Speaker

M. Gessen

M. Gessen

Russian-American journalist, staff writer at The New Yorker, and one of the most widely read Anglophone interpreters of Russian politics and society. Gessen grew up in Moscow, emigrated to the United States with their family in 1981 aged 14, returned to Russia as a journalist in 1991, and lived there for over two decades before leaving in 2013 when the state threatened to remove their adopted son under the anti-gay propaganda laws.

Their books span Soviet mathematics (Perfect Rigour, on Grigori Perelman and the Poincaré conjecture), Putin (The Man Without a Face), the Tsarnaev brothers and the Boston bombing (The Brothers), Pussy Riot (Words Will Break Cement), and the genetic-screening decisions Gessen faced after learning they carried a BRCA mutation (Blood Matters). The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia won the National Book Award in 2017. Gessen uses they/them pronouns.

Core positions

Russia’s trajectory is best explained not by national character or a continuous history of authoritarianism, but by the specific conditions of the 20th-century totalitarian experiment — the longest such experiment in history — and its aftermath. Totalitarianism, for Gessen, is not merely political repression but a system that colonises the interior life: its defining feature, following Hannah Arendt, is not terror but loneliness, the severing of the human bonds through which reality is confirmed and shared. What Russia is living through now is the psychological and civic residue of that severing.

Putin, on this account, is not a totalitarian leader in the classic mould. He is an authoritarian who governs by economy of means — applying only enough force to preserve and extend his grip — and who has reconstituted totalitarian-type social conditions through selective enforcement and manufactured fear rather than mass terror. Crucially, scarcity and falling living standards help him: poverty suppresses the civic surplus that makes political organising possible, as the 2011–12 protests — briefly enabled by relative prosperity — demonstrated in reverse.

In the wiki