MASHA GESSEN
Originally from Moscow, Masha and their parents grew up behind the "Iron Curtain." They recall that growing up there was very little information about the West, and they remember a family friend who would joke about whether or not they had any evidence of the fact that it existed.
At the time, they didn't have any tangible proof that the West wasn't a fiction or merely a creation of someone's imagination.
Masha's mother was more active in the dissident movement than their father, but neither of them went so far as to consciously risk getting arrested.
Once the opportunity to leave the country arose, they left. They spent a couple of months in refugee camps in Austria and Italy, which was the normal route for Soviet Jews leaving the country.
It was a confusing time for Masha, and they had a difficult time understanding what was going on.
They came to the U.S. when they were 14, then 10 years later they went back to Moscow when the regimes in Eastern Europe started falling. It was a hot topic, and as a young journalist working in the gay press in the States, they felt it was an opportunity to cover it because they spoke the language.
Masha remembers so many conversations they had at the time being earth-shattering and life-shaping. For around 10 years they were the only openly gay public person in Russia; they felt it was a matter of principle, since most people in the Soviet Union could not afford to be out due to the risk of losing their livelihoods, their residences, and their families.
So whenever people asked, they would talk.
As a journalist, Masha served on the board of directors of the Moscow-based LGBTQ rights organization "Triangle" and led demonstrations in the city.
They began writing a book about Putin in 2010–2011. They kept it secret from absolutely everyone but their editor, their partner, and their research assistant. Once it became known that they had written a book about Putin, they felt relatively safe because "getting rid of them" wouldn't have gotten rid of the book.
But as a result, they became targeted as a gay person more than an opposition journalist, and a law was passed banning adoption by same-sex couples, which could be used retroactively to remove their oldest son from their family, and that's when they decided to pack up and leave and go back to the U.S.
They continue to be a prolific author and contributor to many publications. Gessen’s book "The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia" won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2017, along with the New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism. In 2024, they won a George Polk Award for opinion writing.
In August 2023, they were awarded the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought, with the international jury calling them "one of the most courageous chroniclers of our time.” They have been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 2017 and became an opinion columnist at The New York Times in May 2024.
Gessen is the first Distinguished Professor at Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.
In July 2024, a Moscow court convicted Gessen in absentia and sentenced them to eight years in prison for "spreading false information" about the Russian military. The charges stemmed from a 2022 interview with Russian blogger Yuri Dud in which Gessen discussed Russian war crimes in Bucha, Ukraine, based on their own reporting from the region.
Gessen reflected on the conviction, saying "I will probably never be able to go home again,” acknowledging the painful reality that they are now one of thousands of exiled Russians targeted by the Putin regime. While unlikely to face imprisonment unless they travel to a country with an extradition treaty with Russia, the conviction has complicated their international travel and serves as a stark reminder of the Kremlin's transnational repression of critical voices.
