Masha Gessen

“Every time I talk to somebody about Putin, it's like, 'But isn't he vastly popular?' Is that really the most important question? I mean, we can unpack his popularity. I think it's manufactured. I think it's manufactured through totalitarian mechanisms.”

“When your doctor and neighbours and child's schoolteachers know you are gay, there is no closet for you to hide in.”

“For years I was the only publicly out gay person who was not a full-time gay activist: my position as a quasi-foreigner gave me a privileged perch, and my ability to earn money by writing for western publications made me almost impervious to discrimination. Other Russians were not in a hurry to come out.”

“To exercise ignorance, racist prejudice, a love of power and total disregard for factual accuracy, one has to inhabit a world where everything can mean anything and nothing is certain.”

“I think Donald Trump was brought to power by Americans. They voted for him.”

“I worked both as a Russian journalist and an American journalist and ran a bunch of magazines in Moscow over the course of about 20 years.”

“I have experienced power as a journalist. On three different occasions, when I wrote about individual immigrants or refugees, the article - or, in one case, my presence in the courtroom - appeared to positively change the outcome of their cases.”

“I wanted to show something that Americans don't usually think about when they think about Russia, which is the extreme stratification of Soviet society.”

“Since 9/11 we have somehow come to accept the 'radicalization' narrative, which basically holds that people become terrorists through a series of consecutive, traceable steps laid out for them by large international Islamic organizations. Reality is messier, and also smaller.”

“Both Trump and Putin use language primarily to communicate not facts or opinions but power: it's not what the words mean that matters but who says them and when. This makes it impossible to negotiate with them and very difficult for journalists to cover them.”

“I've learned over the years to hear what Putin is railing against in his own railing way.”

“If human rights are an attribute of being human, then we must consider the fact that tens of millions of displaced people around the world have been rendered less than human.”

“Fact checking Donald Trump is a really... It is kind of fun but it is ungratifying because nothing checks out.”

“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. Then Russia had something that no other country has had, which is the longest totalitarian experiment in history.”

“I think that Putin's strategy has been throwing a lot of money, fairly haphazardly, at a lot of projects aimed at disrupting Western relations and undermining trust in democracies. They may have gotten farther in the States than anywhere else.”

“I think there was certainly contact between the Trump campaign and Russians, which is perfectly normal. All campaigns in the modern age have contact with representatives of foreign governments.”

“I don't have a lot of hope for Russia when Putin goes, because I think that the kind of damage that has been done to that country hasn't been understood. We've never seen a country that has been this battered.”

“Dictators fall when they're overconfident; they stay in power when they're paranoid.”

“It's not just that both Putin and Trump lie, it is that they lie in the same way and for the same purpose: blatantly, to assert power over truth itself.”

“Soviet mathematics was particularly good in the second half of the 20th century, basically because of the arms race, because the Soviet Union realized... World War II created the conditions for the Soviet Union to become a superpower.”