Masha Gessen Books

“When Gessen speaks about autocracy, you listen.” —The New York Times “A reckoning with what has been lost in the past few years and a map forward with our beliefs intact.” —Interview As seen on MSNBC’s Morning Joe and heard on NPR’s All Things Considered: the bestselling, National Book Award–winning journalist offers an essential guide to understanding, resisting, and recovering from the ravages of our tumultuous times. This incisive book provides an essential guide to understanding and recovering from the calamitous corrosion of American democracy over the past few years. Thanks to the special perspective that is the legacy of a Soviet childhood and two decades covering the resurgence of totalitarianism in Russia, Masha Gessen has a sixth sense for the manifestations of autocracy—and the unique cross-cultural fluency to delineate their emergence to Americans. Gessen not only anatomizes the corrosion of the institutions and cultural norms we hoped would save us but also tells us the story of how a short few years changed us from a people who saw ourselves as a nation of immigrants to a populace haggling over a border wall, heirs to a degraded sense of truth, meaning, and possibility. Surviving Autocracy is an inventory of ravages and a call to account but also a beacon to recovery—and to the hope of what comes next.

WINNER OF THE 2017 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN NONFICTION FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDS WINNER OF THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY'S HELEN BERNSTEIN BOOK AWARD NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2017 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, LOS ANGELES TIMES, WASHINGTON POST, BOSTON GLOBE, SEATTLE TIMES, CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, NEWSWEEK, PASTE, and POP SUGAR The essential journalist and bestselling biographer of Vladimir Putin reveals how, in the space of a generation, Russia surrendered to a more virulent and invincible new strain of autocracy. Award-winning journalist Masha Gessen's understanding of the events and forces that have wracked Russia in recent times is unparalleled. In The Future Is History, Gessen follows the lives of four people born at what promised to be the dawn of democracy. Each of them came of age with unprecedented expectations, some as the children and grandchildren of the very architects of the new Russia, each with newfound aspirations of their own--as entrepreneurs, activists, thinkers, and writers, sexual and social beings. Gessen charts their paths against the machinations of the regime that would crush them all, and against the war it waged on understanding itself, which ensured the unobstructed reemergence of the old Soviet order in the form of today's terrifying and seemingly unstoppable mafia state. Powerful and urgent, The Future Is History is a cautionary tale for our time and for all time.

This is the chilling account of how a low-level, small-minded KGB operative ascended to the Russian presidency and, in an astonishingly short time, destroyed years of progress and made his country once more a threat to her own people and to the world. Handpicked by the "family" surrounding an ailing and increasingly unpopular Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin seemed like a perfect choice for the oligarchy to shape according to its own designs. Suddenly the boy who had stood in the shadows was a public figure, and his popularity soared. Russia and an infatuated West were determined to see the progressive leader of their dreams, even as he seized control of media, sent political rivals and critics into exile or to the grave, and smashed the country's fragile electoral system, concentrating power in the hands of his cronies. As a journalist living in Moscow, Masha Gessen experienced this history firsthand, and she has drawn on sources no other writer has tapped.--From publisher description.

From the acclaimed author of The Man Without a Face, the previously untold story of the Jews in twentieth-century Russia that reveals the complex, strange, and heart-wrenching truth behind the familiar narrative that begins with pogroms and ends with emigration. In 1929, the Soviet government set aside a sparsely populated area in the Soviet Far East for settlement by Jews. The place was called Birobidzhan.The idea of an autonomous Jewish region was championed by Jewish Communists, Yiddishists, and intellectuals, who envisioned a haven of post-oppression Jewish culture. By the mid-1930s tens of thousands of Soviet Jews, as well as about a thousand Jews from abroad, had moved there. The state-building ended quickly, in the late 1930s, with arrests and purges instigated by Stalin. But after the Second World War, Birobidzhan received another influx of Jews—those who had been dispossessed by the war. In the late 1940s a second wave of arrests and imprisonments swept through the area, traumatizing Birobidzhan’s Jews into silence and effectively shutting down most of the Jewish cultural enterprises that had been created. Where the Jews Aren’t is a haunting account of the dream of Birobidzhan—and how it became the cracked and crooked mirror in which we can see the true story of the Jews in twentieth-century Russia. (Part of the Jewish Encounters series)

In an effort to determine why the atrocity occurred, the author traces the lives of the two immigrant brothers responsible for the Boston Marathon bombings.

,"A book that belongs on the shelf alongside The Gulag Archipelago. -- Kirkus Reviews A haunting literary and visual journey deep into Russia's past -- and present. The Gulag was a monstrous network of labor camps that held and killed millions of prisoners from the 1930s to the 1950s. More than half a century after the end of Stalinist terror, the geography of the Gulag has been barely sketched and the number of its victims remains unknown. Has the Gulag been forgotten?Writer Masha Gessen and photographer Misha Friedman set out across Russia in search of the memory of the Gulag. They journey from Moscow to Sandarmokh, a forested site of mass executions during Stalin's Great Terror; to the only Gulag camp turned into a museum, outside of the city of Perm in the Urals; and to Kolyma, where prisoners worked in deadly mines in the remote reaches of the Far East. They find that in Vladimir Putin's Russia, where Stalin is remembered as a great leader, Soviet terror has not been forgotten: it was never remembered in the first place.

Since coming to power in 1999, Vladimir Putin has ruthlessly seized control of media, exiled or killed political rivals and dismantled Russia's fragile electoral system, transforming Russia once more into a threat to her own people and to the world. Masha Gessen experienced this history first-hand, in the form of death-threats and the murder, exile, and mysterious disappearances of many of her friends and colleagues. She courageously returned to Moscow to report on Putin's alarming ascent, tracking down sources who dared speak to no one else.

Migration ist eines der bestimmenden Themen unserer Zeit. Kein Tag vergeht, an dem im Fernsehen oder in den sozialen Medien nicht über Flüchtlinge, Fluchtursachen oder Flüchtlingshilfe diskutiert würde. Häufig gerät dabei in den Hintergrund, welche Konsequenzen Begriffe und Ausdrucksweisen haben. Zu oft bringt schon unsere Sprache die Betroffenen zum Schweigen, etwa wenn aus Menschen »Asylanten«, »Fremde« oder in den Worten von US-Präsident Trump: »Illegale« werden.In dem Versuch, jenen, die ihre »Sprache verloren« haben (Hannah Arendt), eine Stimme zu leihen, erzählt Masha Gessen Geschichten der Migration. Gessen berichtet von Menschenrechtsaktivisten aus Russland, Homosexuellen aus dem Iran - und aus der eigenen Familiengeschichte. Die Porträts fügen sich zu einem beeindruckenden Plädoyer für die menschliche Würde.

Fesselnd wie ein Gesellschaftsroman schreibt Bestsellerautorin Masha Gessen, warum ein Land, das in einem ungeheuren Kraftakt seine lähmenden Machtstrukturen abschütteln konnte, zu einem autoritär geführten Staat mit neoimperialen Zügen geworden ist. Eine Gesellschaft, die zu Emanzipation, Freiheit und Selbsterkenntnis aufgebrochen war, leidet heute unter Bevormundung und Repression. Wie konnte es dazu kommen? Im Zentrum stehen vier Menschen der Generation 1984. Sie kamen in die Schule, als die Sowjetunion zerfiel, und wurden unter Präsident Putin erwachsen. Junge Leute aus unterschiedlichen sozialen und familiären Verhältnissen: zum Beispiel Zhanna, deren Vater Boris Nemzow, ein prominenter Reformer, mitten in Moskau erschossen wurde. Oder Ljoscha, der als schwuler Dozent seine Stelle an der Uni Perm verliert. Die große Erzählung von Aufbrüchen und gescheiterten Hoffnungen der Jungen wird flankiert von den Bildungsgeschichten des liberalen Soziologen Lew Gudkow, der Psychoanalytikerin Marina Arutjunjan und des rechtsnationalistischen Philosophen Alexander Dugin.

Im Jahr 2000 wurde eine Liste mit sieben Rätseln der Mathematik veröffentlicht, mit einem Preisgeld von jeweils einer Million US-Dollar. Eines dieser berühmten »Millennium-Probleme« war der Beweis der Poincaré-Vermutung, an dem sich bereits die klügsten Köpfe die Zähne ausgebissen hatten. 2002 wurde der Beweis erbracht – von Grigori Jakowlewitsch »Grischa« Perelman, einem exzentrischen russisch-jüdischen Mathematiker. Aber Perelman lehnte ab – nicht nur das Geld, sondern zunehmend auch die Welt. Heute lebt er ohne Festanstellung und völlig zurückgezogen bei seiner Mutter in St. Petersburg. Warum war gerade er in der Lage, das Problem zu lösen – und was ist danach mit ihm geschehen? Masha Gessen begibt sich auf Perelmans Spuren, von seinen Anfängen als Wunderkind bis zu seinem Rückzug. Nach und nach entsteht das Bild eines Mannes, dessen fast übermenschliche gedankliche Strenge ihn zu mathematischen Höchstleistungen befähigt, aber auch immer stärker von der Welt entfremdet.