Masha Gessen Quotes

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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 Quotes: One more thing: the regime
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 Quotes: What can a state institution
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 Quotes: Before the Second World War,
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 Quotes: It was in May 1934
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 Quotes: Putin needed an enemy, an
The ability to discuss things was still the most highly valued commodity in the Soviet Union.
Masha Gessen Quotes: The ability to discuss things
Are you putting on airs?
Masha Gessen Quotes: Are you putting on airs?
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 Quotes: Half of the population is
As a gay parent I must flee Russia or lose my children
Masha Gessen Quotes: As a gay parent I
such as first-grader Vladimir's sporting a wristwatch,
Masha Gessen Quotes: such as first-grader Vladimir's sporting
The people who came were not always the ones who most needed to escape: they were the ones most capable of escaping.
Masha Gessen Quotes: The people who came were
One evening, we were sitting in his apartment, and he says, 'Little friend, by now you know what I'm like. I am basically not a very convenient person.' And then he went on to describe himself: not a talker, can be pretty harsh, can hurt your feelings, and so on. Not a good person to spend your life with. And he goes on. 'Over the course of three and a half years you've probably made up your mind.' I realized we were probably breaking up. So I said, 'Well, yes, I've made up my mind.' And he said, with doubt in his voice, 'Really?' That's when I knew we were definitely breaking up. 'In that case,' he said, "I love you and I propose we get married on such and such a day.' And that was completely unexpected.
Masha Gessen Quotes: One evening, we were sitting
There was a game called "Work." and on of the most-often-repeated Soviet jokes described it perfectly: "We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.
Masha Gessen Quotes: There was a game called
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 Quotes: Putin and his colleagues were
[following the Kursk disaster].. "Putin appeared on CNN's Larry King Live. When King asked "What happened?", Putin shrugged, smiled - impishly, it seemed - and said "It sank".
Masha Gessen Quotes: [following the Kursk disaster]..
It was a story no one could tell me when I was child. The story of Russian Jewry had been told in English, by American Jews; to them, it was a story that began with antiquity, culminated with the pogroms, and ended with emigration. For those who remained in Russia, there had been a time before the pogroms and a time after: a period of home, then a period of fear and even greater fear and then brief hope again, and then a different kind of fear, when one no longer feared for one's life but fear never having hope again. This story did not end; it faded into a picture of my parents sitting at the kitchen table poring over an atlas of the world, or of me sitting on the bedroom floor talking at my best friend.

The history of the Soviet Union itself remains a story without an narrative; every attempt to tell this story in Russia has stopped short, giving way to the resolve to turn away from the decades of pain and suffering and bloodshed. With every telling, stories of Stalinism and the Second World War become more mythologized. And with so few Jew left in Russia, with so little uniting them, the Russian Jewish world is one of absences and silences.

I had no words for this when I was twelve, but what I felt more strongly that anything, more strongly even than the desire to go to Israel, was this absence of a story. My Jewishness consisted of the experience of being ostracized and beaten up and the specter of not being allowed into university. Once I found my
Masha Gessen Quotes: It was a story no
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 Quotes: There is a reason that
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 Quotes: But the funniest one they
It's not natural for people in the opposition to leave. It's always a personal catastrophe.
Masha Gessen Quotes: It's not natural for people
Perestroika was an impossible idea on the face of it. The Party was setting out to employ its structures of command to make the country, and itself, less command-driven. A system whose main afflictions were stagnation and inflexibility was setting out to change itself. Worst and probably intractable was the fact that people who had spent their lives securing power and individual leverage were expected to devise change that would dismantle the hierarchy of levers and might dislodge them. The system resisted change instinctively...
Masha Gessen Quotes: Perestroika was an impossible idea
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 Quotes: When you're part of the
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 Quotes: In the middle to late
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 Quotes: In all societies, public rhetoric
Some studies actually showed that that Russian drinkers lived longer than non-drinkers.

[Michelle Parsons] suggested an explanation for the apparent vodka paradox: for what it is worth, alcohol may help people adapt to realities that otherwise make them want to curl up and die. Parsons, who called her book "Dying Unneeded", argued that Russians were dying early because they had nothing and no one to live for.
Masha Gessen Quotes: Some studies actually showed that
Rigidity is always the opposite of the search for truth.
Masha Gessen Quotes: Rigidity is always the opposite
It took me another few hours to realize that I had just spent an entire day at a Jewish museum that made no mention of the Holocaust. It was as if the Jews of the shtetlach from that first display case had just vanished, disappeared into history for no apparent reason. It was as though there had been no reason for the new influx of Jews after the war. It was as though history, and Birobidzhan itself, had just happened.

That view of history is the post-Soviet condition. What happened to people - to families that still carry the memory, whose physical and psychic scars are plainly visible - was so enormous and so inexplicable, and, worst of all, the victims and their executioners were so intimately entangled, so indistinguishable at times, that, following a brief and torturous period of examination, the country's population has conspired to treat it as a force of nature.
Masha Gessen Quotes: It took me another few
Other terms used to describe the Putin regime were 'kleptocracy' and 'crony capitalism'---variations on Navalny's theme of the "Party of the Crooks and Thieves." A Hungarian sociologist named Balint Magyar rejected these terms because, he stressed, both 'kleptocracy' and 'crony capitalism' implied a sort of voluntary association---as though one could partake in the crony system or choose not to, and proceed with one's business autonomously, if less profitably. The fate of Khodorkovsky and the exiled oligarchs, as well as of untold thousands of jailed and bankrupted entrepreneurs, demonstrated that this was a fallacy.
Masha Gessen Quotes: Other terms used to describe
It turned out that capitalism alone could make people not only rich and happy but also poor, hungry, miserable, and powerless.
Masha Gessen Quotes: It turned out that capitalism
But if one examines the fine shades of postwar Soviet poverty,
Masha Gessen Quotes: But if one examines the
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 Quotes: Fighting for gay marriage generally
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