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'A luminous study' Luke Harding, Guardian 'Courageous and shocking'
Katy Guest, Books of the Year, Independent on Sunday How did a
small-minded, low-level KGB operative come to control the world's
largest country and, in an astonishingly short time, destroy years
of progress, making Russia once more a threat to her own people and
to the world? Masha Gessen shows that when Vladimir Putin, an
unimportant, low-level KGB operative, was rushed to power by a
group of Oligarchs in 1999, he was a man without a history. Yet
within a few brief years, he had dismantled Russia's media, wrested
control and wealth from the country's burgeoning business class,
and decimated the fragile mechanisms of democracy. Virtually every
opposing voice was silenced, with political rivals and critics
driven into exile or to the grave. Drawing on information and
sources no other writer has tapped, Masha Gessen's fearless account
charts Putin's rise from the boy who had scrapped his way through
post-war Leningrad schoolyards. Now the 'faceless' man who
manoeuvred his way into absolute - and absolutely corrupt - power,
has become a threat to the stability of the world, and this
important book is more relevant than ever. Now with a new preface
by the author. 'A clear, brave book... Gessen offers intriguing
details of the scratching, biting, hair-tearing, undersized,
brawling boy Putin, refusing to be bullied in the grubby back yards
of Leningrad' James Meek, Observer 'Gessen's engaging prose
combines a native's passion with a mordant wit and caustic
understatement that are characteristically Russian' AD Miller,
Daily Telegraph
In The Future is History Masha Gessen follows the lives of four
Russians, born as the Soviet Union crumbled, at what promised to be
the dawn of democracy. Each came of age with unprecedented
expectations, some as the children or grandchildren of the very
architects of the new Russia, each with newfound aspirations of
their own - as entrepreneurs, activists, thinkers and writers,
sexual and social beings. Gessen charts their paths not only
against the machinations of the regime that would seek to crush
them all (censorship, intimidation, violence) but also against the
war it waged on understanding itself, ensuring the unobstructed
emergence of the old Soviet order in the form of today's terrifying
and seemingly unstoppable mafia state. The Future is History is a
powerful and urgent cautionary tale by contemporary Russia's most
fearless inquisitor.
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We (Hardcover)
Yevgeny Zamyatin; Translated by Clarence Brown; Introduction by Clarence Brown; Notes by Clarence Brown; Foreword by Masha Gessen
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Many of us are consumed by news cycles reporting on Trump's latest astonishing policy or declaration, and the overwhelming sense we have is one of confusion and incredulity - how could this be happening?
As the 2020 US Presidential race takes shape, Surviving Autocracy provides an indispensable overview of the calamitous trajectory of the past few years. Drawing on her Soviet childhood and two decades covering the resurgence of totalitarianism in Russia, acclaimed New Yorker journalist and prize-winning author Masha Gessen links together seemingly disparate elements of Trump's regime to offer a roadmap for understanding Trump's approach, policies and ultimate aims. Highlighting an inventory of ravages to liberal democracy, including the corrosion of the media, the justice system and cultural norms, she posits that America is in the throws of an autocratic attempt.
Gessen's penetrating analysis offers a new political discourse to replace that which has been so thoroughly degraded, and with it, a clearer path to action. Manifesto-like, Surviving Autocracy is threaded with solutions to the current situation, such as developing a political language that encompasses autocratic impulses, a more agile and honest media, and a visionary moral politics to counter Trump's extraordinary on-going assault.
On February 21st 2012, five members of an obscure feminist
post-punk collective called Pussy Riot staged a performance in
Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. Dressed in their
trademark brightly coloured dresses and balaclavas, the women
performed their song 'Punk Prayer - Mother of God, Chase Putin
Away!' in front of the altar. The performance lasted only 40
seconds but it resulted in two-year prison sentences for three of
the performers - and has turned Pussy Riot into one of the most
well-known and important protest movements of the last five years.
This necessary and timely book is an account of the Pussy Riot
protest, the ensuing global support movement, and the tangled and
controversial trial of the band members. It explores the status of
dissent in Russia, the roots of the group and their adoption - or
appropriation - by wider collectives, feminist groups and music
icons. Masha Gessen has unique access to the band and those closest
to them. Her unrivalled understanding of the Russian protest
movement makes her the ideal writer to document and explain the
rage, the beauty and the phenomenon that is Pussy Riot.
A chilling and unflinching portrait of one of the most fearsome
figures in world politics.
In 1999, the "Family" surrounding Boris Yeltsin went looking for a
successor to the ailing and increasingly unpopular president.
Vladimir Putin, with very little governmental or administrative
experience--he'd been deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, and briefly,
director of the secret police--nevertheless seemed the perfect
choice: a "faceless" creature whom Yeltsin and his cronies could
mold in their own image. Russia and an infatuated West were
determined to see in him the progressive leader of their
dreams--even as Putin, with ruthless efficiency, dismantled the
country's media, wrested control and wealth from the business
class, and destroyed the fragile mechanisms of democracy. Within a
few brief years, virtually every obstacle to his unbridled control
was removed and every opposing voice silenced, with political
rivals and critics driven into exile or to the grave.
Masha Gessen has experienced and reported this history firsthand,
and brings it up to its present moment of unrest and uncertainty.
Her spellbinding account of Putin's rise and reign will stand as a
classic of narrative nonfiction.
In the fall of 2017, the internationally acclaimed underground
theatre troupe Belarus Free Theatre took New York by storm for a
production of their harrowing anti-torture, anti-Putin play Burning
Doors. Joined by Maria Alyokhina, a member of Russian punk group
Pussy Riot, the play met with enthusiastic acclaim from critics. In
Svetlana and Nadezhda, award-winning documentary photographer Misha
Friedman and New Yorker reporter Masha Gessen take us backstage,
giving us an intimate look at this fiercely creative drama troupe
that cannot officially perform in its homeland.
Isaiah Berlin once argued that the concept of the intelligentsia
was "Russia's greatest contribution to world civilization." Since
the mid-nineteenth century, the Russian intelligentsia has shared a
profound sense of responsibility for the fate of its country and a
belief in the transformative power of the Word-a belief reinforced
by the state, which has relentlessly tried to suppress any form of
intellectual dissent. Starting in 1986, this belief has been sorely
tested. The floodgates of information were opened, but no miracle
followed. No new sense of morality was awakened, no one rushed to
redeem the nation. Indeed, once the novelty of free speech wore
off, people lost interest in it. While the intelligentsia was
watching its most treasured dream disintegrate, it was also losing
its social standing, its prestige and, finally, its money. As it
had frequently done in the past, the intelligentsia responded by
declaring itself dead, obsolete. Once again, it was the end. Masha
Gessen, one of the most perceptive of a new generation of
correspondents in Russia, does not share this opinion. Her
fascinating book is the first to examine the ways in which
intellectuals are finding an identity in the new Russia. Through a
series of extraordinary individual stories, she shows their quest
for a new faith, be it religion or the paranormal, a commitment to
nationalist ideology, or to feminist principles. She shows, too,
their search for a place in the new society, as artist or
politician, entrepreneur or neo-dissident. Some of those she
describes as already famous (or infamous); others unknown. Her
accounts of their careers and preoccupations can be inspiring or
harrowing, and sometimes hilarious. Finally, Masha Gessen considers
the prospects for future generations of intellectuals, giving a
vivid, and disturbing, portrait of Russia's outcast Generation X,
and of those younger still, who have largely abandoned any notion
of society or hope for a place in it.
In the 1930s, as waves of war and persecution were crashing over
Europe, two young Jewish women began separate journeys of survival.
One, a Polish-born woman from Bialystok, where virtually the entire
Jewish community would soon be sent to the ghetto and from there to
Hitler's concentration camps, was determined not only to live but
to live with pride and defiance. The other, a Russian-born
intellectual and introvert, would eventually become a high-level
censor under Stalin's regime. At war's end, both women found
themselves in Moscow, where informers lurked on every corner and
anti-Semitism reigned. It was there that Ester and Ruzya would
first cross paths, there that they became the closest of friends
and learned to trust each other with their lives.
In this deeply moving family memoir, journalist Masha Gessen tells
the story of her two beloved grandmothers: Ester, the quicksilver
rebel who continually battled the forces of tyranny; Ruzya, a
single mother who joined the Communist Party under duress and made
the compromises the regime exacted of all its citizens. Both lost
their first loves in the war. Both suffered unhappy unions. Both
were gifted linguists who made their living as translators. And
both had children--Ester a boy, and Ruzya a girl--who would grow
up, fall in love, and have two children of their own: Masha and her
younger brother.
With grace, candor, and meticulous research, Gessen peels back the
layers of secrecy surrounding her grandmothers' lives. As she
follows them through this remarkable period in history--from the
Stalin purges to the Holocaust, from the rise of Zionism to the
fall of communism--she describes how each of her grandmothers, and
before them her great-grandfather, tried to navigate a dangerous
line between conscience and compromise.
Ester and Ruzya is a spellbinding work of storytelling, filled with
political intrigue and passionate emotion, acts of courage and acts
of betrayal. At once an intimate family chronicle and a fascinating
historical tale, it interweaves the stories of two women with a
brilliant vision of Russian history. The result is a memoir that
reads like a novel--and an extraordinary testament to the bonds of
family and the power of hope, love, and endurance.
"From the Hardcover edition."
In 2004 genetic testing revealed that Masha Gessen had a mutation
that predisposed her to ovarian and breast cancer. The discovery
initiated Gessen into a club of sorts: the small (but exponentially
expanding) group of people in possession of a new and different way
of knowing themselves through what is inscribed in the strands of
their DNA. As she wrestled with a wrenching personal decision--what
to do with such knowledge--Gessen explored the landscape of this
brave new world, speaking with medical experts, religious thinkers,
historians, and others facing genetic disorders. "Blood Matters" is
a much needed field guide to this unfamiliar and unsettling
territory. It explores the way genetic information is shaping the
decisions we make, not only about our physical and emotional health
but about whom we marry, the children we bear, even the personality
traits we long to have. And it helps us come to terms with the
radical transformation that genetic information is engineering in
our most basic sense of who we are and what we might become.
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