Masha Gessen

Masha Gessen
Masha Gessen at the 6 Moscow International Book Festival, 2011
Born	(1967-01-13) 13 January 1967 Moscow, Soviet Union
Nationality	Russian, American
Occupation(s)	Journalist, author

Maria Alexandrovna Gessen, better known as Masha Gessen (born 13 January 1967), is a Russian and American journalist, author, and member of the democratic opposition to the regime of Vladimir Putin. Gessen is a lesbian who has written extensively on LGBT rights and who founded the Pink Triangle Campaign for gay rights in Russia. She has been described as "Russia's leading LGBT rights activist" and has said herself that for many years she was "probably the only publicly out gay person in the whole country."

Gessen writes in both Russian and English, and in addition to writing books on Putin and Russian feminist punk rock protest group Pussy Riot, she has been a prolific contributor to such publications as The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, New Statesman, Granta, Slate, Vanity Fair, and U.S. News & World Report.

Early life

Gessen was born into an Ashkenazi Jewish family in Moscow. In 1981 Gessen moved with her family to the United States. She returned in 1991 to Moscow. She holds both Russian and US citizenship. Her brothers are Keith Gessen, Daniel Gessen and Philip Gessen.

Activism and journalism

Gessen served as a member of the board of directors for the Moscow-based LGBT rights organization "Triangle" from 1993 to 1998.

In an extensive October 2008 profile of Vladimir Putin for Vanity Fair, Gessen reported that the young Putin had been "an aspiring thug" and that "the backward evolution of Russia began" within days after his inauguration in 2000.

She contributed several dozen commentaries on Russia to The New York Times blog "Latitude" between November 2011 and December 2013. Among her subjects were the banning of homosexual "propaganda" and other antigay laws, the harassment and beating of journalists, the crushing of independent media, the fall of the ruble, show trials and other contemporary "travesties" of Russian justice, the shame she feels about her own country, the ban on American adoption of Russian children, and Kremlin raids on non-profit groups.

In March 2013, politician Vitaly Milonov, who promoted the Russian law against foreign adoption of Russian children, championed the law by saying: "The Americans want to adopt Russian children and bring them up in perverted families like Masha Gessen's."

Dismissal from Vokrug Sveta

She was dismissed from her position as the chief editor of Russia's oldest magazine, Vokrug sveta, a popular-science journal, on 1 September 2012 after she refused to send a reporter to cover a Russian Geographic Society event about nature conservation featuring President Putin, because she considered it political exploitation of environmental concerns. After she tweeted about her firing, Putin phoned her and claimed he was serious about his “nature conservation efforts.” On his invitation, she met him, and her former publisher, at the Kremlin and was offered her job back. She rejected the offer.

Radio Liberty controversy

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 her appointment was announced and a few days after Gessen met with Russian President Vladimir Putin, more than 40 members of Radio Liberty's staff were fired. Radio Liberty also lost its Russian broadcasting licence several weeks after Gessen took over. Gessen's role in both of these events is unclear but has caused controversy. John O'Sullivan described Gessen in The Wall Street Journal as someone who "disdains" opposition media and had replaced Putin-critical content with "softer news features in which liberty is likely to mean sexual liberation (with illustrations) rather than ‘political’ aspects of human rights." Judy Bachrach in World Affairs journal depicted Gessen as seeking to replace controversial news stories that reported on criticism of Putin with innocuous reports on "polar bears" and kindergartens” and "Russian marriage and funeral traditions."

Replying to these critics in Forbes, Mark Adomanis found it "thoroughly bizarre" that "Masha Gessen, one of Russia‘s most outspoken and consistently anti-Putin journalists, has been dragged through the mud and been darkly portrayed as some sort of surrogate Kremlin operative." While stating that he agreed with Gessen "on almost nothing," Adomanis said "it is glaringly, blindingly obvious to anyone even passingly familiar with her work that she is not some sort of sycophantic Kremlin suck-up, but is instead an active and vocal member of the opposition that, according to O'Sullivan, she supposedly 'disdains.'" Suggesting that O'Sullivan "doesn’t actually have the faintest idea who Masha Gessen is, because the entirety of her oeuvre bears almost no resemblance whatsoever to his description of it," Adomanis concluded that "it is absurd, and remarkably tasteless, to portray one of Russia’s bravest and most outspoken voices of political opposition as a soulless apparatchik...Although I often disagree with her conclusions, Gessen has always struck me as someone of remarkable moral consistency and impeccable honesty." O'Sullivan replied to Adomanis's article by maintaining that he had never portrayed Gessen as a Kremlin stooge and that he was, rather, "inclined to think...that Ms. Gessen is herself a victim of the current Radio Liberty crisis."

One of the groups that took the lead in opposing her hiring at Radio Liberty, the Kavkaz Center, a Chechen Islamic entity, suggested that a major part of the problem had been Gessen's criticism of religious groups, stating that "the person holding her position has no right to offend the religious feelings of both Muslims and Orthodox Christians."

Her 2012 book The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin is a political biography of Vladimir Putin, whom she describes as a dictator.

Honors and awards

Gessen was the Guest of Honor at the 2012 ceremony awarding the Swedish Grand Prize for Journalism.

Gessen won the 2013 Media for Liberty award for her Vanity Fair article "The Wrath of Putin".

Media appearances

Gessen has given talks around the Western world and has appeared on Skavlan (Sweden), PBS News Hour, MSNBC, and the Australian comedy news program Mad as Hell. She spoke at the Council on Foreign Relations in 2012. In the same year, she spoke at the Personal Democracy Forum in New York.

Gessen is scheduled to speak at the Oslo Freedom Forum in May 2014.

Personal life

In 2004 Gessen was married in the U.S. to Svetlana Generalova, a Russian citizen who was also involved in the LGBT movement in Moscow. By the time Gessen returned to the U.S. from Russia in December 2013, she was married to Darya Oreshkina. Gessen is, however, opposed to the existence of marriage at all, and advocates for the fundamental change of the institution of marriage, including her three children being legally able to have five parents.

Gessen has three children, the older two being a boy, Vova, and a girl, Yolka, both of whom are U.S. citizens. Vova was born in 1997 in Russia and was adopted by Gessen from an orphanage in Kaliningrad for the children of HIV-positive women. “At the time,” she has written, “no other Russian citizen would have adopted him, so great was the fear of AIDS, and so rare were adoptions generally.” Yolka was born to Gessen in the U.S. in 2001. A third child, a son, was born to Oreshkina in February 2012.

Bibliography

• Masha Gessen (1993). The Rights of Lesbians and Gay Men in the Russian Republic. International Gay & Lesbian Human Rights Comm. p. 60. ISBN 978-1-884955-13-6.
• Masha Gessen, ed. (1995). Half a Revolution: Contemporary Fiction by Russian Women. Cleis Press. p. 269. ISBN 978-1-57344-006-6.
• Masha Gessen (1997). Dead Again: The Russian Intelligentsia after Communism. Verso. p. 211. ISBN 978-1-85984-147-1.
• Masha Gessen (2004). Ester and Ruzya: How My Grandmothers Survived Hitler's War and Stalin's Peace. Dial Press Trade Paperback. p. 384. ISBN 978-0-385-33605-5.
• Masha Gessen (2008). Blood Matters: From Inherited Illness to Designer Babies, How the World and I Found Ourselves in the Future of the Gene. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. p. 336. ISBN 978-0-15-101362-3. (a New York Times Notable Book of the year)
• Masha Gessen (2009). Perfect Rigor: A Genius and the Mathematical Breakthrough of the Century. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. p. 256. ISBN 978-0-15-101406-4. (about Grigori Perelman)
• Masha Gessen (2012). The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. Riverhead Hardcover. p. 304. ISBN 978-1-59448-842-9.
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• Masha Gessen (2014). id=zVw2AAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot. Riverhead Hardcover. p. 320. ISBN 978-1-59463-219-8. {{cite book}}: Check |url= value (help); Missing pipe in: |url= (help)
• Masha Gessen (co-editor) (2014). Gay Propaganda: Russian Love Stories. OR Books. p. 224. ISBN 978-1-939293-35-0. {{cite book}}: |author= has generic name (help)

See also

• LGBT rights in Russia

References

• Bloomsbury Books author pages
• Review of Blood Matters, The Independent
• Review of "Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot"

External links

• "Vladimir Putin: The Grey Cardinal of Russia", Vanity Fair, October 2008.
• "The Wrath of Putin" re: Russian prime minister's relationship with Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Vanity Fair, April 2012.
• "A Call from the Kremlin" re: face-to-face meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, The New York Times, September 2012.
• "Putin Biography Chronicles Rise Of A 'Street Thug'", interview with Dave Davies on Fresh Air, 1 March 2012.