4 Quotes & Sayings By Masha Gessen

Masha Gessen is a journalist, author, and scholar. She is the author of the award-winning books "The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin" (2009), "The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia" (2012), and "A Small Fortune: Diary of a Wealthy Rascal" (2013). Her work has appeared in "The New York Times", "The Washington Post", "The Guardian", and the "Los Angeles Times", among others. Born in Moscow, Masha Gessen emigrated to the United States with her family at the age of eight Read more

She attended Yale University, where she received her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. Her first book, "Stealing the State: Eight Years in the Secret Russian World of Power Politics", was published by Random House in 1996. Her second book, "A Small Fortune: Diary of a Wealthy Rascal", was published by Penguin Press in 2013.

Her first work of nonfiction, "The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia" was published by PublicAffairs in 2012. She also writes fiction under the name Masha Alexander.

1
It turned out that capitalism alone could make people not only rich and happy but also poor, hungry, miserable, and powerless. Masha Gessen
2
When you lose your freedom, you lose, first and foremost, the opportunity to choose the company you keep. Masha Gessen
3
Perestroika was an impossible idea on the face of it. The Party was setting out to employ its structures of command to make the country, and itself, less command-driven. A system whose main afflictions were stagnation and inflexibility was setting out to change itself. Worst and probably intractable was the fact that people who had spent their lives securing power and individual leverage were expected to devise change that would dismantle the hierarchy of levers and might dislodge them. The system resisted change instinctively.. Masha Gessen