Masha Gessen Quotes & Sayings

In the middle to late 1970s, when Putin joined the KGB, the secret police, like all Soviet institutions, was undergoing a phase of extreme bloating. Its growing number of directorates and departments were producing mountains of information that had no clear purpose, application, or meaning. An entire army of men and a few women spent their lives compiling newspaper clippings, transcripts of tapped telephone conversations, reports of people followed and trivia learned, and all of this made its way to the top of the KGB pyramid, and then to the leadership of the Communist Party, largely unprocessed and virtually unanalyzed. — Masha Gessen

It was in May 1934 that the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR granted Birobidzhan the status of the Jewish Autonomous Region, a major step toward achieving the coveted status of a national republic, the apogee of Soviet-style autonomism. At — Masha Gessen

What can a state institution teach us? In what way can I be reformed by a penal colony and you by, say, Russian TV Channel 1? In his Nobel lecture, Joseph Brodsky said, 'The more substantial an individual's aesthetic experience is, the sounder his taste, the sharper his moral focus, the freer - though not necessarily the happier - he is.' We in Russia once again find ourselves in a situation where resistance, especially aesthetic resistance, becomes the only viable moral choice as well as a civic duty." Nadya — Masha Gessen

To create, and to confront, one has to be an outcast. — Masha Gessen

Like Solzhenitsyn, I believe that in the end, words will break cement. Solzhenitsyn wrote, "So the word is more sincere than concrete? So the word is not a trifle? Then may noble people begin to grow, and their word will break cement."

[Nadya Tolokonnikova's closing statement] — Masha Gessen

They had had about enough time to get their bearings and blow up one train when they ran out of food supplies. — Masha Gessen

The people who came were not always the ones who most needed to escape: they were the ones most capable of escaping. — Masha Gessen

When you're part of the opposition you want to stay. It's part of your identity. You're useless if you leave. You feel like you have failed. — Masha Gessen

But the funniest one they showed us was about the need for leisure time. I was sitting next to women who work until one in the morning every day. And here they were telling us that when a person does not get any rest, he becomes a destructive member of society because of the elevated risk of accidents. The women were laughing so hard they fell off their chairs. — Masha Gessen

When you lose your freedom, you lose, first and foremost, the opportunity to choose the company you keep. — Masha Gessen

No one is easier to manipulate than a man who exaggerates his own influence. — Masha Gessen

Faced with a brass band that was positioned to drown out free speech, Russian activists reacted to the potential confrontation with lemons. With activists eating lemons or pretending to, involuntary saliva reaction of the band made it impossible for them to interrupt. — Masha Gessen

The ability to discuss things was still the most highly valued commodity in the Soviet Union. — Masha Gessen

It's not natural for people in the opposition to leave. It's always a personal catastrophe. — Masha Gessen

Putin and his colleagues were reduced mainly to collecting press clippings, thus contributing to the growing mountains of useless information produced by the KGB. — Masha Gessen

Half of the population is behind bars and the other half is guarding them,' Russians have said of their country since the times of Stalin. — Masha Gessen

Angleterre Hotel, — Masha Gessen

Are you putting on airs? — Masha Gessen

As a gay parent I must flee Russia or lose my children — Masha Gessen

adolescent who expresses dissident opinion more or less vocally can end up in a place like that. Some of the children arrive there from orphanages. If a child tries to run away from an orphanage, it is considered normal in our country to commit him to a psychiatric facility and treat him with the strongest of sedatives, such as aminazine, used to suppress Soviet dissidents back in the 1970s. This is particularly shocking considering these institutions' general punitive trend and the absence of psychological help as such. All communication there is based on fear and the children's forced subjugation. They become exponentially more cruel as a result. Many of the children are illiterate, but no one makes an effort to do anything about that. On the contrary, they do everything to quash the last remnants of any motivation to grow. The children shut down and stop trusting words. I — Masha Gessen

Putin needed an enemy, an Other, against which to mobilize. LGBT people are really convenient: we're sort of the ultimate foreign agent. — Masha Gessen

Before the Second World War, more than nine million Jews were living in Europe, most of them in lands that were or had been part of the Russian Empire. — Masha Gessen

There is a reason that Russian troops in both Moscow and Beslan acted in ways that maximized bloodshed; they actually aimed to maximize the fear and the horror. This is the classic modus operandi of terrorists, and in this sense it can certainly be said that Putin and the terrorists were acting in concert. — Masha Gessen

Here is what I was trying to figure out: how a miracle happens. A great work of art -- something that makes people pay attention, return to the work again and again, and reexamine their assumptions, something that infuriates, hurts, and confronts -- a great work of art is always a miracle. — Masha Gessen

Rigidity is always the opposite of the search for truth. — Masha Gessen

The Agat Institute was a God- and state-forsaken outfit inhabited by dead souls and a few disoriented live ones like Yekaterina, who was put to work developing software for the weapons-control system of a nuclear submarine. — Masha Gessen

One more thing: the regime is a show that conceals what in reality is chaos. What looks orderly and restrictive is in fact disorganized and inefficient. Obviously, this does not lead to order. On the contrary, people feel acutely lost, in time and space among other things. As everywhere in the country, a person does not know where to go with a particular problem. So he goes to the head of the detention facility. That's like taking your problem to Putin outside of jail. When we describe the system in our lyrics - I guess you could say we are not really opposed - We are in opposition to Putinist chaos, which is a regime in name only. When — Masha Gessen

In all societies, public rhetoric involves some measure of lying, and history -- political history and art history -- is made when someone effectively confronts the lie. But in really scary societies all public conversation is an exercise in using words to mean their opposites -- in describing the brave as traitorous, the weak as frightening, and the good as bad -- and confronting these lies is the most scary and lonely thing a person can do. — Masha Gessen

such as first-grader Vladimir's sporting a wristwatch, — Masha Gessen

Fighting for gay marriage generally involves lying about what we are going to do with marriage when we get there-because we lie that the institution of marriage is not going to change, and that is a lie. The institution of marriage is going to change, and it should change. And again, I don't think it should exist. — Masha Gessen

Hypnosis Los Angeles offers the reduction of phobias and makes you to enhance the feel of peace in your mind. Only some descriptive discussion session will make your life stress less and change your perspective to watch life. Session charge nothing much but the output of the session produce bright future. — Masha Gessen

It turned out that capitalism alone could make people not only rich and happy but also poor, hungry, miserable, and powerless. — Masha Gessen

But if one examines the fine shades of postwar Soviet poverty, — Masha Gessen

In the fall of 1932, Bergelson undertook the longest journey of his life. He traveled the Trans-Siberian Railway all the way through Siberia and beyond, disembarking just fifty miles shy of the border with China, in the budding Jewish autonomy of Birobidzhan. The Jews of Birobidzhan welcomed him grandly, as if he were a long-lost descendant of a royal Yiddish tribe. A plenary session of the settlement council convened in his honor. He toured the new collective farms in the company of local authorities. He participated, as a guest of honor, in the celebration of the fifteenth anniversary of the October Revolution - an unprecedented role for a foreign national. — Masha Gessen