M. Gessen

M. Gessen (formerly known as Masha Gessen; ) is a Russian American journalist, author, and translator who has written extensively on LGBT rights and authoritarian regimes. Gessen received the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Opinion Writing for their articles in The New York Times, which the Pulitzer committee called "an illuminating collection of reported essays on rising authoritarian regimes that draw on history and personal experience to probe timely themes of oppression, belonging and exile."

Gessen writes primarily in English but also in Russian. In addition to authoring more than 10 nonfiction books, Gessen has been an opinion columnist at The New York Times since May 2024 and was a staff writer at The New Yorker from 2017 to 2024. They have also contributed to The New York Review of Books, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, New Statesman, Granta, Slate, Vanity Fair, Harper's Magazine, and U.S. News & World Report. Early life and education Gessen was born into a Jewish family in Moscow in 1967 to Alexander and Yelena Gessen. and their father is a computer scientist specializing in forensics.

Gessen's paternal grandmother, Ester Goldberg, the daughter of a socialist mother and a Zionist father, was born in Białystok, Poland, in 1923 and emigrated to Moscow in 1940. Ester's father, Jakub Goldberg, died in 1943, in either the Białystok Ghetto or a Nazi concentration camp. As a Judenrat member, he was forced to assist the Nazis by, among other things, providing lists of Jews for deportation. As an adult in 1996, Gessen moved back to Moscow, where they worked as a journalist.

Journalism career

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.

Gessen served as a volunteer board member at PEN America for nine years, resigning in May 2023 after 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 by the event's Ukrainian participants. Gessen was vice president of the board at the time and remains a member of PEN America.

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

In an October 2008 profile of Vladimir Putin for Vanity Fair, Gessen called him "an aspiring thug" and claimed the "backward evolution" of Russia had begun within days of his inauguration in 2000.

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 toward journalists, and the depreciation of the ruble.

In March 2013, politician Vitaly Milonov promoted the Russian law against foreign adoption of Russian children by saying: "The Americans want to adopt Russian children and bring them up in perverted families like...Gessen's."

Dismissal from Vokrug sveta Gessen was dismissed as chief editor of Russia's oldest magazine, the popular-science journal Vokrug sveta, in September 2012 after refusing to send a reporter to cover a Russian Geographical Society event about nature conservation featuring Putin, because Gessen considered it political exploitation of environmental concerns. After Gessen tweeted about their firing, Putin phoned them and said he was serious about his "nature conservation efforts". At his invitation, Gessen met him and Gessen's former publisher at the Kremlin and was offered their job back. Gessen rejected the offer.

Radio Liberty

In September 2012, Gessen was appointed as director of the Russian Service for Radio Liberty, a U.S. government-funded broadcaster based in Prague. Shortly after their appointment was announced and a few days after Gessen met with Putin, more than 40 members of Radio Liberty's staff were fired. The station lost its Russian broadcasting license several weeks after Gessen took over. The degree of Gessen's involvement in these events is unclear, but has caused controversy.

In March of that year, "the St Petersburg legislator [Milonov] who had become a spokesman for the law [against 'homosexual propaganda' toward children] started mentioning me and my 'perverted family' in his interviews", and 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".

In a January 2014 interview with ABC News, Gessen claimed that the Russian gay propaganda law had "led to a huge increase in antigay violence, including murders. It's led to attacks on gay and lesbian clubs and film festivals ... and because these laws are passed supposedly to protect children, the people who are most targeted or have the most to fear are LGBT parents."

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

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

Since 2020, Gessen has intermittently taught in the Written Arts department as Distinguished Visiting Writer at Bard College.

Previously at Amherst College, they were named the John J. McCloy '16 Professor of American Institutions and International Diplomacy for the 2017–18 and 2018–19 academic years.

In October 2017, they published their tenth book, The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia.

In 2022, they were included in the Fast Company Queer 50 list.

Arrest warrant by Russia

In August 2023, Russia opened a criminal case against Gessen on charges of spreading "false information" about the Russian army's actions in Ukraine. In December 2023, it was reported that Gessen's name appeared on the Russian Interior Ministry's online wanted list. 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, Gessen was convicted and sentenced in absentia to 8 years in prison.

Award controversy In August 2023, the Heinrich Böll Foundation (HBS) announced that Gessen had won the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought. In December, days before the award was to be presented, the HBS said it planned to withdraw its support because it objected to Gessen's December 9 New Yorker essay In the Shadow of the Holocaust on German Holocaust memory and the Gaza war. In the essay, Gessen argued that Germany's remembrance culture regarding the Holocaust was being used as a "cynically wielded political instrument" by the Alternative for Germany (AfD) to target Muslim immigrants. Gessen was also critical of the Israeli bombings of the Gaza Strip, saying it was highly destructive and comparable to an Eastern European ghetto "being liquidated" by the Nazis. On December 16, Gessen received the award in a scaled-down ceremony.

Personal life Gessen is nonbinary and trans and uses they/them pronouns.

Gessen has dual Russian and U.S. citizenship. In 2004, they married Svetlana Generalova, a Russian citizen who was also involved in the LGBT movement in Moscow. The wedding took place in the U.S. Generalova and Gessen later divorced. By the time Gessen returned to the U.S. from Russia in December 2013, Gessen was married to Darya Oreshkina. In 2024, Gessen married Lynne Echenberg, special counsel for restorative justice in the Brooklyn District Attorney's office.

Gessen has three children.

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

Gessen came out as nonbinary in 2020 and began using they/them pronouns. 2012: Stora Journalistpriset (Swedish Grand Prize for Journalism), Guest of Honor 2013: Liberty Media Corporation, Media for Liberty award for their article "The Wrath of Putin," published in the April 2012 edition of Vanity Fair 2015: University of Michigan Wallenberg Medal, 24th recipient 2017: National Book Award for Nonfiction for The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia 2018: Hitchens Prize 2023: Hannah Arendt Prize 2024: Polk Award in Commentary for In the Shadow of the Holocaust 2026: Pulitzer Prize in Opinion Writing for several pieces

The New York Review of Books described the book as written in "beautifully clear and eloquent English", calling it "at heart a description of th secret police milieu" from which Putin originated and "also very good at evoking ... the culture and atmosphere within which he was raised, and the values he came to espouse". The Guardian called the book "luminous"; the Telegraph called it "courageous".

CIA officer John Ehrman wrote: "As a biography it is satisfactory, but no more than that" and "little of what Gessen has to say is new". Ehrman found Gessen's depiction of Putin as essentially a gangster and a mafia don to be an oversimplification, but concluded, "The image of Putin making offers no Russian can refuse is exactly what Gessen wants us to see and is effective as anti-Putin propaganda."

Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot

When this book was published in 2014, A. D. Miller wrote in the Telegraph that "even readers who do not share Gessen's esteem for Pussy Riot as artists will be convinced of their courage". Miller called Gessen "the right person to tell this story" and their journalistic approach "scrupulous and sensitive". Booklist called the book "prickly, frank, precise, and sharply witty".

The New York Times called it "urgent" and "damning". The Washington Post called the book an "excellent" portrait of Pussy Riot and said that "Gessen gives a particularly brilliant account of their trials". The Los Angeles Times said that Gessen was "Not just a keen observer of these events" but "also an impassioned partisan".

The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy

Published in April 2015 by Riverhead, The Brothers investigates the background of Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the perpetrators of the Boston Marathon bombing.