M. Gessen


M. Gessen is a Russian American journalist, author, and translator who has written extensively on LGBT rights.
Gessen writes primarily in English but also in Russian. In addition to authoring several nonfiction books, they have contributed to The New York Times, 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, The New Yorker, and U.S. News & World Report.
Gessen has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 2017 and an opinion columnist at The New York Times since May 2024.

Early life and education

Gessen was born into a Jewish family in Moscow to Alexander and Yelena Gessen.
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 concentration camp. As a Judenrat member he was forced to assist the Nazis by, among other things, providing lists of Jews for deportation.
Gessen's maternal grandmother, Rosalia Solodovnik, worked as a censor for the Stalinist government until she was fired during an antisemitic purge. Gessen's maternal grandfather, Samuil, was a committed Bolshevik who died during World War II, leaving Ruzya to raise Yelena alone.
In 1981, when Gessen was a teenager, their family moved via the U.S. Refugee Resettlement Program to the United States. As an adult in 1996, Gessen moved to Moscow, where they worked as a journalist. They hold both Russian and US citizenship. Their brothers are Keith, Daniel, and Philip Gessen.

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. Gessen was vice president of the board at the time and continues to be a member of PEN America.
Gessen said they understood the feelings of Ukrainian authors but did not approve of the way PEN handled the situation. They said: "I felt like I was being asked to tell these people that because they're Russians they can't sit at the big table; they have to sit at the little table off to the side … Which felt distasteful."
In an October 2008 profile of Vladimir Putin for Vanity Fair, Gessen called him "an aspiring thug" and claimed the "backward evolution" of Russia began 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, Vokrug sveta, a popular-science journal, in September 2012, after they refused to send a reporter to cover a Russian Geographical Society event about nature conservation featuring President Putin, because Gessen considered it political exploitation of environmental concerns. After Gessen tweeted about their firing, Putin phoned them and claimed 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.

Return to the U.S.

In December 2013, 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 who had become a spokesman for the law 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".
The lawyer told Gessen "to instruct my son to run if he is approached by strangers and concluding: 'The answer to your question is at the airport.'" In June 2013, Gessen was beaten up outside of the Parliament; they said of the incident: "I realized that in all my interactions, including professional ones, I no longer felt I was perceived as a journalist first: I am now a person with a pink triangle." They said, "a court would easily decide to annul Vova's adoption, and I wouldn't even know it". Given this potential threat to their family, Gessen "felt like no risk was small enough to be acceptable", they later told the CBC Radio. "So we just had to get out."
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.
, Gessen taught as a distinguished professor at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. From 2020 to 2023, Gessen taught as Distinguished Writer in Residence 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 10th book The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia. They were included in the 2022 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 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 was withdrawing 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 to target Muslim immigrants. Gessen was also critical of the Israeli bombings of the Gaza Strip, which they considered highly destructive and comparable to an Eastern European ghetto "being liquidated" by the Nazis. On December 16, Gessen received the Hannah Arendt literary prize 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—two sons and a daughter. Their eldest son was born in 1997 in Russia and was adopted by Gessen from an orphanage for the children of HIV-positive women in Kaliningrad. Their daughter was born to Gessen in the U.S. in 2001. Their third child, a son, was born in 2012.
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 at that time. Of their childhood, Gessen has said: "I remember, at the age of five hoping that I would wake up a boy. A real boy. I had people address me by a boy's name. My parents, fortunately, were incredibly game. They were totally fine with it." As a child, Gessen used the male-denoting verb forms, a feature of Russian grammar in which past-stem verbs denote the grammatical gender of the subject of the sentence, but as a teenager they switched to female-denoting verb forms. In a Russian-language interview, Gessen said they continue to use the female form of verbs when speaking Russian.

Awards