Masha Gessen

Gessen's paternal grandmother Ester Goldberg, the daughter of a socialist mother and a Zionist father, was born in Białystok, Poland, in 1923 and emigrated to Moscow in 1940.

Ester's father Jakub Goldberg was murdered during the Holocaust in 1943, either in the Białystok Ghetto or a concentration camp.

Gessen's maternal grandmother, Ruzya Solodovnik, was a Russian-born intellectual who worked as a censor for the Stalinist government until they were fired during an antisemitic purge.

Gessen's maternal grandfather Samuil was a committed Bolshevik who died during World War II, leaving Ruzya to raise Yelena alone.

Masha Gessen (Мари́я "Маша" Алекса́ндровна Ге́ссен; born 13 January 1967) is a Russian-American journalist, author, translator, and activist who has been an outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump.

Gessen is nonbinary and trans and uses they/them pronouns.

Gessen has written extensively on LGBT rights.

Described as "Russia's leading LGBT rights activist", Gessen has said that for many years they were "probably the only publicly out gay person in the whole country".

They now live in New York with their wife and children.

Gessen writes primarily in English but also in their native Russian.

In addition to being the author of several non-fiction books, they have been a prolific contributor to such publications as The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, New Statesman, Granta, Slate, Vanity Fair, Harper's Magazine, The New Yorker, and U.S. News & World Report.

In 1981, when Gessen was a teenager, their family moved via the US Refugee Resettlement Program to the United States.

Gessen was on the board of directors of the Moscow-based LGBT rights organization Triangle between 1993 and 1998 and has led gay rights demonstrations in Moscow.

Gessen served as a volunteer board member at PEN America for nine years.

They resigned in May 2023 when the organization withdrew an invitation to two exiled Russian authors to speak at the PEN World Voices event, after invited Ukrainian authors protested the presence of Russian writers and threatened a boycott.

Gessen was Vice President of the board at the time, and will continue to be a member of PEN America.

Gessen said they understand the feelings of Ukrainian authors and their resignation was related to how PEN handled the situation.

Gessen said: "I felt like I was being asked to tell these people [the Russian dissidents] that because they’re Russians they can’t sit at the big table; they have to sit at the little table off to the side … Which felt distasteful."

As an adult in 1996, Gessen moved to Moscow, where they worked as a journalist.

They hold both Russian and US citizenship.

Their brothers are Keith, Daniel, and Philip Gessen.

In March of that year, "the St Petersburg legislator [Milonov] who had become a spokesman for the law [against 'homosexual propaganda' towards children] started mentioning me and my 'perverted family' in his interviews", and Gessen contacted an adoption lawyer asking "whether I had reason to worry that social services would go after my family and attempt to remove my oldest son, whom I adopted in 2000."

In an extensive October 2008 profile of Vladimir Putin for Vanity Fair, Gessen reported that the young Putin had been "an aspiring thug" and that "the backward evolution of Russia began" within days of his inauguration in 2000.

They contributed several dozen commentaries on Russia to The New York Times blog "Latitude" between November 2011 and December 2013.

Among their subjects were the banning of so-called "homosexual propaganda" and other related laws, the harassment and beating of journalists, and the depreciation in value of the ruble.

Gessen was dismissed from their position as the chief editor of Russia's oldest magazine, Vokrug Sveta, a popular-science journal, in September 2012 after Gessen refused to send a reporter to cover a Russian Geographical Society event about nature conservation featuring President Putin, because Gessen considered it political exploitation of environmental concerns.

After Gessen tweeted about their firing, Putin phoned them and claimed he was serious about his "nature conservation efforts".

At his invitation, Gessen met him and Gessen's former publisher at the Kremlin and were offered their job back.

Gessen rejected the offer.

In September 2012, Gessen was appointed as director of the Russian Service for Radio Liberty, a U.S. government-funded broadcaster based in Prague.

Shortly after their appointment was announced and a few days after Gessen met with Putin, more than 40 members of Radio Liberty's staff were fired.

The station lost its Russian broadcasting license several weeks after Gessen took over.

The degree of Gessen's involvement in both of these events is unclear, but has caused controversy.

In March 2013, politician Vitaly Milonov promoted the Russian law against foreign adoption of Russian children by saying, "The Americans want to adopt Russian children and bring them up in perverted families like Masha Gessen's."

In December 2013, they moved to New York because Russian authorities had begun to talk about taking children away from gay parents.

The lawyer told Gessen "to instruct my son to run if he is approached by strangers and concluding: 'The answer to your question is at the airport.'" In June 2013, Gessen was beaten up outside of the Parliament; they said of the incident that "I realized that in all my interactions, including professional ones, I no longer felt I was perceived as a journalist first: I am now a person with a pink triangle."

They stated that "a court would easily decide to annul Vova's adoption, and I wouldn't even know it".

Given this potential threat to their family, Gessen "felt like no risk was small enough to be acceptable," they later told the CBC Radio.

Since 2017, they have been a staff writer for The New Yorker.

Gessen was born into a Jewish family in Moscow to Alexander and Yelena Gessen.