Masha Gessen

At 57 years old, Masha Gessen physical status not available right now. We will update Masha Gessen's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

Gessen was on the board of directors of the Moscow-based LGBT rights organization Triangle between 1993 and 1998.

In an extensive October 2008 profile of Vladimir Putin for Vanity Fair, Gessen reported that the young Putin had been "an aspiring thug" and that "the backward evolution of Russia began" within days of his inauguration in 2000.

At the Sydney Writer's Festival in 2012, Gessen expressed their view that the institution of marriage shouldn't exist. They said: "Fighting for gay marriage generally involves lying about what we're 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."

They contributed several dozen commentaries on Russia to The New York Times blog "Latitude" between November 2011 and December 2013. Among their subjects were the banning of so-called "homosexual propaganda" and other related laws; the harassment and beating of journalists, and the depreciation in value of the ruble.

In March 2013, politician Vitaly Milonov promoted the Russian law against foreign adoption of Russian children by saying: "The Americans want to adopt Russian children and bring them up in perverted families like Masha Gessen's."

Gessen was dismissed from their position as the chief editor of Russia's oldest magazine, Vokrug sveta, a popular-science journal, in September 2012 after Gessen refused to send a reporter to cover a Russian Geographical Society event about nature conservation featuring President Putin because Gessen considered it political exploitation of environmental concerns. After Gessen tweeted about their firing, Putin phoned them and claimed he was serious about his "nature conservation efforts." At his invitation, Gessen met him and Gessen's former publisher at the Kremlin, and were offered their job back. Gessen rejected the offer.

In September 2012, Gessen was appointed as director of the Russian Service for Radio Liberty, a U.S. government-funded broadcaster based in Prague. Shortly after their appointment was announced and a few days after Gessen met with Putin, more than 40 members of Radio Liberty's staff were fired. The station also lost its Russian broadcasting license several weeks after Gessen took over. The degree of Gessen's involvement in both of these events is unclear, but has caused controversy.

In December 2013, they moved to New York because Russian authorities had begun to talk about taking children away from gay parents. In March of that year, "the St Petersburg legislator [Milonov] who had become a spokesman for the law [against 'homosexual propaganda' towards children] started mentioning me and my 'perverted family' in his interviews," and Gessen contacted an adoption lawyer asking "whether I had reason to worry that social services would go after my family and attempt to remove my oldest son, whom I adopted in 2000." The lawyer told Gessen "to instruct my son to run if he is approached by strangers and concluding: 'The answer to your question is at the airport.'" In June 2013, Gessen was beaten up outside of the Parliament; they said of the incident that "I realized that in all my interactions, including professional ones, I no longer felt I was perceived as a journalist first: I am now a person with a pink triangle." They stated that "a court would easily decide to annul Vova's adoption, and I wouldn't even know it." Given this potential threat to their family, Gessen "felt like no risk was small enough to be acceptable," they later told the CBC Radio. "So we just had to get out."

In a January 2014 interview with ABC News, Gessen said that the Russian gay propaganda law had "led to a huge increase in antigay violence, including murders. It's led to attacks on gay and lesbian clubs and film festivals...and because these laws are passed supposedly to protect children, the people who are most targeted or have the most to fear are LGBT parents."

Gessen wrote in February 2014 that Citibank had closed their bank account because of concern about Russian money-laundering operations.

As of 2020, Gessen serves as Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College. Previously at Amherst College, they were named the John J. McCloy '16 Professor of American Institutions and International Diplomacy for the 2017–18 and 2018–19 academic years. In October 2017, they published their 10th book The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia. They were included in the 2022 Fast Company Queer 50 list.

Source

• 2005: National Jewish Book Award for Ester and Ruzya: How My Grandmothers Survived Hitler's War and Stalin's Peace
• 2012: Stora Journalistpriset (Swedish Grand Prize for Journalism), Guest of Honor
• 2013: Liberty Media Corporation, Media for Liberty award for their article "The Wrath of Putin," published in the April 2012 edition of Vanity Fair
• 2015: University of Michigan Wallenberg Medal, 24th recipient
• 2017: National Book Award for Nonfiction for The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia
• 2018: Hitchens Prize