28 Facts About Masha Gessen

Masha Gessen is a Russian and American journalist, author, and translator.

Masha Gessen was born into a Jewish family in Moscow to Alexander and Yelena Masha Gessen.

Masha Gessen's maternal grandmother, Ruzya Solodovnik, was a Russian-born intellectual who worked as a censor for the Stalinist government until she was fired during an antisemitic purge.

Masha Gessen's maternal grandfather Samuil was a committed Bolshevik who died during World War II, leaving Ruzya to raise Yelena alone.

In 1981, when Masha Gessen was a teenager, their family moved via the US Refugee Resettlement Program to the United States.

Masha Gessen was on the board of directors of the Moscow-based LGBT rights organization Triangle between 1993 and 1998 and has led gay rights demonstrations in Moscow.

Masha Gessen served as a volunteer board member at PEN America for nine years, resigning in May 2023after the organization withdrew an invitation to two exiled Russian authors to speak at the PEN World Voices event in the wake of a threatened boycott.

Masha Gessen was vice president of the board at the time and continues to be a member of PEN America.

Masha Gessen said they understood the feelings of Ukrainian authors but did not approve of the way PEN handled the situation.

Masha Gessen contributed several dozen commentaries on Russia to The New York Times blog "Latitude" between November 2011 and December 2013 on the Russian gay propaganda law and other related laws, violence towards journalists, and the depreciation of the ruble.

At his invitation, Masha Gessen met him and Masha Gessen's former publisher at the Kremlin and were offered their job back.

In September 2012, Masha Gessen was appointed as director of the Russian Service for Radio Liberty, a US government-funded broadcaster based in Prague.

Shortly after their appointment was announced and a few days after Masha Gessen met with Putin, more than 40 members of Radio Liberty's staff were fired.

In December 2013, Masha Gessen moved to New York because Russian authorities had begun to talk about taking children away from gay parents.

In March of that year, "the St Petersburg legislator [Milonov] who had become a spokesman for the law [against 'homosexual propaganda' towards children] started mentioning me and my 'perverted family' in his interviews", and Masha Gessen contacted an adoption lawyer asking "whether I had reason to worry that social services would go after my family and attempt to remove my oldest son, whom I adopted in 2000".

Masha Gessen wrote in February 2014 that Citibank had closed their bank account because of concern about Russian money-laundering operations.

Masha Gessen worked as a translator on the FX TV channel historical drama The Americans.

From 2020 to 2023, Masha Gessen taught as Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College.

In December 2023, it was reported that Masha Gessen's name appeared on the Russian Interior Ministry's online wanted list.

Masha Gessen was accused of spreading "false information" after discussing atrocities in the Ukrainian city of Bucha during an interview with Russian journalist Yury Dud.

In July 2024, Masha Gessen was convicted and sentenced in absentia to 8 years in prison.

Masha Gessen was critical of the Israeli bombings of the Gaza Strip, which they considered to be highly destructive and comparable to an Eastern European ghetto "being liquidated" by the Nazis.

In 2004, Masha Gessen married Svetlana Generalova, a Russian citizen who was involved in the LGBT movement in Moscow.

In 2024, Masha Gessen married Lynne Echenberg, special counsel for restorative justice in the Brooklyn District Attorney's office.

Masha Gessen tested positive for the BRCA mutation that is correlated with breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy in 2005.

CIA officer John Ehrman's review stated: "As a biography it is satisfactory, but no more than that" and "little of what Masha Gessen has to say is new".

The Washington Post called the book an "excellent" portrait of Pussy Riot and said that "Masha Gessen gives a particularly brilliant account of their trials".

The Los Angeles Times said that Masha Gessen was "Not just a keen observer of these events" but " an impassioned partisan".