Speaker(s): Masha Gessen
What can we understand about the relationship between Putin, Trump and the media? Renowned journalist and author Masha Gessen will offer her views, drawing from her recent book, The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia , which recently won the 2017 National Book Award for Nonfiction.
As a journalist living in Moscow, Gessen experienced the rise of Vladimir Putin firsthand. Her 2012 bestselling book The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin gave the chilling account of how a low-level, small-minded KGB operative ascended to the Russian presidency and, in an astonishingly short time, destroyed years of progress and made his country once more a threat to its own people and to the world. In this talk, Gessen fast-forwards this story to the current moment, providing critical insights about the role that Putin and Trump play in today’s mediated environment.
Gessen is also the author of Perfect Rigor, Blood Matters, Ester and Ruzya, Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot, The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy and most recently Where the Jews Aren’t: The Sad and Absurd Story of Birobidzhan, Russia’s Jewish Autonomous Region. She regularly contributes to The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair and Slate, among other publications. She lives in New York.