Masha Gessen on Putin’s Russia and Trump’s America
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.3 • 3.9K Ratings
🗓️ 26 February 2018
⏱️ 18 minutes
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Summary
Masha Gessen was born in Moscow, and came to this country with her family as a teenager, and she moved back and forth between the United States and Russia as an adult. Her work as a journalist and as a gay rights activist in both countries has made her uniquely positioned to write about Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Donald Trump’s America, and how they intersect at this very fraught moment. “It’s like I was gifted with this special pair of eyeglasses,” she tells David Remnick.
Gessen is as ferocious a critic of Putin as you’ll find, yet she’s skeptical of how much attention the Russia scandal has received in the media. “Every column inch that’s devoted to the Mueller probe is not devoted to some other thing that the Trump Administration is doing, that I think often is more important,” she said. When asked about the effects of Trumpism on American society, Gessen thinks that while we’re having lots of conversations about politics, we’ve lost the capacity for political conversation: “A political conversation is a conversation in which people with different views come to agreements about how they’re going to inhabit this society together,” she says. “We don’t see that happening in Congress, we don’t see that happening in the streets, we don’t see that happening at kitchen tables.”
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| 1:12.2 | I'm Dorothy Wickendenden. On today's Politics and More podcast, David Remneck talks to New Yorker |
| 1:17.8 | staff writer Masha Gessen. She was born in Russia and is a harsh critic of Vladimir Putin, |
| 1:23.3 | but thinks the media might be too focused on the Trump administration's ties to Russia. |
| 1:30.6 | My colleague Masha Gessen has written or translated more than a dozen books. |
| 1:35.3 | One is about genetics, one about mathematics, |
| 1:37.7 | and she's written a biography of Vladimir Putin, |
| 1:40.0 | not an authorized biography by any means, |
| 1:42.6 | and her most recent is titled, |
| 1:44.5 | The Futurist History, How Totalitarianism, Reclaimed Russia. |
| 1:49.2 | Gessen came to this country with her family as a teenager, but she did something that most immigrants don't. |
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