136 Quotes by Masha Gessen

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I have no doubt that there are Russian efforts to disturb the fabric of American democracy, but they're disruption efforts. They're troublemaking efforts. They're also not illegal.

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.

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.

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.