M. Gessen: Censorship, Silence, & Resistance

Join the Center for Global Studies in welcoming M. Gessen, who will deliver the keynote address in our year-long series, The Press in Times of Peril.

One of our most trenchant observers of democracy, M. Gessen is the author of eleven books, including the National Book Award-winning The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia and The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. An opinion writer at The New York Times, they have covered political subjects including Russia, L.G.B.T. rights, Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and the rise of autocracy among others.

Gessen’s essential book Surviving Autocracy is a bracing overview of the calamitous trajectory of American democracy under the Trump administration. Highlighting not only the corrosion of the media, the judiciary, and the cultural norms that were supposed to be a salvation, they illuminate how a short few years have changed Americans from a people who saw themselves as a nation of immigrants to a populace haggling over a border wall, heirs to a degraded sense of truth, meaning, and possibility.

In the New York Times bestselling The Man Without a Face, Gessen delivers a chilling account of how a low-level, small-minded KGB operative ascended to the Russian presidency and, in an astonishingly short time, destroyed years of progress and made his country once more a threat to his own people and to the world. As a journalist living in Moscow during Putin’s ascendency, Gessen experienced this history firsthand, even famously being dismissed as editor of the Russian popular-science magazine Vokrug Sveta for refusing to send a reporter to observe Putin hang-gliding with Siberian cranes. 2014’s Words Will Break Cement investigates the activism of the artists known as Pussy Riot, who resurrected the power of truth in a society built on lies.

Gessen spent many years as a staff writer for The New Yorker and has contributed to The Washington Post, Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, and Vanity Fair. They are currently an Opinion columnist at The New York Times. Gessen is a founder of the Russian Independent Media Archive, a digital archive focused on preserving the last two decades of independent Russian journalism. They are the first Distinguished Professor at Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, and have taught at Amherst, Oberlin, and Bard Colleges. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, a Nieman Fellowship, the Hitchens Prize, and the Overseas Press Club Award for Best Commentary, Gessen has lived in New York since 2013 after more than twenty years as a journalist and editor in Moscow.