In 2012 Masha Gessen, then editor of Russia’s longest-running magazine Vokrug Sveta, refused to send a reporter to cover Russian President Vladimir Putin hang-gliding with endangered Siberian cranes that were being released into the wild. Declining to aid in another stage-managed depiction of Putin as a man of both action and compassion cost Gessen their job.
Within a year Russian authorities had started openly talking about taking away gay parents’ children (one politician referred to Gessen, a longtime LGBTQIA+ activist in Russia, by name in the debate) in addition to passing legislation about “homosexual propaganda”. At this point Gessen and their family moved to the US.
Since then, Gessen has chronicled, in pristine style, the rise of autocracy and how it degrades language and institutions, in the US, Russia and elsewhere.
When Crikey spoke to Gessen ahead of their visit to Australia for the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Benjamin Netanyahu was in the middle of a US visit that prompted speculation the Israeli PM was on the outer with mainstream US politicians. Gessen wasn’t so sure.
“You could say the optics are mixed, or you could say that somebody waging a genocidal war, somebody using openly fascist rhetoric, spoke to a joint meeting of Congress, got a standing ovation and is going to meet [presumptive Democratic nominee Kamala] Harris today,” Gessen said.
“That’s a lot of goodies for the war criminal.”
Netanyahu did indeed meet with Harris, US President Joe Biden and, of course, Republican nominee Donald Trump, the primary subject of Gessen’s 2020 book, Surviving Autocracy. The book looked at American institutions’ impotence in the face of the first US president who openly wanted to destroy them, “one who rejects the possibility that his power should be limited by institutions”, including the media. Four years later, facing the very real prospect of it all happening again, Gessen was unsure if the media had learnt anything.
“For example, the CNN town hall with Trump earlier this year, where they stepped into all the same traps as the media had stepped into during Trump’s first campaign,” Gessen said. “And not only did they do it, but you almost got the sense that they did it intentionally, because it was going to get viewers.”
Gessen cited a recent experience at a conference at Columbia Journalism School where the editors of various major US publications were asked how they would approach a second Trump presidency.
“And they all had a version of response that was like, ‘Oh, we just have to do our jobs. We know what journalism is. Just say what’s out there. Just be objective’,” Gessen said. “And it’s like, ‘No, you don’t!’ Like, none of us know how to do our jobs. And in fact, the best journalism, and I’m not the first person to say this, but the best journalism is humble.”
Surviving Autocracy mentions in passing Australia’s media landscape, noting that the far right in Australia, “aided mightily by Rupert Murdoch’s media outlets, got about a decade’s head start on their American counterparts” when it came to inexorably linking words like “deterrence” and “illegal” with asylum seekers. The Fox proprietor’s domination of his home country’s media is faintly baffling to Gessen.
“You gotta give it to [Murdoch], his strategy of owning everything, from the tabloids to the highbrow papers, is pretty thorough, but even coming from the United States, that strikes me as a failure of regulation,” they said. “You know, even with the very, very weak state of US antitrust laws and almost total absence of regulation [of] media, I don’t think one person could own all the papers, or even the majority of the papers.”
The week before our interview, Gessen had been sentenced in absentia to eight years imprisonment by a Moscow court for spreading “false information” about the Russian government’s conduct after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Gessen has frequently criticised the “view from nowhere” style of journalism, which extolls “objectivity” above all else and, as a handy consequence, allows straight white males to remain impartial about all social issues.
This is certainly not something you can accuse Gessen of — a Jewish person who writes about Israeli human rights abuses, a trans and non-binary person who has spent decades writing about homophobia and transphobia, a Russian who writes about Russian war crimes in Ukraine. I asked them how they balance the work they do with the personal impacts it has.
Gessen conceded they are always working with “incomplete information”.
“[When I did that reporting] I didn’t know about the extent of extradition treaties that they were going to be signing, and also about the extent the assassination machinery that is operating outside of Russia,” they said.
But that may not have made a difference.
“I’m not saying I would have made different decisions. I don’t think so because what I wanted to do more than anything else in the world at that point was write the piece about war crimes,” Gessen said. “And, you know, I’m not in prison there. There have been more than 250 people charged under those same censorship laws, and some of them are actually serving actual prison time in Russia, they are in danger. I’m at risk. I think there’s a difference.”
To say the times have suited the writing of Gessen — a Jewish LGBTQIA+ Russian-American with an acute ear for the degradation of language, first-hand experience living under various kinds of autocracy, and a keen sense of the parallels between historical atrocities — is perhaps not an optimistic reflection on the times. Nevertheless, Gessen has no desire to be “a prophet of doom”.
They took heart from “the way that France approached the abyss, then gave a total ‘fuck you’ to the abyss” in the election earlier this year. Movements like that, Gessen said, “can’t come just from the fear of something. There has to be something else. There has to be a sense of possibility. And that may be exactly what’s happening in the US”.
While noting that Harris “may fuck up, may pick a terrible VP candidate”, Gessen is ultimately optimistic about her candidacy for president and the attendant shift from a defensive campaign around the danger Trump presents: “She is really out there talking about an America that she wants to live in for the rest of us. Which makes me very, very hopeful.”
“There’s so much movement among young people who everybody thought would just sit down at the election. There’s a palpable sense of enthusiasm everywhere,” Gessen said. “And I know that that spirit can be deceptive and it can just dissipate. But I also know that everything is forever, until it isn’t.”
Masha Gessen appears at The Edge, Fed Square in Melbourne for the Wheeler Centre (August 21) and at Carriageworks in Sydney, as part of the Festival of Dangerous Ideas (24-25 August).
