WASHINGTON - Masha Gessen is a journalist, author and member of the democratic opposition to the government of Russian President .
She spoke recently with VOA’s Mark Snowiss about what she called the “third and final stage of Putin’s rule,” including “an all-out political crackdown that has led to the war with Ukraine” and a sustained assault on Russia’s beleaguered independent media.
Gessen writes in both Russian and English. In addition to books on Putin and the Russian feminist punk rock protest group , she has been a prolific contributor to such publications as , , the , , , , , , and .
She is a lesbian who has written extensively on and who founded the Pink Triangle Campaign for . She has been described as "Russia's leading LGBT rights activist."
Gessen is currently working on a book about the Tsarnaev brothers.
: Masha, thank you very much for coming to VOA and agreeing to talk to us.
Thank you for having me.
You’ve spent most of your career in Moscow, looking at Russian society from many different angles. So much is happening right now in Moscow — looking out at the world, toward Ukraine, things happening in the Middle East, the domestic political situation within this very dynamic, changing country. What’s something that leaps out at you, what strikes you having just come from Moscow back to the United States?
: So, what’s the one thing I want the world to know about Russia? I was actually most recently in Moscow in May — I'm still going back and forth. I moved to this country permanently in December, but I’m still reporting from Russia a fair amount. I think that what needs to be clear is that what Russia is going through now is sort of the third and final stage of [Russian President Vladimir] Putin's rule. It’s the final stage, the most dangerous, the scariest — it may last a very long time, it may not.
But everything up until now has been working up to this stage. The first stage of his regime, which probably was the first five years, was [about] destroying the democratic gains of the 1990s. It was actually very systematic: he disassembled the electoral system, the Kremlin took over the media. Over the course of five years, every level of elections was either cancelled entirely, like with the gubernatorial elections, or transformed beyond recognition. Then there was a period of affluence and stasis after that had gone into effect, and sort of a system of balance of fear and power and money had taken hold.
And now for the last two years we’ve been living through an all-out political crackdown that has led to the war with Ukraine — that’s the only word to call it — there’s a war between Russia and Ukraine. And that is leading to the agonizing death of all the independent media — what remains of the independent media in Russia. It’s an all-out crackdown on political dissent.
: What prompted the shift to the final phase? Do you think it was preconceived, or was it sort of a natural evolution?
: I think it's a natural evolution, [but] I think it was also fear — I mean [Putin] was terrified when the protests broke out, and because in his mind there’s no such thing as something that grows naturally. I mean he couldn’t actually conceive of a protest movement, or a protest culture, in the way that we conceive of it, and in the way that I think is right. People, for a variety of reasons — some because they’ve gotten wealthier and their priorities have changed, and some because they learned more about what was going on, and some because they just couldn’t take it any more — but for a variety of reasons, many people, from very different walks of life, and actually with a variety of political views, came together for these mass protests.
In Putin's mind that’s impossible. He sees everything as coming from above. So what’s actually happening in his mind is that he believes the Kremlin made grave mistakes that led to the appearance of the protest movement. That perhaps Vladislav Surkov, his former ideologue and main political operative, created too many movements, engineered too many groups, and some of them took on a life of their own.
: But, if I may, these mistakes you referred to probably, in Putin’s mind, went back a lot farther...the things he’s trying to correct.