Quotes from Masha Gessen

The truth was too primitive and too bloody.

The truth of the matter is that we are careening into our darkest moment yet, and we look ridiculous doing it.

You know, I think that a conversation about what Facebook is - is it a public resource, even though it's a privately owned corporation? Is it a media company? It is certainly not just a platform, as Facebook has claimed repeatedly. I think that is a really important question.

To effectively create the image of an enemy you have to show first of all that the enemy is extremely dangerous, but on the other hand less than human.

St. Petersburg, under the czars, had been a grand city. It was a planned city, and it had - there were all these Parisian architects who had been brought in to build the apartment buildings in the center of town.

Autocratic power requires the degradation of moral authority - not the capture of moral high ground.

I would much rather engage people in a conversation about deregulation and reversals of women's rights and civil rights and LGBT rights than conversations about Russian interference.

I was a political journalist for a long time. I wrote a book about Putin. I made all kinds of trouble.

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 doublethink.

I think that Russian meddling in the election is an important issue.

We learn to think of history as something that has already happened, to other people. Our own moment, filled as it is with minutiae destined to be forgotten, always looks smaller in comparison.

There aren't a lot of things that are extraordinary about Putin, but his greed is truly extraordinary.

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.

Russians didn't elect Trump. Even if there was collusion, even if every hypothesis that has - that is at play in the Russia investigation is proved, still, Americans elected Trump, and he is president.

Of course, Oliver Stone is not Donald Trump. But he shares with him a certain way of seeing the world and being in the world - and the luxury of persisting in this way of being, and even making a spectacle of it.

Trump very much wants to be liked by Putin and I think sincerely admires him. Putin doesn't know how to deal with somebody who positions himself like that.

Trump, like Putin, has a demonstrably thin skin and short temper when it comes to being criticized by journalists.

There's nothing effective against Trump. Trump is Trump. Trump is going to lie. Trump is going to act the way he's acting. No amount of reason, no amount of criticism, no amount of anything is going to work to change Trump's behavior. Putin is exactly the same way.

I think some people have blind faith in American institutions without knowing a whole lot about them and think they will stand up to Trump and are indestructible.

What Trump is not smart enough to even grasp is that the kind of popularity that Putin has can only be achieved in the context of retro-totalitarianism.

Basically, Trump's significant first moves have been twofold. To marginalize the media, and to start dismantling the federal government.

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 would not attribute any strategic thinking to Trump.

Donald Trump ran for autocrat, he didn't run for president. The first thing in autocrat does is take over the media, or alienate the media, which is what Trump is doing, he is doing it actively.