“Stay Outraged”: A Conversation with Masha Gessen

Abstract

“I like kitties and puppies and little animals,” Vladimir Putin told Masha Gessen in 2012. This was a strange way for the Russian president to start a conversation with a journalist whose scathing biography of him was receiving rave reviews around the world. When the two met, Gessen had just been fired as the editor of Vokrug Sveta, a popular science magazine, for refusing to cover one of Putin’s media stunts. (Putin had piloted a motorized hang glider while ostensibly escorting six endangered Siberian cranes to their winter homes.) Putin had reached out to offer Gessen her job back—apparently uninformed of her unflattering assessments of the former KGB officer. Gessen declined. She would never work “as a Kremlin appointee,” she explained later. (“Don’t make compromises” would become one of her six rules for surviving an autocracy.) Gessen was born in the Soviet Union, and moved to Boston with her family when she was 14. In 1991, she went back to Russia as a young reporter, and soon made her name as an LGBT rights activist and a Putin critic . In 2013, with the Kremlin threatening to take away the children of gay parents, she fled to the U.S. with her wife and kids. Since then, Gessen has written or co-edited four books, including The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy on the Tsarnaev brothers who carried out the Boston Marathon bombings. Having spent over two decades watching Russia slide into dictatorship, Gessen is now terrified of the damage President Donald Trump could do to American democracy. World Policy Journal spoke with Gessen about Putin, the U.S. media, and what citizens can do to protect a country from authoritarianism.