YouSaid · the spoken record

Masha Gessen

lines on the record: 87
first: 2019-08-14
most recent: 2019-08-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“But five and a half years ago, yeah, the anti-gay campaign started. I was at the time parenting three children with a woman. And the state was threatening to take my oldest son who is adopted away. And that didn't leave me any choice. He packed up and left.”
2019-08-14 · Conversations with Tyler · M. Gessen on the Ins and Outs of Russia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Made it feel like those conversations would have consequences. And so it was irresistible to me as a journalist. So I started going back and forth and after a couple of years I realized I should stop paying rent here and just move to Moscow.”
2019-08-14 · Conversations with Tyler · M. Gessen on the Ins and Outs of Russia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And feeling physically comfortable in a way that I never did in New York. And I love the city, right? But somehow just the way the light fell, the way that the air smelled, everything about it was so comfortable. And I've talked since to many people who went back to their childhood countries, not necessarily Russia. It is a sensation that catches you unaware as often and that is incredibly powerful. So that was part of it. It's not like I was walking around and thought, oh my God, I'm going to move back. This is home, not at all, but it was very powerful. And the other thing was that it was the most interesting place in the world. It was March 1991. The Soviet Union still existed, but it was in such turmoil and people were having such important conversations. And they were having them in a way that actually”
2019-08-14 · Conversations with Tyler · M. Gessen on the Ins and Outs of Russia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I was 24 when I first went back. So I was already a journalist. And I just went back on a story. And I thought, what? I mean, first of all, I was blown away by feeling at home, which is something I didn't expect. I had moved here when I was 14. I had no sort of sentimental attachment to Russia at that point. I really expected to feel like a foreign country where I was reporting, and I just happened to speak the language.”
2019-08-14 · Conversations with Tyler · M. Gessen on the Ins and Outs of Russia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think that it's part of the culture, it's part of the literary culture, it's part, it's part of the narrative. It is also a function of powerlessness. And I think that it's, you know, according to Hannah Arendt, the defining condition of totalitarianism is loneliness. I think she is exactly right in her diagnosis. I think this is something that is often overlooked in her writing, but it's an incredible sort of humanistic discovery that I think she made in writing about totalitarianism. And I think that if you read, you know, when I teach Russian literature, I teach it through that lens, right? A 20th century Russian literature, the lens of loneliness. And when we also look at some of the social phenomena in Russia, a lot of them are, you know, like for example excess mortality are explainable through mass depression.”
2019-08-14 · Conversations with Tyler · M. Gessen on the Ins and Outs of Russia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Certainly not the friendliest, and I thought, you know, Americans were bizarre. I mean, they would say hello to you in the street for no reason. And yeah, I found them very unreasonably friendly. I think that there's a kind of grumpy and dark culture in Russia. Russians certainly have a lot of discernment in the fine chains of misery. Russians do not cheerfully, you know, if you ask a Russian how they are, they will not cheerfully respond by saying they're great. And if they're miserable, they might actually share that with you in some detail. There's no shame in being miserable in Russia. There's, in fact, there's a lot of validation. And, you know, read a Russian novel. You'll find it all in there. We really are connoisseurs of depression.”
2019-08-14 · Conversations with Tyler · M. Gessen on the Ins and Outs of Russia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, people in Russia certainly do not smile as much. And yes, when I moved here in 1981, I thought Americans were so strange. And, you know, we moved to Boston, not the smilest city in this country. Quite contrary.”
2019-08-14 · Conversations with Tyler · M. Gessen on the Ins and Outs of Russia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Likely to take responsibility, and we really saw this after the Soviet Union collapsed or even during Perestroika, when men who lost their jobs and lost their bearings would often, and I'm trafficking stereotypes, but they are rooted in research. Men would stay at home and feel useless and lost, and women would go out and get new careers and new professions and new training and figure out ways to make money because they had to ultimately support the family. But what's your hypothesis?”
2019-08-14 · Conversations with Tyler · M. Gessen on the Ins and Outs of Russia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But of course, at home, they also did all the housework. And housework in the Soviet Union was not doing housework in the United States. It was washing clothes by hand, often in a communal bathroom or a communal bathhouse, was cooking in a communal kitchen. It was getting food products in conditions of extreme shortages. It was like this constant battle for survival and for the survival of one's family. And I think that that made women strong, productive, and created a kind of matriarchal family that wouldn't exist if women weren't also breadwinners on par with men. But also, I think there may be something about women that is just more adaptable and more”
2019-08-14 · Conversations with Tyler · M. Gessen on the Ins and Outs of Russia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where does that come from? I think that comes from life. Look, you know, part of the Soviet experiment was this very strange gender equality ideology. It was an enforced ideology. It was top down. So it was women were almost equally represented in the workforce to men.”
2019-08-14 · Conversations with Tyler · M. Gessen on the Ins and Outs of Russia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Run a fairly traditional campaign, organizing campaign where he just traveled the country and met with people. And he'd get to a town and the hall that they had rented would be shut down and he wouldn't be able to talk to people or like every person who was supposed to meet with him would have gotten a threatening phone call. I mean, he couldn't do that kind of grassroots level organizing that he set out to do and that he put all his resources and money toward Alexey Navalny, the anti-corruption campaigner, has shown how you can do organizing in a country that has destroyed a public sphere. And basically, you know, it's through the internet, it's through creating your own kind of media universe, which in a sense is what Donald Trump has done as well, right? But I think there are great limitations even to that strategy. But that's not what...”
2019-08-14 · Conversations with Tyler · M. Gessen on the Ins and Outs of Russia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was a friend of mine. He is, you know, and I think he is absolutely brilliant and he is also charismatic. I actually went on the road with him for a bit in, I guess, 2005. And when I was done, I thought, you know, I came home and I literally said to my partner, I said, you know, I want to quit journalism and go work for him. He's amazing. He has an understanding of the world and politics. And people, like no one I've ever met, he is the smartest person I know. I just want to work for Gary. And so it's actually painful to see him living in exile on a pro-West side and having not just failed, right? I mean, anybody can fail in trying to overthrow a regime, but really having failed to make a dent. I mean, I think that most of it is that Putin controls the public sphere, right? Gary tried to”
2019-08-14 · Conversations with Tyler · M. Gessen on the Ins and Outs of Russia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so at that point, I felt like I had constructed him. And it was like getting a phone call from the protagonist of your novel who says, I want to meet. And then you really want to see whether you got it right. And part of me wanted him to be exactly like the person in the book. And part of me wanted him to be different. Part of me wanted to make a discovery, to have him be more interesting, more deep, more human, because, you know, the guy in my book was pretty two-dimensional. And he was that. He was completely two-dimensional.”
2019-08-14 · Conversations with Tyler · M. Gessen on the Ins and Outs of Russia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get on G chat. And so she got on G chat and I said, you know, Putin just called me and he wants to meet. And she said, well, I'm really scared for you. I'm like, are you kidding? She said, how are you feeling? And I said, well, I would be more excited if it had been Paraman, but this is really good. Perilman was the first person that I wrote a book about who didn't talk to me, and Pussin was the second. So, you know, it was the sense of meeting a character from your book. It's like, because the experience of writing nonfiction isn't that different from writing fiction in the sense that you have all this available information, then you construct a character to the best of your ability based on the available information.”
2019-08-14 · Conversations with Tyler · M. Gessen on the Ins and Outs of Russia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, you know, some history. I met Putin about six months after publishing an unauthorized biography of him that came out in about 20 languages and became a bestseller in many of them. And he didn't know about the book. So that was really interesting because, you know, and it's obvious why he didn't know about the book in order for him to know about the book, someone would have had to tell him about the book. And nobody wanted to be that person. But my experience of meeting him, you know, he called me and said that he wanted to meet for different reason, that it had nothing to do with the book. I couldn't tell anybody about it because I was afraid of having the meeting cancelled. So I just texted, I was in Prague that day. I texted my editor in New York and said, you know, I have to talk to you.”
2019-08-14 · Conversations with Tyler · M. Gessen on the Ins and Outs of Russia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All right, well, let's say 50 50. You know, either he leaves the office alive or he leaves office dead. I think he plans to be in office for life.”
2019-08-14 · Conversations with Tyler · M. Gessen on the Ins and Outs of Russia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, because Russian society has reconstituted itself as a totalitarian society, poverty and scarcity are actually very good for totalitarian societies. They maintain that sense of mobilization that's essential. For totalitarian societies, right? And this is actually not my idea, but I think it has a lot of merit, this idea that the mass protests in Russia that we saw in 2011, 2012 were partly a function of prosperity. People lived well enough that they had the luxury of demanding good governance. When you're constantly worried about your survival, You do not actually engage proactively in politics.”
2019-08-14 · Conversations with Tyler · M. Gessen on the Ins and Outs of Russia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, they're inextricably linked. I mean, he measures his money in power and his power in money, right? But he has applied force when he has encountered resistance. And the application of that force has created totalitarian type conditions in Russian society. But he is really, I mean, he has not created terror. He has created selective enforcement. And he has gone after signal enemies and random people in order to create a sense that he controls the country and to minimize the possibility of any kind of resistance.”
2019-08-14 · Conversations with Tyler · M. Gessen on the Ins and Outs of Russia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've never thought of it in terms of constraint. I think that he has a natural sort of inclination for economy, an economy of means. He is not a totalitarian type leader in the sense that he wants to exert only as much forces as necessary to continue accumulating money in power.”
2019-08-14 · Conversations with Tyler · M. Gessen on the Ins and Outs of Russia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, actually, Erdogan has also managed to traffic anti-gas sentiment quite effectively. I mean, this is a theme that we're seeing really in common among many autocrats in the world right now. And the fact that it's not surprising that hatred is getting traction. Campaigns of hatred get traction, especially when you control all the media in the country. I mean, how could it not get traction, right? And it's particularly effective, of course, because there was no language, there was no conversation really about sexuality before that campaign began. So it wasn't pushing back against anything that existed. It was just occupying a vacuum. Once the Kremlin started a conversation about sexuality, it owned it.”
2019-08-14 · Conversations with Tyler · M. Gessen on the Ins and Outs of Russia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not at all. I think that the anti-gay campaign that has been a centerpiece of Russian politics for the last now seven years, it's completely Kremlin manufactured. I think most Russians had never given the subject any thought, which is, of course, why it's so effective.”
2019-08-14 · Conversations with Tyler · M. Gessen on the Ins and Outs of Russia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People who came here, who are much more numerous, who came here starting in about 1990 and basically through that decade, who I think are the people you're referring to, they were fleeing the collapse of the empire. They were not running away from the Soviet Union. They were not leaving Russia. They were leaving that sense of extreme instability and uncertainty that was created by the end of the Soviet Union. So, to them, there's no contradiction between liking Putin who came in and said, I'm going to take you back to that imagined stability and predictability of the Soviet Union. There's no contradiction between that and what they felt when they were leaving. So I think it's perfectly logical that they support him.”
2019-08-14 · Conversations with Tyler · M. Gessen on the Ins and Outs of Russia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that among Russian emigrants, it's actually a very specific thing, which is that there have been distinct waves of Russian immigration. My parents and I came here in 1981 as part of the Jewish immigration, and we were fleeing the Soviet Union. My parents made the decision to step into the abyss they knew nothing about the West or what was going to happen to them here. They thought they would never be able to see their friends and relatives in the Soviet Union. And they made this decision to get out of the Soviet Union because it was so important for them to leave the Soviet Union.”
2019-08-14 · Conversations with Tyler · M. Gessen on the Ins and Outs of Russia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then Russia had something that no other country has had, which is the longest totalitarian experiment in history. And that's a 20th century phenomenon, and it's a very specific set of conditions. And so I don't think I don't read Russian history as this history of Russians always want a strong hand, which is a very traditional way of looking at it. I think that Russia add breaking points when it could have developed a democracy or a semi-democracy actually started this totalitarian experiment. And what we're looking at now is the aftermath of the totalitarian experiment.”
2019-08-14 · Conversations with Tyler · M. Gessen on the Ins and Outs of Russia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I mean, I tend to read Russian history a little bit differently in the sense that I don't think it's a continuous history of unfreedom. I think that Russia was, like a lot of other countries, a lot of empires in being a tyranny up until the early 20th century”
2019-08-14 · Conversations with Tyler · M. Gessen on the Ins and Outs of Russia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a great question. I don't know the answer. It is true, and it's very odd to me because I've had kids, my older kids were educated partly in Russia and partly here, and my youngest son is now in elementary school here. I mean, I find it pretty disorienting that every year Americans reshuffle their classes and sort of put kids in a new social situation. There's something amazing to having gone through life from the time you were six or seven with the same people. I think it can foster really incredible friendships. It can also foster awful dynamics, obviously.”
2019-08-14 · Conversations with Tyler · M. Gessen on the Ins and Outs of Russia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're missing the alcohol here tonight. But, you know, if you're going to really get down, it's at 3 a.m., 4 a.m. proposition. You can't just have dinner and go home. So then I realized this was really a way to be very productive because I could go back to work. I write at night. So I could work after seeing friends, which was amazing. But something that I had never experienced in Russia. I think that maybe that's what you're referring to. Maybe you're just referring to sort of the emotional intensity of Russian friendship, where it's hard, you know, it's like lovers even in this country don't really drift apart usually. You kind of have to break up. You can't just stop calling and... and go from talking every day to talking every few weeks and then forget about each other's existence.”
2019-08-14 · Conversations with Tyler · M. Gessen on the Ins and Outs of Russia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's interesting. I don't know that I agree, but I think that, and this may answer your question, Russian friendships are much more emotional and intense than American friendships. I mean, when I move back to this country five and a half years ago, it was like the sense of whiplash because, you know, I had a lot of friends here, but I had been absent for 20 years. And then I would get together with my friends. And then two hours later, I would get together with Be Over. And I'm like, well, what was the point of that? Was that just to like let each other know that we still exist? Because you don't really get into a deep conversation until about four hours in, right? And, you know, a number of bottles of alcohol. And if you're going to”
2019-08-14 · Conversations with Tyler · M. Gessen on the Ins and Outs of Russia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He claims to not be doing mathematics. And last I heard he was going to move to Sweden where his sister lives, but I haven't had it confirmed that he moved there. But the conditions that clearly allowed him to create his proof were conditions of solitude and calm in St. Petersburg. Would he have done the same thing at Princeton? Would he have found those conditions? Probably. I don't know that it would have made much of a difference.”
2019-08-14 · Conversations with Tyler · M. Gessen on the Ins and Outs of Russia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we don't know. There's little evidence that he would have enjoyed teaching. So, you know, basically the conditions that allowed him to, for those who don't know, I assume everybody knows who Grigory Paramon is, he proved a pull incorrect conjecture and published his solution on the web without any explication. It took three groups of mathematicians about three years each to actually delve into his proof and conclude that yes, in fact, it worked. And since then, Perelman, who turned down the million dollar prize, has basically disappeared.”
2019-08-14 · Conversations with Tyler · M. Gessen on the Ins and Outs of Russia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think that that goes some way to explaining why so many people came from math and physics and the exact sciences. And these days when I look at Greta Thunberg, who I was actually, I'm pretty sure the first American journalist to interview her, the now 16-year-old Swedish girl who went on school strike and has started this worldwide climate change movement. She is diagnosed with autism and she's very, very clear about talking about how intolerable she finds life with the way that adults are not acting rationally in the face of climate change and how for her it is an absolute necessity to confront it. And I really recognize that spirit of Soviet dissonance.”
2019-08-14 · Conversations with Tyler · M. Gessen on the Ins and Outs of Russia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The opposite option was to confront those contradictions, but to basically be thrown out of society, to be an extreme discomfort. So think about the type of person who would prefer the discomfort of being completely ostracized to the discomfort of living inside the tension.”
2019-08-14 · Conversations with Tyler · M. Gessen on the Ins and Outs of Russia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, well, I don't know the answer. I can tell you my personal hypothesis. So my hypothesis is that for people who are both trained and inclined to think in rigorously logical ways, it is particularly difficult to adapt to the Soviet system of double think. And I think that now when we talk about this kind of inclination now, I think we talk about people being sort of spectrumy and neurologically different and therefore having difficulty with sort of the illogical or rational ways of life. I think we can retroactively diagnose a lot of dissidents with that. Because basically what we're talking about is there is the conditions of being, not just survival, but of being reasonably comfortable while living in the Soviet Union were the conditions of double think. You had to be able to live inside untenable contradictions all the time.”
2019-08-14 · Conversations with Tyler · M. Gessen on the Ins and Outs of Russia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was part of the system, whether it matters for math, we don't know, but we know that the extraordinary Soviet mathematician Andrei Kalmagorov, who designed the Soviet mathematics education system, he had this idea that it had to be like what he imagined Greek schools to have been like. So he felt that a good literary education, a high level of physical culture and mathematics were the keys to success.”
2019-08-14 · Conversations with Tyler · M. Gessen on the Ins and Outs of Russia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, there's some debate about that. The Soviets were certainly extremely good at math competitions, both in the country and internationally, right? I mean, I can't, it's been many years since I wrote about this, so I can't now remember the statistics. But basically, you know, there were always either winners of the Math Olympics or somewhere in the top three. But if you look at it, I mean, it was a great feeder system for the weapons industry, but you didn't see a whole lot of research mathematicians come out of the math competition system. They seem to pretty much in parallel tracks.”
2019-08-14 · Conversations with Tyler · M. Gessen on the Ins and Outs of Russia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Privileged and lived in these sort of incubator conditions. And it was amazing because it was really the only area in the Soviet Union where intellectualism was prized and privileged. So drew probably a broader range of people than just kids who were interested in mathematics.”
2019-08-14 · Conversations with Tyler · M. Gessen on the Ins and Outs of Russia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it mathematics was particularly good in the second half of the 20th century. And basically because of their arms race, because the Soviet Union realized, you know, World War II created the conditions for the Soviet Union to become a superpower. And they realized very quickly that the to make that happen was to develop weapons technology. And so there was a huge organizing and recruitment effort around the country to find kids who were particular math aptitude yanked them out of wherever they were living, put them in specialized boarding schools or specialized schools in their city if they lived in a big city give them an elite mathematics education, but actually a broad education, but with a focus on mathematics, put them through excellent colleges and then create conditions in science towns for them to live. I mean, they were truly...”
2019-08-14 · Conversations with Tyler · M. Gessen on the Ins and Outs of Russia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source