142
" What can a state institution teach us? In what way can I be reformed by a penal colony and you by, say, Russian TV Channel 1? In his Nobel lecture, Joseph Brodsky said, ‘The more substantial an individual’s aesthetic experience is, the sounder his taste, the sharper his moral focus, the freer—though not necessarily the happier—he is.’ We in Russia once again find ourselves in a situation where resistance, especially aesthetic resistance, becomes the only viable moral choice as well as a civic duty.” Nadya "
― Masha Gessen , Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot
144
" When some of the post-Soviet societies developed in unexpected ways, language impaired our ability to understand the process. We talked about whether they had a free press, for example, or free and fair elections. But noting that they did not, as Magyar has said, is akin to saying that the elephant cannot swim or fly: it doesn’t tell us much about what the elephant is. Now the same thing was happening in the United States; we were using the language of political disagreement, judicial procedure, or partisan discussion to describe something that was crushing the system that such terminology was invented to describe. Magyar spent about a decade devising a new model, and a new language, to describe what was happening in his country. He coined the term “mafia state,” and described it as a specific, clan-like system in which one man distributes money and power to all other members. He then developed the concept of autocratic transformation, which proceeds in three stages: autocratic attempt, autocratic breakthrough, and autocratic consolidation. It occurred to me that these were words that American culture could now borrow, in an appropriate symbolic reversal of 1989: these terms appear to describe our reality better than any words in the standard American political lexicon. Magyar had analyzed the signs and circumstances of this process in post-Communist countries and proposed a detailed taxonomy. But how it might happen in the United States was uncharted territory. "
― Masha Gessen , Surviving Autocracy
145
" Then the pogroms started. Not that they had ever stopped. Still, the Jews had not seen brutality on this scale in nearly four centuries. During the civil war of 1918-22, the different entities that called themselves the White Army, each led by its own general, attacked the Jews for their perceived support of the Bolsheviks and disloyalty to the czar. The self-proclaimed Ukrainian national army, commanded by Symon Petlyura, attacked the Jews for being Jews. The anarchists, led by Nestor Makhno, engaged in random violence, as did a long list of what were essentially roaming gangs. In all, more than two thousand pogroms were carried out in the three years following the Bolshevik revolution, killing nearly two hundred thousand Jews and leaving half a million homeless. "
― Masha Gessen , Where the Jews Aren't: The Sad and Absurd Story of Birobidzhan, Russia's Jewish Autonomous Region
147
" 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
