Masha Gessen

Putin's biographer reveals how, in the space of a generation, Russia surrendered to a more virulent and invincible new strain of autocracy.

How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

The Future is History

"An analysis of the destruction the Trump administration has waged on our institutions, the cultural norms we hoped would save us, and our very sense of identity"--

Surviving Autocracy

Relates the story of the mathematical genius who solved one of the world's greatest intellectual puzzles--the Poincarâe conjecture--but could not cope with the reality of human affairs, causing him to withdraw first from the field he loved, and then fromthe world in general.

A Genius and the Mathematical Breakthrough of the Century

Perfect Rigor

In 1929, the Soviet Union declared the area of Birobidzhan a homeland for Jews. It was championed by a group of intellectuals who envisioned a place of post-oppression Jewish culture, and by the early 1930s, tens of thousands of Jews had moved there from the shtetls. The state-building ended quickly, in the late 1930s, with arrests and purges of the Communist Party and cultural elite, but after the Second World War, the newly named "Jewish Autonomous Region" received an influx of Jews dispossessed from what had once been the Pale, most of whom had lost families in the Holocaust. In the late 1940s, another wave of arrests swept through Birobidzhan, traumatizing the Jews into silence, and effectively making them invisible. Now Masha Gessen gives us a haunting account of the dream of Birobidzhan-and how it became

The Sad and Absurd Story of Birobidzhan, Russia's Jewish Autonomous Region

Where the Jews Aren't

Drawing on access to the band's members and their families and associates, recreates the feminist punk activists' fierce act of political confrontation in Moscow, which made national headlines as they were punished for their act of defiance.

The Passion of Pussy Riot

Words Will Break Cement

Documents the Russian prime minister's rapid ascent from a low-level KGB operative to the presidency, describing his selection by an ailing Boris Yeltsin's oligarchy and the ways in which the author believes that his views and ambitions have renewed Russia's threatening position to its citizens and the world. By the author of Perfect Rigor. Reprint. 35,000 first printing.

The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin

The Man Without a Face

From Inherited Illness to Designer Babies, How the World and I Found Ourselves in the Future of the Gene

Blood Matters

In 2006, an eccentric Russian mathematician named Grigori Perelman solved one of the world's greatest intellectual puzzles. The Poincare conjecture is an extremely complex topological problem that had eluded the best minds for over a century. In 2000, the Clay Institute in Boston named it one of seven great unsolved mathematical problems, and promised a million dollars to anyone who could find a solution. Perelman was awarded the prize this year - and declined the money. Journalist Masha Gessen was determined to find out why. Drawing on interviews with Perelman's teachers, classmates, coaches, teammates, and colleagues in Russia and the US - and informed by her own background as a math whiz raised in Russia - she set out to uncover the nature of Perelman's astonishing abilities. In telling his story, Masha Gessen has constructed a gripping and tragic tale that sheds rare light on the unique burden of genius.

A Genius and the Mathematical Breakthrough of a Lifetime

Perfect Rigour

searching for Stalin's gulags in Putin's Russia

Never remembers

How My Grandmothers Survived Hitler's War and Stalin's Peace

Ester and Ruzya

Describes how Russian intellectuals strove to retain their integrity under communism, discusses how they have attempted to adapt to a new society that ignores them, and considers the situation of the youngest generation of graduates

The Russian Intelligentsia After Communism

Dead Again

In this “extraordinary family memoir,”* the National Book Award–winning author of The Future Is History reveals the story of her two grandmothers, who defied Fascism and Communism during a time when tyranny reigned. *The New York Times Book Review In the 1930s, as waves of war and persecution were crashing over Europe, two young Jewish women began separate journeys of survival. Ester Goldberg was a rebel from Bialystok, Poland, where virtually the entire Jewish community would be sent to Hitler’s concentration camps. Ruzya Solodovnik was a Russian-born intellectual who would become a high-level censor under Stalin’s regime. At war’s end, both women found themselves in Moscow. Over the years each woman had to find her way in a country that aimed to make every citizen a cog in the wheel of murder and repression. One became a hero in her children’s and grandchildren’s eyes; the other became a collaborator. With grace, candor, and meticulous research, Masha Gessen, one of the most trenchant observers of Russia and its history today, peels back the layers of time to reveal her grandmothers’ lives—and to show that neither story is quite what it seems. Praise for Masha Gessen “One of the most important activists and journalists Russia has known in a generation.”—David Remnick, The New Yorker “Masha Gessen is humbly erudite, deftly unconventional, and courageously honest.”—Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny

As Duas Babushkas

Hillary Huber

The Road to an American Tragedy

The Brothers

Misha Friedman

The Belarus Free Theatre and the Art of Resistance

Svetlana and Nadezhda

Contemporary Fiction by Russian Women

Half a Revolution

National Book Award winner Masha Gessen's biography of a ruthless man's ascent to near-absolute power. “In a country where journalists critical of the government have a way of meeting untimely deaths, Ms. Gessen has shown remarkable courage in researching and writing this unflinching indictment of the most powerful man in Russia.” —The Wall Street Journal The Man Without a Face is the chilling account of how a low- level, small-minded KGB operative ascended to the Russian presidency and, in an astonishingly short time, destroyed years of progress and made his country once more a threat to her own people and to the world. Handpicked as a successor by the "family" surrounding an ailing and increasingly unpopular Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin seemed like a perfect choice for the oligarchy to shape according to its own designs. Suddenly the boy who had stood in the shadows, dreaming of ruling the world, was a public figure, and his popularity soared. Russia and an infatuated West were determined to see the progressive leader of their dreams, even as he seized control of media, sent political rivals and critics into exile or to the grave, and smashed the country's fragile electoral system, concentrating power in the hands of his cronies. As a journalist living in Moscow, Masha Gessen experienced this history firsthand, and for The Man Without a Face she has drawn on information and sources no other writer has tapped. Her account of how a "faceless" man maneuvered his way into absolute—and absolutely corrupt—power is the definitive biography of Vladimir Putin.

“When Gessen speaks about autocracy, you listen.” —The New York Times “A reckoning with what has been lost in the past few years and a map forward with our beliefs intact.” —Interview As seen on MSNBC’s Morning Joe and heard on NPR’s All Things Considered: the bestselling, National Book Award–winning journalist offers an essential guide to understanding, resisting, and recovering from the ravages of our tumultuous times. This incisive book provides an essential guide to understanding and recovering from the calamitous corrosion of American democracy over the past few years. Thanks to the special perspective that is the legacy of a Soviet childhood and two decades covering the resurgence of totalitarianism in Russia, Masha Gessen has a sixth sense for the manifestations of autocracy—and the unique cross-cultural fluency to delineate their emergence to Americans. Gessen not only anatomizes the corrosion of the institutions and cultural norms we hoped would save us but also tells us the story of how a short few years changed us from a people who saw ourselves as a nation of immigrants to a populace haggling over a border wall, heirs to a degraded sense of truth, meaning, and possibility. Surviving Autocracy is an inventory of ravages and a call to account but also a beacon to recovery—and to the hope of what comes next.

In an effort to determine why the atrocity occurred, the author traces the lives of the two immigrant brothers responsible for the Boston Marathon bombings.

Masha Gessen

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