Top masha Quotes Collection

Discover a curated collection of masha quotes. Find inspiration, motivation, and wisdom from the best quotes in this category.

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There's something structurally integrated with foreign coverage. Reporters often default to thinking of their government as the sort of ultimate authority.
- Masha Gessen
Collection: Masha
Image of Masha Gessen
Every time I talk to somebody about Putin, it's like, 'But isn't he vastly popular?' Is that really the most important question? I mean, we can unpack his popularity. I think it's manufactured. I think it's manufactured through totalitarian mechanisms.
- Masha Gessen
Collection: Masha
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Putin, I believe, was actually born to be a KGB agent. And I say born because I think that his father was also an agent of the secret police in Russia.
- Masha Gessen
Collection: Masha
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In the 1990s, there was a lot of reform, and there was a lot of forward movement on a lot of fronts in Russia. There was fundamental economic reform. There was a new constitution and an electoral system built from scratch. But the judicial system was probably the most difficult to reform.
- Masha Gessen
Collection: Masha
Image of Masha Gessen
I think Putin's popularity was genuine when he first came to power. He was seen as a welcome relief from the Yeltsin era.
- Masha Gessen
Collection: Masha
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You know, I don't walk home alone at night. If I drive into our courtyard after dark, I ask my partner to come outside with the dog to meet me. Those are, you know, basic sort of urban precautions.
- Masha Gessen
Collection: Masha
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Putin really assumed that once Trump - who had such clear admiration for him - was elected, it would be convenient for Trump to change the relationship with Russia profoundly and instantly.
- Masha Gessen
Collection: Masha
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Scholars of totalitarianism talk about the importance of this constant movement, this forever war, this need to do battle on behalf of something that needs protection. In Russia, this something has been postulated as faith and traditional values.
- Masha Gessen
Collection: Masha
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After the Soviet Union collapsed, people thought the last Soviet generation was going to be the great hope for democracy. When that failed, their hopes shifted to the first post-Soviet generation, and then the second one.
- Masha Gessen
Collection: Masha
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There's the hypothesis that things just keep happening to Russians, things that keep turning them into the same kind of subjects, as opposed to citizens. The more credible hypothesis, I think, is that there is a kind of trauma, a social trauma that is passed on from generation to generation.
- Masha Gessen
Collection: Masha
Image of Masha Gessen
I don't have a lot of hope for Russia when Putin goes, because I think that the kind of damage that has been done to that country hasn't been understood. We've never seen a country that has been this battered.
- Masha Gessen
Collection: Masha
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I worked both as a Russian journalist and an American journalist and ran a bunch of magazines in Moscow over the course of about 20 years.
- Masha Gessen
Collection: Masha
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I was a political journalist for a long time. I wrote a book about Putin. I made all kinds of trouble.
- Masha Gessen
Collection: Masha
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Most Russians actually were living much better by the end of the 1990s than by the beginning of the 1990s. Most Russians were no longer confronting food shortages.
- Masha Gessen
Collection: Masha
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When totalitarian regimes are established, they at least have the illusion of the single-minded purpose. But once they establish the stature that's necessary for a totalitarian regime, they tend to flail.
- Masha Gessen
Collection: Masha
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Putin has this ritual of having the televised meetings with ministers. Cameras will be allowed in to film the first five minutes of a meeting that is conducted entirely for the cameras. We don't even know whether the meeting then goes on.
- Masha Gessen
Collection: Masha
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I kept thinking, I'm not going to do political journalism, because there's no way to keep my principles and be a political journalist, so I'll edit a popular science magazine. This will be my salvation, and I'll emerge with my integrity intact. That didn't even happen.
- Masha Gessen
Collection: Masha
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I think that Putin's strategy has been throwing a lot of money, fairly haphazardly, at a lot of projects aimed at disrupting Western relations and undermining trust in democracies. They may have gotten farther in the States than anywhere else.
- Masha Gessen
Collection: Masha
Image of Masha Gessen
Russians didn't elect Trump. Even if there was collusion, even if every hypothesis that has - that is at play in the Russia investigation is proved, still, Americans elected Trump, and he is president.
- Masha Gessen
Collection: Masha
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I would not attribute any strategic thinking to Trump.
- Masha Gessen
Collection: Masha
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There's nothing effective against Trump. Trump is Trump. Trump is going to lie. Trump is going to act the way he's acting. No amount of reason, no amount of criticism, no amount of anything is going to work to change Trump's behavior. Putin is exactly the same way.
- Masha Gessen
Collection: Masha
Image of Masha Gessen
What Trump is not smart enough to even grasp is that the kind of popularity that Putin has can only be achieved in the context of retro-totalitarianism.
- Masha Gessen
Collection: Masha
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I've learned over the years to hear what Putin is railing against in his own railing way.
- Masha Gessen
Collection: Masha
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Putin was very careful to gradually sort of rotate people in and out of power, to make sure that he had competent bureaucrats by his side at all times, to keep the machine running.
- Masha Gessen
Collection: Masha
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I think there was certainly contact between the Trump campaign and Russians, which is perfectly normal. All campaigns in the modern age have contact with representatives of foreign governments.
- Masha Gessen
Collection: Masha
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Since 9/11 we have somehow come to accept the 'radicalization' narrative, which basically holds that people become terrorists through a series of consecutive, traceable steps laid out for them by large international Islamic organizations. Reality is messier, and also smaller.
- Masha Gessen
Collection: Masha
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First of all, radical beliefs are not a predictor of terrorist behavior: most people who hold radical beliefs never become terrorists, and some terrorists don't hold radical beliefs.
- Masha Gessen
Collection: Masha
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Of course, Putin may well have reasons for wanting Trump to be president - not least Trump's apparent skepticism toward NATO and his lack of opposition to Russia's military interventions in Ukraine and Syria.
- Masha Gessen
Collection: Masha
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It's not just that both Putin and Trump lie, it is that they lie in the same way and for the same purpose: blatantly, to assert power over truth itself.
- Masha Gessen
Collection: Masha
Image of Masha Gessen
Both Trump and Putin use language primarily to communicate not facts or opinions but power: it's not what the words mean that matters but who says them and when. This makes it impossible to negotiate with them and very difficult for journalists to cover them.
- Masha Gessen
Collection: Masha
Image of Masha Gessen
Trump, like Putin, has a demonstrably thin skin and short temper when it comes to being criticized by journalists.
- Masha Gessen
Collection: Masha
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Most Russians believe they've never met an LGBT person in their lives. Also they immediately see LGBT people as 'other,' lending to the success of singling the group out as a 'problem.'
- Masha Gessen
Collection: Masha
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I wanted to show something that Americans don't usually think about when they think about Russia, which is the extreme stratification of Soviet society.
- Masha Gessen
Collection: Masha
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Hate has a great unifying potential.
- Masha Gessen
Collection: Masha
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Abstracted hatred is incredibly potent. There's never the risk of having it challenged by the reality of living human beings.
- Masha Gessen
Collection: Masha
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Trump very much wants to be liked by Putin and I think sincerely admires him. Putin doesn't know how to deal with somebody who positions himself like that.
- Masha Gessen
Collection: Masha
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We learn to think of history as something that has already happened, to other people. Our own moment, filled as it is with minutiae destined to be forgotten, always looks smaller in comparison.
- Masha Gessen
Collection: Masha
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In 'Chernobyl,' which was created and written by Craig Mazin and directed by Johan Renck, the material culture of the Soviet Union is reproduced with an accuracy that has never before been seen in Western television or film - or, for that matter, in Russian television or film.
- Masha Gessen
Collection: Masha
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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.
- Masha Gessen
Collection: Masha