M. Gessen

An event for the magazine Jewish Currents took a surprising turn.

By M. Gessen

For a candidate who positions herself as caring, her failure to acknowledge the pain of Gaza protesters is especially jarring.

By M. Gessen

The plan that freed the journalist was hatched long before he was arrested.

By M. Gessen

We are living in a realm in which “nothing is true and everything is possible.”

By M. Gessen

Masha Gessen, a visiting professor at Amherst, tells why, on this Thanksgiving, her annual ritual of hosting strangers is more important and more difficult.

By Masha Gessen

When Americans focus on immigrants’ economic contributions, they fail to stand up to the Trump administration’s fundamentally hateful agenda.

By Masha Gessen

For decades, Russian leaders have had to face questions about human rights from their American counterparts. Not anymore.

By Masha Gessen

“The Putin Interviews” on Showtime tell us a lot about what would make someone admire Russia’s autocratic president so much.

By Masha Gessen

History shows that stupidity and autocracy aren’t mutually exclusive. In fact, they go hand in hand.

By Masha Gessen

We don’t need to traffic in conspiracy theories to realize how outrageous Trump is.

By Masha Gessen

The president makes a bittersweet concession to an American norm.

By Masha Gessen

We’re both queer women who fled Communist regimes. America has given us a sense of belonging — until now.

By Masha Gessen and Martina Navratilova

Trump has taken a page from Putin’s playbook on dealing with the news media. Here’s how to avoid getting lost in the fog.

By Masha Gessen

Imagine the conversation we’d be having if we weren’t debating facts.

By Masha Gessen

A recent conference of Russian exiles was perhaps a preview of what Russia will look like when it decides what to be next.

By Masha Gessen

The Kremlin fears sociologists even more than it needs them.

By Masha Gessen

Life in Russia today is more similar to life in the U.S.S.R. than at any point since the failed coup of 1991.

By Masha Gessen

What do censorship and traffic have in common in Russia? The rules keep shifting.

By Masha Gessen

An unsolved crime reveals an even deeper mystery in post-Communist Russia.

By Masha Gessen

A popular Russian writer describes her flight from the Bolsheviks.

By Masha Gessen

Now a motorcycle club is shaping Russia’s foreign policy.

By Masha Gessen

A man is found dead at home with no sign of forced entry? He was gay and was killed by someone he brought home.

By Masha Gessen

A gruesome murder goes unreported in Russia because TV executives forget that their job is to report what happens, not propaganda.

By Masha Gessen

The crisis is plodding along, simply because even panic requires open lines of communication.

By Masha Gessen

Russia is a mafia state, not only because it is run like the mafia but also because it is run by organized crime.

By Masha Gessen

A dystopian satire follows a doctor’s struggles through a snowstorm to deliver relief to a zombie-plagued town.

By Masha Gessen

Could a major truckers' protest shake Putin?

By Masha Gessen

The strategic purpose of Putin’s wars is war itself, because only at war can Russia feel at peace.

By Masha Gessen

According to his reading, Russia was the key to creating a participatory world order that America abused.

By Masha Gessen

Russia has sentenced a Ukranian film director to two decades in prison for alleged crimes against inanimate objects.

By Masha Gessen

In 1990s America, I thought outing gays advanced the L.G.B.T. cause. In Russia today, I'm not so sure.

By Masha Gessen

Consumers are finding their way around a ban on food products imported from the European Union.

By Masha Gessen

The state's repressive machine won't quit until it has vacuumed up every last bit of independent activity.

By Masha Gessen

On the dangerous comfort of thinking that Putin's Russia isn't as bad as Stalin's.

By Masha Gessen

The trial failed to explain the roots of the Tsarnaev brothers’ radicalization, and whether anyone helped them.

By Masha Gessen

People are being killed in the name of the Kremlin, against the backdrop of the Kremlin, simply for daring to oppose the Kremlin.

By Masha Gessen

So why now target a provincial housewife with a trade-school education?

By Masha Gessen

Russia’s president ushers in 2015 with fresh attacks on the last independent media and on NGOs.

By Masha Gessen

Two new translations of Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina.”

By Masha Gessen

Some of Putin’s opponents predict the oligarchs will eventually take him down. But there are no oligarchs in Russia anymore.

By Masha Gessen

Masha Gessen recounts the literary history of Moscow and describes why she’s become disillusioned with the city of her birth.

By Masha Gessen

With his popularity slipping, Vladimir Putin is casting about for new enemies.

By Masha Gessen

Russia tries to expand its influence by exporting its repressive legislation to former Soviet states.

By Masha Gessen

By going after McDonald’s, the Kremlin is once again turning the restaurant chain into a symbol of openness.

By Masha Gessen

The Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 disaster has divided Russians over how to relate to their homeland.

By Masha Gessen

At the crux of the emigration debate is a question: Does one owe a special debt to one's country of birth?

By Masha Gessen

In the five months since I left, Russia has changed: Many of those who can are thinking about emigrating.

By Masha Gessen

Critics of the Russian government are being framed on bogus charges and forced to flee the country.

By Masha Gessen

Young or old, the characters in Molly Antopol’s story collection know the pain of estrangement.

By Masha Gessen

Schadenfreude is a necessary exercise for political émigrés.

By Masha Gessen

Why had my account been closed? And where was all my money?

By Masha Gessen

I promised my children that America would feel different because, for the first time in their lives, they would not feel they were different.

By M. Gessen

Since the early days of the Soviet Union, state officials have cared more about reporting good results than achieving them.

By Masha Gessen

Putin’s sudden clemency marks a new step in his evolution as a dictator: He is allowing himself to be inconsistent.

By Masha Gessen

The special creepiness of gay-bashing in Russia.

By Masha Gessen

Another Lenin effigy is dismantled, in Kiev, but can Ukraine do better than Russia at shedding the Soviet legacy?

By Masha Gessen

Russians are looking on longingly at the early success of the protest movement in Ukraine.

By Masha Gessen

When Russia’s president decides to take over literature.

By Masha Gessen

Yet another way for the Kremlin to punish anyone who disturbs its sense of the social order.

By Masha Gessen

An artist nails his scrotum to the pavement to protest Russia’s repressive laws.

By Masha Gessen