Quotes from Masha Gessen

But reason was helpless against demagogy.

American political conversation had become a space free from imagination and aspiration. Rather than talk about the future, we talked about policy; rather than talk about what's right and just, we talked about what's realistic and lawful; rather than discuss values, we discussed strategies. It was this dull, neutral, largely hollow space that Trump so easily filled with his crudeness, cruelty, and lies.

American media effectively declared the Russian story dead

Before the Second World War, more than nine million Jews were living in Europe, most of them in lands that were or had been part of the Russian Empire.

In June 2001, George W. Bush met Putin for the first time, famously "looked the man in the eye," and "was able to get a sense of his soul.

Still, Berlin was the new center of Jewish intellectual and literary life. Writers and thinkers from the Russian Empire had fled there, and young and old now frequented the same cafés and competed for the same commissions from American Jewish publications—getting paid in dollars was the best way to survive Germany's galloping inflation. Dubnow

A movement exists to create change while a party strives to govern.

ON DECEMBER 31, 2010, Zhanna went to a protest with her father. For a year and a half now, activists had been gathering at Triumfalnaya Square in central Moscow on the thirty-first day of every month that had thirty-one days. They gathered to demand observance of Article 31 of the Russian Constitution

It was in May 1934 that the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR granted Birobidzhan the status of the Jewish Autonomous Region, a major step toward achieving the coveted status of a national republic, the apogee of Soviet-style autonomism. At

Our souls are permanently empty. We have grown to presume everyone guilty at all times, thus creating hundreds of thousands of guards watching over our morality, conscience, purity of world view, compliance with the wishes of the authorities. We have turned truth into a crime. We have robbed nature to within a

Science gradually yielded to propaganda, and as a result propaganda tended more and more to represent itself as science.

the Soviet Union's growing nationalist conservatism based on the glorification of some imaginary peasant class's traditional values.

a non-believing Jew may be counted as an adherent of Judaism so long as he does not identify himself with any other faith that conforms to his philosophical views.

She sometimes thought of herself as a sort of extraterritorial patriot: given a country, she would be proud, and given a uniform, she would serve. Instead, she was given Russia, which filled her heart with despair and her mind with the idea that life was not worth living.

On November 16, 2009, Sergei Magnitsky died in prison at the age of thirty-seven.

The ability to discuss things was still the most highly valued commodity in the Soviet Union.

There were no facts in her universe, and no issue of trust. There was power. Power demanded respect. Power conferred the right to speak and not be challenged. Being right was a question of power, not evidence.

He died of peritonitis.

Trump acted at once the emperor and the boy who said that the emperor has no clothes, ripping the illusory cover of decency off the system, forcing everyone to stare at its obscene nature. Unlike the emperor in the fairy tale, though, Trump felt no shame and so was not transformed by the exposure—rather, he transformed the system, once again stripping away the moral aspiration of politics.

Fomenko was a classic conspiracy theorist: he proved his assertions by way of relentlessly logical constructions based on random mathematical assumptions, and he dismissed all contrary evidence as falsification by his enemies.

Putin and his colleagues were reduced mainly to collecting press clippings, thus contributing to the growing mountains of useless information produced by the KGB.

The Agat Institute was a God- and state-forsaken outfit inhabited by dead souls and a few disoriented live ones like Yekaterina, who was put to work developing software for the weapons-control system of a nuclear submarine.

in 2003, when Khodorkovsky attempted to talk to Putin about corruption, the global organization Transparency International ranked Russia as more corrupt than 64 percent of the world's countries:

In its 2010 report, the organization showed Russia as more corrupt than 86 percent of the world: