Masha Gessen
There is no law that guarantees press access to the White House. Communication was lessening during the Obama years. There was every reason to suspect that Trump was going to create an adversarial relationship and that people were going to be faced with the impossible dilemma between sort-of-complicity and access.Collection: Communication
The Soviet system of propaganda and censorship existed not so much for the purpose of spreading a particular message as for the purpose of making learning impossible, replacing facts with mush, and handing the faceless state a monopoly on defining an ever-shifting reality.Collection: Learning
Dictators fall when they're overconfident; they stay in power when they're paranoid.Collection: Power
If human rights are an attribute of being human, then we must consider the fact that tens of millions of displaced people around the world have been rendered less than human.
Where incompetence is prized, it is ever-present.
Autocratic power requires the degradation of moral authority - not the capture of moral high ground.
Donald Trump ran for autocrat, he didn't run for president. The first thing in autocrat does is take over the media, or alienate the media, which is what Trump is doing, he is doing it actively.
There can be a conspiracy, but the presence of a conspiracy is actually not an excuse for conspiracy thinking.
Poverty and scarcity are actually very good for totalitarian societies. They maintain that sense of mobilization that's essential for totalitarian societies.
I think that when you emigrate, when everything you took for granted disappears, it's a kind of loss of innocence. When you're a kid, the world as you know it is just there. Suddenly, you emigrate and that's no longer the case. It's a break in reality that parachutes you into adulthood.
Fact checking Donald Trump is a really... It is kind of fun but it is ungratifying because nothing checks out.
I looked at Putin and was terrified from the very beginning. That makes me look very prescient because he actually turned out to be exactly the monster that I thought he was.
I think some people have blind faith in American institutions without knowing a whole lot about them and think they will stand up to Trump and are indestructible.
Resignation was the defining condition of Soviet life.
Putin is an uneducated, unintelligent, uncultured man who has no plan.
Putin set out to build a mafia state. He didn't set out to build a totalitarian regime. But he was building his mafia state on the ruins of a totalitarian regime. And so we end up with a mafia state and a totalitarian society.
I think that Russian meddling in the election is an important issue.
I mean, hunger strike is almost a ritual in a Russian prison colony. It actually has been going back to Soviet times. It's a way of protesting.
To effectively create the image of an enemy you have to show first of all that the enemy is extremely dangerous, but on the other hand less than human.
In war you're either a collaborator or you're a resistor. I mean you don't get to be neutral.
I realized - I've been an opposition journalist in Russia for a long time. And I've often considered how real risks are and how much of a risk I can take.
My family immigrated to the States in 1981, when I was 14.
I have a little hope that the nuclear holocaust doesn't happen.
Basically, Trump's significant first moves have been twofold. To marginalize the media, and to start dismantling the federal government.
I do a very good impersonation of an American - I went to high school here - but I've spent most of my life in Russia.
The most difficult and, in some ways, the most rewarding thing I've ever been through was emigrating as a teenager.
It is so impossible to predict how much influence what you write will have, and what sorts of anxieties and imaginaries it will tap into.
The thing about the Russian secret police and the Soviet secret police is that one never leaves the secret police. Once a KGB man, always a KGB man.
It seems that probably Putin's father maintained some connection to the secret police throughout his life. One sign of that is that they had a telephone, and people didn't have telephones in the Soviet Union in the 1950s.
St. Petersburg, under the czars, had been a grand city. It was a planned city, and it had - there were all these Parisian architects who had been brought in to build the apartment buildings in the center of town.
There aren't a lot of things that are extraordinary about Putin, but his greed is truly extraordinary.
I think Donald Trump was brought to power by Americans. They voted for him.
Americans voted for Trump. A lot of people in this country feel the system of representative democracy hasn't worked for them for a long, long time. And those are the issues that this election gives us an unfortunate opportunity to engage with. And engaging instead with the Russia conspiracy takes up that bandwidth.
There are a couple of ways to use the word democracy, and the way that I think is productive is to think about democracy as not a state that can actually be achieved, but as an ideal.
It's very difficult to write in Russian for someone who has never been schooled in Russian.
The American justice system administers punishment. It does not conduct inquests and it does not find facts.
Nobody knows what self-radicalized means, and that's one of the weird things about the way that we talk about terrorism. We talk about radicalization as though it were a thing, as though you could sort of track it and identify it, and that's not the case.
If you grew up in Boston, you actually grew up thinking that Patriots' Day is a major American holiday, sort of like the other Fourth of July.
I had a very humane, what the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova would probably have called 'vegetarian,' experience of migration. It involved planes and trains - the actual compartments of passenger trains - and not grueling walking and riding on the roofs of trains.
Journalists casually use terms like crossing the border illegally when referring to asylum seekers - when in fact there is no law that says they must use the ports of entry.
I have experienced power as a journalist. On three different occasions, when I wrote about individual immigrants or refugees, the article - or, in one case, my presence in the courtroom - appeared to positively change the outcome of their cases.
I really can't abide conspiracy theories, because I believe that everything in the world stems from idiocy and incompetence. That's certainly true of most of what's happened in Russia under Putin.
For years I was the only publicly out gay person who was not a full-time gay activist: my position as a quasi-foreigner gave me a privileged perch, and my ability to earn money by writing for western publications made me almost impervious to discrimination. Other Russians were not in a hurry to come out.
Russia, at the start of the 21st century, at least in its larger cities, very much resembled the United States of the early 1990s: being gay was no longer criminal or shameful, but it was still not a topic for polite conversation or public discussion.
When your doctor and neighbours and child's schoolteachers know you are gay, there is no closet for you to hide in.
By the mid-noughties, I found that I was no longer the only openly gay person in every setting. At one point, a couple of Moscow magazine publishers even got the idea that they should actively headhunt gay and lesbian staff.
Soviet mathematics was particularly good in the second half of the 20th century, basically because of the arms race, because the Soviet Union realized... World War II created the conditions for the Soviet Union to become a superpower.
My hypothesis is that for people who are both trained and inclined to think in rigorously logical ways, it is particularly difficult to adapt to the Soviet system of doublethink.
I think that Russia was like a lot of other countries, a lot of empires, in being a tyranny up until the early 20th century. Then Russia had something that no other country has had, which is the longest totalitarian experiment in history.
Many Americans have been looking for an explanation for Mr. Trump's apparent adoration of Mr. Putin. How can a powerful, wealthy American man hold affection for the tyrannical, corrupt leader of a hostile power?