* 2017: National Book Award for Nonfiction for The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia
* 2018: Hitchens Prize
* 2023: Hannah Arendt Award
* 2024: Polk Award in Commentary for In the Shadow of the Holocaust

## Summaries of select works
### The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin

In The Man Without a Face, Gessen offers an account of Putin's rise to power and summary of recent Russian politics. The book was published on 1 March 2012 and translated into 20 languages.
The New York Review of Books described the book as written in "beautifully clear and eloquent English", stating that it was "at heart a description of th[e] secret police milieu" from which Putin originated and was "also very good at evoking ... the culture and atmosphere within which [Putin] was raised, and the values he came to espouse". The Guardian called the book "luminous"; the Telegraph called it "courageous".
CIA officer John Ehrman's review stated: "As a biography it is satisfactory, but no more than that" and "little of what Gessen has to say is new". Ehrman found Gessen's depiction of Putin as essentially a gangster and a mafia don to be an oversimplification, but concluded, "The image of Putin making offers no Russian can refuse is exactly what Gessen wants us to see and is effective as anti-Putin propaganda."

### Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot

When this book was published in 2014, A. D. Miller wrote in the Telegraph that "even readers who do not share Gessen's esteem for Pussy Riot as artists will be convinced of their courage". Miller described Gessen as "the right person to tell this story" and said that their journalistic approach was "scrupulous and sensitive". Booklist described the book as "prickly, frank, precise, and sharply witty".
The New York Times called it "urgent" and "damning". The Washington Post called the book an "excellent" portrait of Pussy Riot and said that "Gessen gives a particularly brilliant account of their trials". The Los Angeles Times said that Gessen was "Not just a keen observer of these events" but "also an impassioned partisan".

### The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy

Published in April 2015 by Riverhead, The Brothers investigates the background of Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the perpetrators of the Boston Marathon bombing.