After leaving her home in Russia, Masha Gessen talks about moving on, both professionally and personally, in the U.S.
by Kaylen Ralph
This time last year, in December 2013, Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen left her home in Russia and relocated to New York. The Russian parliament had passed a law that June that “creat(ed) mechanisms for removing children from same-sex families” such as Gessen’s, a move that Gessen correctly interpreted as a personal threat. Gessen, prolific author and frequent contributor to Slate, the New York Times, the New Yorker, and more) and her girlfriend put their apartment in Moscow on the market immediately and made plans to move to New York where Gessen’s adopted son Vova was attending boarding school.
This November, Gessen wrote an essay for the New York Times Book Review in which she detailed her “break up” with Moscow, and how her relationship with the city has evolved since. As a Russian correspondent for various American publications, she finds herself back in Moscow for frequent visits. I was struck by her interesting approach to this essay; it’s interesting to think about the city we live in like a lover, and the circumstances under which Gessen left last year make her story all the more compelling. I had the opportunity to talk to Gessen about this particular essay, as well as her journalist approach to covering Russia from her dual-perspective as correspondent and citizen. Her most recent book was published in January 2014. Called Words Will Break Cement, it’s an intimate look at about the women of Pussy Riot, popped up on many of the end-of-year “best of” lists. She has a book coming out this spring about the Tsarnaev brothers, aka “the Boston bombers,” an intriguing departure from her Russian-specific canon of previously published books.
Kaylen Ralph: I first wanted to ask you about your essay “To Russia, With Tough Love” in the New York Times (published in the New York Times Book Review on November 25) It was such a powerful “breakup” letter and something you’d obviously been thinking about doing for a while, but what inspired you to break up with Moscow in that way, with the essay? What was your inspiration for that kind of approach?
Masha Gessen: Well, that’s how journalism often happens – the New York Times Book Review asked me to write an essay about a place, and I thought about different places – I was actually planning to write about Chechnya because I had a lot of notes for an essay about Chechnya… and then I was in Moscow a couple of times, once in the summer and once this fall I was there and…every time I went back to Moscow since I left—I’m in this odd situation because I’ve emigrated, but I keep going back because that’s what I do professionally. So, I’m in and out of the city all the time and the first couple of times I went back, I was very fearful that it was going to be very painful, especially because I have had that experience of emigrating and then going back, so I expected to have this storm of emotions and what I felt was quite different. And I realized that what I felt was most like the end of a relationship where you can expect all sorts of things, but you don’t actually expect love. And the moment when love ends is something that probably hasn’t been described enough, but it’s a really amazing emotional experience when you’re lying next to somebody that maybe you’ve been with for many years, and you suddenly have this incredibly clear emptiness where love used to be. And I thought, “That’s what I feel toward this city,” this city that I loved all my life and I never questioned my love for it, and suddenly, it was gone. So, as writers do, I wanted to describe it.
KR: I thought it was great and what you just said, “the moment when love ends,” how you talk about it as loving a person, I think that’s really interesting because, whereas in a breakup with a person, you can choose to leave, but because you were so tied to that place professionally as well, I can imagine that would be an additional level of fear, like “How will this affect my career?” and I was wondering if you could speak to that at all…
MG: That sort of created a different type of experience for me because I very much feel like it was my story, and it’s a story I’ve been writing for a very long time, and I was saying to people as we’re packing up to leave, I was saying if it weren’t a question of my family’s safety, I would stay and finish watching this “movie” (quotes added for clarification). I very much felt like the story that I had been writing for the last 23 years had this incredible dramatic arc and it was clear that it was coming to an end, and it is coming to an end, and I very much feel like we’re in the last stage of this story, so it’s not a great analogy, walking out of a movie theater…because it wasn’t walking out of the movie theater as a spectator, [because] I very much felt like a creator of the script, both as a writer and as a participant… So, the opportunity to keep writing the story is very important to me, and it’s not directly related to going back to Moscow—in terms of reporting, it is, but emotionally it’s not—and I’m actually quite grateful that I can continue to write the story. I fear the moment, which will certainly come, when Russia won’t let me in anymore.
KR: And you feel that that’s coming soon?
MG: I think it could happen any day. If I didn’t have a Russian passport I would have been banned a long time ago, like most journalists. It doesn’t take a leap of the imagination to figure that that could happen to me, as well, but because I have a Russian passport I’ve been able to go in and out. Russia is imposing more and more travel restrictions on its own citizens, so…it’s sort of part of the process of [the] closing down that’s happening in that country.
KR: In your (most recently published) book, Words Will Break Cement (released in January, 2014), there’s a line early on, “To create and confront, one has to be an outcast.” Keeping that in mind and despite your Russian heritage, did you consider yourself an outcast?
MG: I consider myself an outcast because I, first of all, grew up Jewish in that country, and second of all, I went to the U.S. as a teenager so I very much had an outsider’s perspective when I went back as a correspondent. But I didn’t go back as a correspondent like a lot of other American journalists, [because] I also learned to write in Russian. It took years to get comfortable with not being like anybody else. When you’re young, and I think especially if you’re an immigrant kid, you want to be like everybody else. It’s a natural desire for human beings to find groups to which they can belong. The older I got and the more writing I did, the more I realized that that was a huge advantage, to be sort of organically an outsider, so you don’t have to take yourself out of the situation, you’re already out of the situation, you’re already an observer, and whenever I talked to journalists on the job, one of the things I’d always say to people is, ‘Look, you have to be writing every story as though you’ve just fallen off the moon and on to this planet.’ So you find things endlessly surprising, endlessly in need of explanation and exploration. That’s what makes a good journalist. And as difficult as being an émigré and a Jew and gay growing up in the ’70s and ’80s, as difficult as those things were for me growing up, they were incredible assets for me as grown-up journalist and a writer.
(image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons)
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Kaylen is one of The Riveter’s co-founders and the EIC. She moved to Minneapolis, MN after graduating from the Missouri School of Journalism in August 2013. In addition to her editorial duties at The Riveter, Kaylen also works as a freelance researcher for The Sager Group. You can follow her on Instagram and Twitter at @kaylenralph.
