Masha Gessen QUOTES

181 " A December 2018 study by MIT Media Lab showed that over the course of 2018, coverage of the movement of Central Americans toward the U.S. border had shed the words “refugee” and even “immigrant” and shifted instead to “migrant.” Study author Emily Boardman Ndulue wrote, “‘Migrants’ convey[s] individuals who are by nature itinerant, while ‘refugees’ impl[ies] those affected by situationally-forced migration, and ‘immigrants’ impl[ies] that the individuals will be entering and settling in the US. The media’s adoption of the phrase ‘migrant caravan’ and ‘migrants’ is further evidence of the adoption of Trump’s anti-immigrant framing and rhetoric. "

― Masha Gessen , Surviving Autocracy

182 " Yeltsin also knew, or thought he knew, that Putin would not allow the prosecution or persecution of Yeltsin himself once he retired. And if Yeltsin still possessed even a fraction of his once outstanding feel for politics, he knew that Russians would like this man they would be inheriting, and who would be inheriting them. "

― Masha Gessen , The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin

183 " The word “deterrence” comes from the language of crime prevention, and its use reinforces the view of asylum seekers as criminals. "

― Masha Gessen , Surviving Autocracy

184 " On August 9, 1999, Boris Yeltsin named Vladimir Putin prime minister of Russia. A week later he was confirmed in that position by a wide majority of the Duma: he proved just as likable, or at least unobjectionable, as Yeltsin had intuited. "

― Masha Gessen , The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin

185 " The television networks would broadcast these sessions live; the newspapers would report on them, and Trump’s other coronavirus-related pronouncements, as though they were the stuff of an intelligible presidency, with positions, principles, and a strategy. As a result, even as hospitals across the country buckled, people died, and the economy tanked, more than half of all Americans claimed to approve of Trump’s response to the pandemic. Some people compared the Trumpian response to COVID-19 to the Soviet government’s response to the catastrophic accident at the Chernobyl power plant in 1986. "

― Masha Gessen , Surviving Autocracy

186 " The message to Georgia—and any other post-Soviet country that might have wanted to follow its example—was, If you try to ally with NATO, you will lose lives and territory and will be assured NATO limbo in perpetuity. "

― Masha Gessen , The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

187 " America was the very definition of modernity; it was the country that Russia had failed to become. "

― Masha Gessen , The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

188 " But the people walking through Mexico were not an army or a hurricane. They were not even planning to cross the border illegally. International law guaranteed their right to seek asylum. The United States had an obligation to consider their claims. Trump did not have a moral or legal leg to stand on when he talked about deterring the asylum seekers, much less when he promised to send the military to stop them. But most of the media, across the political spectrum, were now standing right there with him. "

― Masha Gessen , Surviving Autocracy

189 " But then this aggressive anti-American stance was most pronounced among the better-educated, more-well-off respondents. This was the position of the newly emergent elite—the men in uniform and the neotraditionalists whom the Putin presidency had elevated.3 — "

― Masha Gessen , The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

190 " fortochka. It is a tiny window cut inside a larger pane. Even when windows have been sealed for the long winter, the fortochka can remain in use, being opened regularly to allow air to circulate. The Soviet university, as it turned out, had its fortochkas, and the way to learn was to hunt for them and then to stick your whole face in them and breathe the fresh air as though one’s lungs could be filled up with reserve supplies. "

― Masha Gessen , The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

191 " Trump’s campaign promise of a return to the imaginary past was largely a promise to transport Americans to a time when racism, misogyny, and xenophobia were mainstream attitudes. More than that: it was the promise of a new history in which a greater inclusivity not only had not happened but would never happen. "

― Masha Gessen , Surviving Autocracy

192 " Three political scientists from Texas compared hate-crime statistics from counties where Trump had held campaign rallies to demographically similar counties where rallies were not held—and concluded that Trump rallies were correlated with a 226 percent rise in hate crimes. "

― Masha Gessen , Surviving Autocracy

193 " The same day, Putin made one of his first television appearances. “We will hunt them down,” he said of the terrorists. “Wherever we find them, we will destroy them. Even if we find them in the toilet. We will rub them out in the outhouse. "

― Masha Gessen , The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin

194 " The damage done to American language is not yet nearly as profound as the century-long decimation of Russian under totalitarianism and Putinism, but the lessons of Russian journalists hold. Some words ought to be retired: “tremendous” can take a hiatus, for example. Essential words, in the debasement of which journalists have often been complicit, have to be rehabilitated before it’s too late. The word “politics,” or “political,” is an example. It ought to refer to the vital project of negotiating how we live together as a city, a state, or a country; of working across difference; of acting collectively. Instead, it is used to denote emptiness: hollow procedure, inflated rhetoric, tactical positioning are dismissed as “just politics.” But to use the word “politics,” or indeed any other word, and be believed, journalists will have to understand the words as meaningful and consequential. That, in turn, requires a reckoning not only with the damage Trumpism has inflicted on the public sphere but also with the conditions that made him so effective. "

― Masha Gessen , Surviving Autocracy

195 " Russian law in fact gives the prime minister no authority over the military. "

― Masha Gessen , The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin

196 " For a number of years, perhaps since the end of the Cold War, the language of ideals and principles had been fading from American political discourse too, giving way to the language of realism and action. "

― Masha Gessen , Surviving Autocracy

197 " In the collective prosecutorial mind our apologies are also apparently characterized as “so-called.” Though I find this insulting. It causes me suffering and moral harm. Because our apologies were sincere. I am so sad that we have said so many words and you have not understood any of them. Or are you lying when you talk of our apologies as though they were insincere? I don’t understand: What more do you need to hear? For me, only this trial can rightly be referred to as “so-called.” And I am not afraid of you. I am not afraid of lies and fictions and of poorly coded deception in the verdict of this so-called court, because all you can do is take away my so-called freedom, the only sort that exists in the Russian Federation. But no one can take away my inner freedom. It lives in my words and it will survive thanks to the public nature of my statements, which will be heard and read by thousands. This freedom is already multiplying, thanks to every caring person who hears us in this country. Thanks to everyone who has found splinters of this trial in themselves, as Franz Kafka and Guy Debord once did. I believe that openness and public speech and a hunger for the truth make us all a little bit freeer. We will see this yet. The "

― Masha Gessen , Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot

198 " Reporter Mary Louise Kelly went on the air to explain why she chose not to use the word in her story on Trump’s post-inauguration appearance at the CIA headquarters. She said that she checked the definition in the Oxford English Dictionary. “A false statement made with intent to deceive,” she said. “Intent being the key word there. Without the ability to peer into Donald Trump’s head, I can’t tell you what his intent was. I can tell you what he said and how that squares, or doesn’t, with facts. "

― Masha Gessen , Surviving Autocracy

199 " Mikhail Sergeevich, Some mathematical problems have no solution. They cannot be solved. Mathematics has methods for proving that a problem is unsolvable. Karabakh is such a problem. It cannot be solved. There is no optimal solution. Any conceivable solution will be unacceptable to one of the two sides.16 Alexander Nikolaevich wrote this note to Gorbachev in January 1988. For months, tension had been building between the republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan in the Caucasus concerning Nagorny Karabakh, an ethnic Armenian enclave that was part of Azerbaijan. This was the first region in the Soviet Union to cry foul in the nationalism/internationalism game. "

― Masha Gessen , The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

200 " In his farewell speech, President Obama addressed the “work of democracy,” the daily grind of change and the importance of the belief in the American experiment rather than the ideals on which the experiment is based. "

― Masha Gessen , Surviving Autocracy