M. Gessen on the Ins and Outs of Russia
M. Gessen — Russian-American journalist, staff writer at The New Yorker, and author of The Future Is History — joins Tyler Cowen for Ep. 73 to trace how the longest totalitarian experiment in history continues to shape Russia’s politics, culture, and society, and to reflect on their own life lived between two countries.
Key ideas
- Russia’s unfreedom is a product of totalitarianism, not historical character. Gessen resists the traditional reading of Russia as congenitally disposed to strong rule. Russia was, like many empires, a tyranny until the early 20th century — unremarkable by the standards of the day. What distinguishes it is the totalitarian experiment that followed: a form of rule (totalitarianism means a system that claims to penetrate every sphere of life, not merely political control) uniquely capable of reshaping not just behaviour but the interior life of a society, and whose aftermath Russia is still living through.
- Putin governs by economy of means, not by terror. Unlike a classic totalitarian leader, Putin does not seek to control everything — he applies only as much force as necessary to continue accumulating money and power, which he measures in each other interchangeably. Selective enforcement and signal prosecutions create a pervasive chilling effect without the cost of mass repression. The result is totalitarian-type conditions achieved through far less visible machinery.
- Poverty and scarcity are assets, not vulnerabilities, for an autocrat. Gessen inverts the conventional assumption that falling living standards threaten Putin’s grip. The mass protests of 2011–12 were produced by relative prosperity — people who lived well enough had the luxury of demanding good governance. When survival is precarious, citizens cannot afford to engage in proactive politics. Economic hardship reconstitutes the mobilised, scarcity-disciplined atmosphere in which autocracies thrive.
- The anti-gay campaign is Kremlin-manufactured, not culturally organic. Gessen argues the campaign succeeded precisely because it occupied a vacuum — there was no prior public conversation about sexuality for it to push against. Once the Kremlin started that conversation, it owned it. The same mechanism appears in other autocracies: hatred campaigns find traction when you control the media because there is no pre-existing counter-narrative to displace.
- Online organising is not collective action. Alexei Navalny’s model — a YouTube appeal, then simultaneous protests in over a hundred towns — looks like mobilisation but is, Gessen contends, a sequence of isolated individual acts. Each person watches alone, acts alone, and goes home without having genuinely cooperated with anyone else. Real politics requires the ongoing, physical experience of acting with others across difference; that experience is what the internet cannot replicate and what the parallel polis (see below) is designed to supply.
Content
Soviet mathematics and the dissident temperament
Gessen opens, somewhat unexpectedly, on Soviet mathematics. The arms race drove the Soviet state to identify mathematically gifted children across the country, educate them in specialist boarding schools, and house them in privileged science towns — creating the only enclave of Soviet life where pure intellectualism was prized. Kolmogorov, who designed the curriculum, imagined it along classical Greek lines: mathematical rigour, literary breadth, and physical culture together.
This incubator also, Gessen suggests, disproportionately produced dissidents. Their hypothesis: people trained and constitutionally inclined to think in rigorously logical ways found it harder than most to sustain the doublethink — holding untenable contradictions without resolution — that ordinary Soviet survival required. The comparison Gessen reaches for is Greta Thunberg and her autism diagnosis: someone for whom the adult world’s failure to act rationally on climate change is not merely frustrating but viscerally intolerable. The Soviet dissident and the climate activist share a refusal, or incapacity, to accommodate institutionalised irrationality.
What Putin is and is not
Asked for their model of how Putin rules, Gessen is precise: he is not a totalitarian in the classic sense. He does not seek total penetration — he seeks the minimum force required to preserve and extend his position. Siloviki (the security-services men — sila means force in Russian — who form Putin’s inner circle) and selective prosecutions do the work that mass terror did under Stalin. The effect on society can be totalitarian-type — pervasive self-censorship, withdrawal from political life — even when the machinery is far lighter.
On money versus power: Gessen argues the distinction collapses. Putin measures one in the other; they are a single compound variable. When Cowen notes that GDP per capita has fallen for five consecutive years, Gessen’s response unsettles the expected logic: scarcity, historically, stabilises autocracies rather than threatening them. The 2011–12 protests were an anomaly enabled by a brief prosperity window.
Russia’s culture of misery and loneliness
Gessen introduces Hannah Arendt’s claim that loneliness is the defining condition of totalitarianism — not fear, not surveillance, but the severing of the human bonds through which reality is confirmed and shared. Gessen endorses this as ‘an incredible humanistic discovery’ that is underread even in Arendt’s admirers. They teach 20th-century Russian literature through this lens.
Russian culture’s grumpy surface — the non-smiling, the discernment in fine shades of misery, the absence of shame about depression — is, on this reading, not ethnic temperament but the psychological residue of a society organised around loneliness. Excess mortality, Gessen notes in passing, is substantially explicable through mass depression.
The strong Russian woman is equally a product of history rather than nature: the enforced gender-equality ideology of the Soviet period put women in the workforce at parity with men while leaving them solely responsible for the gruelling domestic labour of scarcity — washing clothes by hand, cooking in communal kitchens, navigating food shortages. That double burden made women adaptive and competent in ways men, who lost their bearings when the Soviet collapse upended their roles, often were not.
The anti-gay campaign and manufactured hatred
Russia was not, in Gessen’s view, a particularly homophobic society before the Kremlin’s anti-gay campaign began in earnest around 2012. Most Russians had simply never thought about it. The campaign’s genius was occupying that blankness: with no existing counter-narrative, the Kremlin could own the conversation entirely. The pattern — autocrat manufactures outward enemy, campaign gains traction through media control — is not uniquely Russian; Gessen notes Erdoğan has used the same mechanism in Turkey.
Why Kasparov failed and what Navalny found
Garry Kasparov’s attempt at conventional political organising — travelling the country, renting halls, meeting citizens — was defeated before it began. Halls were shut, meetings were cancelled, contacts received threatening calls. The public sphere had been destroyed. Navalny found the workaround: build a parallel media universe on the internet, bypassing the Kremlin’s control of broadcast media.
But Gessen is sceptical even of the Navalny model. What looks like collective action — simultaneous protests across Russia after a YouTube appeal — is, on closer inspection, a multitude of solitary acts. Politics, Gessen insists, is doing things with others; the experience of physical, ongoing co-presence is constitutive, not incidental. The internet replicates the signal but not the substance.
Ukraine, NATO, and the new cold war
Two positions Gessen holds firmly in the Q&A. On Ukraine: the common assumption, held by both the Kremlin and the Russian opposition, that Ukraine is a smaller mirror of Russia — that what happens there will happen in Russia — is a category error. A generation of post-Soviet transition has produced a Ukrainian political culture with genuinely different expectations of accountability, political action, and civic trust. Gessen feels it when they visit.
On NATO: Gessen has no patience for the argument that Western expansion provoked Russia. Every country that joined NATO did so voluntarily, urgently, because it wanted protection against a Russia that had already colonised it. To ignore those countries’ agency in order to frame the alliance as American aggression is to reproduce the imperial logic that made those countries seek membership in the first place. Kosovo is different — an illegal bombing campaign whose corrosive effects on international norms Gessen takes seriously.
The parallel polis and imaginative politics
Gessen’s forthcoming book at the time of recording — the parallel polis project — takes a concept from Charter 77, the Czechoslovak dissident movement of the 1970s: in a totalitarian society, it is possible to create a small experimental community that operates by different rules — economically, socially, politically, or religiously — so that when the totalitarian structure collapses around it, a working model already exists. Gessen extends the idea beyond explicitly totalitarian contexts: wherever a democracy is broken in some domain, a parallel project can imagine an alternative into being. The Detroit urban farm/public space/community economy project they are studying is one example.
Related
- M. Gessen — guest; Russian-American journalist and author of The Future Is History
- Tyler Cowen — host
- Stephen Kotkin on Stalin, Power, and the Art of Biography — adjacent episode: the Stalinist machinery that created the totalitarian conditions Gessen describes as Russia’s lasting inheritance
- Serhii Plokhy on Russia, Ukraine, and the History of Their Relationship — adjacent episode: the Russia–Ukraine divergence Gessen discusses in the Q&A
- Velina Tchakarova on China, Russia, and the Future of Geopolitics — adjacent episode: geopolitical structure of Russian power