The New Yorker Radio Hour - Masha Gessen and Keith Gessen Debate Russian and American Politics

Episode Date: April 12, 2019

Masha Gessen and Keith Gessen have, taken together, written more than a dozen books and a thousand articles. Keith Gessen is a founder of n+1, an influential literary journal; Masha has written for major newspapers and journals as well as, since 2014, The New Yorker. Their parents emigrated from the Soviet Union in its latter days. Keith has spent most of his life in America, but Masha, who is older, returned to Russia as an adult and worked there as a reporter. In a conversation at the 2018 New Yorker Festival, the siblings discussed their different perspectives on the U.S.-Russia relationship. All through the Mueller investigation, Masha warned people not to expect a smoking gun to prove collusion between Putin and Trump, and then, somehow, this fierce critic of Putin was branded an apologist for his regime. Masha’s most recent book is “The Future Is History”; Keith’s is a novel, called “A Terrible Country.” New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Masha Gessen is one of our keenest observers of Russia and Russian politics. She grew up in the Soviet Union in its latter days, emigrated with her family to the U.S. and then returned to Russia as a reporter. So she's got a unique perspective on the U.S.-Russia relationship. And all through the Mueller investigation, she warned people not to expect some kind of magical revelation or smoking gun of collusion between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. In 2018, she sat down at the New Yorker Festival with a guest she knows pretty well, her younger brother, Keith Gessen. So this is a completely self-service panel.

We're going to talk about ourselves, interview each other, introduce ourselves. So this is my brother Keith. Keith Gesson is a founder of the magazine N-plus-1, and he teaches journalism at Columbia University. He's written two novels, most recently A Terrible Country, which came out last year. Okay, this is my sister, Masha. She is the person in whose shadow I dwell,

but in fact it is more like she is the sunlight. Yes, in whose rays I grow. Oh, okay. So I'm very happy to welcome you to our conversation. Yes. I will ask the first few questions, if that's okay. That is fine. So in late 2013, because of various unpleasant developments in Russia,

you moved to Moscow, I mean, you moved from Moscow to New York after being away for 20 years. You've always worked kind of in both countries, but when you went back to Russia, you became a Russian language journalist. Right. Working for Russian publications. You were publishing books and articles in the U.S., but your kind of day job was as a Russian language journalist, and now you've moved back to the States and become primarily an English language journalist.

So what has that been like? Well, it's actually, it's been lovely because there's a line in your most recent book. That is absolutely brilliant. You describe a character who in some ways bears a certain resemblance to me. You're observing, the narrator is observing this character, walking around Moscow and says nobody liked him here, and that put him at ease. I think the experience of not being liked by anybody, it might be sort of character building, but it's really lovely to just not have that on a daily basis. Like I hardly get any death threats.

It's lovely. Do you want to talk about our parents? Right now? Right here. Sure. When I think about our immigration, our parents were in their mid to late 30s. And I grew up thinking, well, you know, basically their lives. are over, right? And so the only possible reason they could have emigrated was for us. And I kind of felt

like you had mixed feelings about it, about our immigration, you know, and you kind of left home. So I was like, well, it was just me. They did it for me, so I better do good. He did well. Thank you. Thank you. So from your perspective, is that? What do you think? I think that for them, it was very important not to see us go through the experience of applying to university and experiencing what they did, which was just really explicit discrimination against Jews. It's one thing to know about injustice and unfairness, and it's another thing to come face to face of it and have it be completely sort of unabashed. I think for both of them, it was a formative thing, and so they didn't want to see us go

through that, but mostly I think they thought they were doing it for themselves. And you know, they were like in their mid-30s. They had their entire lives ahead of them. But they really, I mean, I've thought about it a lot. I've thought about what kind of courage it would have taken to just step into the abyss. I mean, they had, they knew nothing about this, right? They read a few letters from people who had emigrated. And so they stepped into the abyss.

But our dad, our mom died a long time ago, but our dad always responds by saying, we thought of it as a great adventure. Do you want to talk about politics a little bit? Sure. Yeah? Okay. What? You didn't like hearing about our parents?

I found that very therapeutic, so thank you. Has being here and writing about Russia changed your perspective in terms of what Americans need to know and need to hear? Well, that's a great question. I mean, I think that the perception. of Russia has really gone through some very strange permutations in the last. I mean, I've been here for just under five years. And it's been a very strange five years for, I think, how Russia is perceived in this country. You found yourself in the somewhat curious position of having been a person who was writing about Putin and kind of warning about Putin for a long time. And now

you're in the position of saying, hey, you know, relax. Sometimes I, you know, sometimes I, you're go on Twitter, I see people calling you a paid propagandist for people. I know. No. I was amazing. I've been called a Russian Putin shill. Yeah, paid Putin propagandist. There's an online community of anti-Trump Russian immigrants who, yeah, they had a long thread going about how I was, whether I was intimidated or paid into what they see as supporting Putin. Yeah. And they say that because you have been skeptical. all along, first about the evidence, but then, you know, about the significance of the Russian interference in the election.

Right. In a way, you know, I was one of the originators of that narrative, right? When I wrote a book about Putin, and now I find myself in the very strange position of saying, come on, you know, he's not that kind of monster. He's a different kind of monster, right? But not the kind of monster who's masterminded the takeover of the interoper of the intellectuals. Western world. He doesn't have the mind for that kind of masterminding, among other things. Do you feel partly responsible for this narrative?

What an interesting question. Yeah, a bit. But the problem with writing, with journalism, or any kind of writing, it is so. impossible to predict how much influence what you write will have and what kind of influence it will have and what sorts of anxieties and imaginaries it will tap into. I can acknowledge sort of contributing to that narrative, but I don't think that I can take too much responsibility for it. And I also don't want to ever estimate the number of people who buy, you know, thick, nonfiction books and actually read them.

But you wrote this fascinating article for the New York Times Magazine earlier this year on so-called Russia Hands. And you posit a kind of dichotomy in that article that some people basically think that everything that has gone wrong in the Russian-American relationship over the last 25 years, which is basically everything and consistently, regardless of who was in charge, was attributable to Russia and its transigence in its own trajectory. And then there are those who think that it was bad American policy and American failure to move past the Cold War narrative. And I think that that's actually that almost perfectly describes the stories that I have been writing versus the stories

that you've been writing. You mean I am more likely to blame the U.S. Yeah, that's my strong position. Do you ever worry that that actually overestimates American agency and it's a kind of backhanded imperialist position? That's an interesting question. I mean, yes and no. Yes, I mean, I think the article, you know, kind of traced American policy toward Russia in the post-Cold War era through the sort of people who were inside the government and the State Department, the National Security Council, who were kind of running Russia policy. And the article began because I had watched Obama

seemed to really want to de-escalate tensions with Russia and really de-emphasize Russia in general, which struck me as objectively correct, right? Russia is a troubled country that is declining, right, unlike its neighbor to the east, China, which is not declining. And that was the kind of Obama argument, right, for shifting our focus to the east. And yet, under Obama, you get the Ukraine crisis and eventually the hacking of the Democrats. And I was like, well, how, you know, why did that happen? Here you had a president. who had kind of made his preferences pretty clear,

is there a deep state, right? Which, you know, and when I started working on, this had not been popularized by the right, or at least I had not come across it. And, I mean, the partial answer is yes. Presidents come and go, policymaker, you know, the people who they appoint come and go, but there is this kind of small core

that moves between the State Department, the National Security Council. You know, and one of the kind of really surprising things to me about them was just how strong their views were. And you talk to them and they're quite convincing. For example, some of these people were in the kind of center of debates over NATO and whether it should be expanded. And their position was we have this historic opportunity to push the sort of zone of security, as they called it. But other times they would call it the free world, right, or the West, closer to the borders of Russia, right? because eventually Russia will come back and threaten those neighbors, you know, which you, and you could say, well, they've been proved correct.

I was just going to ask. Yes. Or you can say this was a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? And I don't know if the U.S. had had a very different policy, whether we would have had a totally different result. I don't know. Let's shift gears. Okay. So you wrote this book, and I know that the, you know that the, you know.

the process of writing that book was quite interesting and lengthy, right? You set out to write something fairly different. Can you talk about that? Sure. So it's basically a kind of a story about a guy who goes,

who is actually a loser, and goes to Moscow to take care of his grandmother at the request of his swash-buckling entrepreneurial older brother, who's not

based on Masha. He has this fantasy that she's going to tell him stories about socialism, and this will then he'll write these stories down, and then it'll help him get an academic job, and then he shows up there, and she can't remember who he is, much less a detailed narrative about Stalinist Russia. Yeah, and then I finished this draft, and I kind of read it, and it was horrible. And I cut all that stuff out. Why is it horrible?

It was just boring. It was just really, really boring. What I realized, you know, a few years into the process was that actually the grandmother needs to be a kind of central figure, not just as a kind of domestic background, but her life needs to make the central argument about what happened after the Soviet Union fell apart. And as you know, I changed some details. but it did strike me that our own grandmother's life, you know, she hated the Soviet Union. And she was delighted when the Soviet Union fell apart. And then she lost her life savings.

The town in which she lived, you know, fell apart. The Research Institute where her husband worked fell apart. She lost her sense of self in the world, I think. I mean, it struck me that that story made a, pretty good case for the post-Soviet transition being not so great. So once I figured that out and kind of made the grandmother a more central character, the book became a lot better. It is definitely no longer boring. Yeah, I read it in like one night instead of sleeping. And there were all sorts of reasons for me not to want to read it at all, or never mind

in one night. No, but it's a really great book. Are you thinking of writing a nonfiction book? I thought we weren't going to... Yes, I am definitely... Wait, I thought you were. We don't have to talk about it. We can talk about our parents. Yes, I am...

Yes, I'm working on it. What's the book? I'm working on that. Okay, all right. You wrote a piece called Rules for Autocracy. I did. And it was written, you know, directly after the election, right? So, you know, in the, very much in the heat of the moment.

But I wanted to revisit that and see... how much of that you still think holds and where you were wrong and right, right? So, you know, the first rule for surviving autocracy is believe the autocrat. When he says he's going to do something nasty, chances are he will. So one thing that you said that might lead to,

you know, when they say lock her up, they're going to lock her up. It hasn't happened yet. Hasn't happened. What do you think that means? It means that journalists should never make predictions is what it means. And I think that, you know, the way that that piece happened was that I'd, like probably many people in this room, I'd been to a disastrous election night party and kind of crawled away without saying goodbye.

And when I was on my way home, biking from Queens, I started getting phone calls and emails from people saying, what do we do now? They're like, well, how should I know? You know, I had to flee my country, obviously. I don't have the answers. But it's a long bike ride. So as I was biking, I was thinking that there are actually things that I learned from living in a country that was what democracy it had had was dismantling itself. And it was creating an autocracy. And I think that there are things that I learned about how you survive mentally and spiritually in that.

But, you know, I think that the rule believed the autocrat is, I completely stand by it. And what I was trying to get across was something that I had learned actually in the process of reporting my Putin book. Was that when I went back and listened to his interviews and his press conferences, and fortunately the man has such a small presence that it was possible to listen to everything he had said. and study it in some detail. So when I did that, I realized that it was all out there. He said exactly what he was planning to do. But people both in Russia and in this country had ideas about what he represented,

that had nothing to do with what he was putting forward. Another rule is the institutions will not save you. Do you think they've held up a little bit better than you'd expected? I don't, actually. I don't think they've held up better than I expected. And I think the damage he's been able to do has been profound and has perhaps even been more profound than I thought in the first two years. I mean, I think the Kavanaugh confirmation has been great,

amazing illustration of that, right? I mean, now here's the great institution of the Supreme Court that just stands, I think, exposed, you know, would the curtain pull back in a way that, that maybe sort of emotionally we could have anticipated a couple of years ago but I don't think we could have imagined I mean it is shocking

what do you say to the argument that you know the Supreme Court's a great example I mean the real kind of norm breaking there was the refusal to seat Merrick Garland or even to discuss Merrick Garland by Mitch McConnell right so that predates Trump yeah and I don't you know Trump didn't come out from out of space

he did not actually come from Russia He came from here. And we're out of time. All right. That's great. Thank you. Thank you all. The New Yorker's Masha Gessen, talking with her brother, Keith Gessen. And between the two of them, they've written more than a dozen books and more than

a thousand articles, many of which have appeared in the pages of the New Yorker. Keith's most recent book is a novel set in Russia called A Terrible Country. And Masha's most recent book also deals with Russia, but it's nonfiction. called The Future is History. I'm David Remnick, and that's it for this week. I hope to see you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards

with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. Our team includes Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Cario, Riannon, Corby, Jill Duboff, Karen Frillman, Calilea, David Krasnow, Caroline Lester, Louis Mitchell, Sarah Nicks, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Emily Mann and Jessica Henderson. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.