Masha Gessen is the first journalist to fully lay bare contemporary Russia, “a country where political rivals and vocal critics are often killed, and at least sometimes the order comes directly from the president’s office”. Gessen wrote these words in “The Man Without a Face”, her 2012 book about Vladimir Putin’s rise to power, which she worked on in secret for fear of retaliation.
A remarkably prolific author, publishing at a rate of about a book a year, she’s already well into a second book about Putin, she says, which focuses on the last three years of his regime. Her writing has established her as Putin’s most eloquent critic and the de facto translator of Russian politics for Western readers.
Gessen’s working characterisation of Russia combines John le Carre-esque espionage, Chekhovian tragedy and straight vaudeville: as more and more of Putin’s opponents turn up dead or in prison colonies, the Russian leader remains a feckless bureaucrat lacking in personality.
When Gessen finally meets him in the Afterword, in the closing scene of “The Man Without a Face”, set in September 2012, Putin has no idea who she is, despite her growing status as one of his more prominent detractors. He tells her, “I like kitties and puppies and little animals.”
Her latest work, “The Tsarnaev Brothers”, is about the Boston Marathon bombing, executed by Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on April 15, 2013, which killed three people and injured hundreds more, 17 of whom lost limbs. After a manhunt that shut down the city of Boston, Tamerlan was dead, shot by police and then run over by his younger brother as he tried to escape. Dzhokhar was found four days after the bombing, hiding in a boat in a backyard in nearby Watertown. A federal jury sentenced him to death in May this year.
The book begins by tracing the Tsarnaev family’s movements between 1985 and 2012, from locations in Kyrgyzstan, Russia , Kalmykia and Istanbul to Boston and elsewhere, though they have become predominantly associated with Makhachkala in Dagestan — “a backwater”, as Gessen describes it, in the North Caucasus.
They were rovers, endlessly looking for a place to belong and never finding one. Their problems were constant, but the real tragedy, Gessen argues, began with the Russian apartment bombings of 1999, which killed nearly 300 people. Putin, the former KGB lieutenant colonel and recently named successor to then President, Boris Yeltsin, blamed these events on Chechen rebels.
The first Chechen war ran from 1994 to 1996, and the Tsarnaevs, recently relocated to Chechnya, were present for its beginnings. The war left hundreds of thousands of people dead or displaced.
When the conflict ended, the North Caucasus remained unstable, and the accusations of Putin were enough to catapult the region once again into turmoil — and Putin to national popularity. As the second war raged on, centred in Chechnya and Dagestan (the Tsarnaevs were now back in Makhachkala), evidence began to accumulate, according to Gessen, suggesting the Russian secret police had arranged the bombings for the purpose of bolstering nationalist fervour and securing Putin’s public reputation.
By this time, Putin’s power was solid, and he was steadily remodelling Russia as an authoritarian state. This went largely unnoticed because, after 9/11, the country “got to reframe Chechnya, and the continuing bloodshed in Dagestan, as part of a war it was now fighting alongside the US — the war against radical Islamist terrorists”, Gessen writes. Meanwhile, the Tsarnaev family made its way to Boston.
The story is personal for Gessen because, up to a point, much of it mirrors her own experience. While writing “The Tsarnaev Brothers”, her life was uprooted in a more direct way by Putin when she was forced to relocate from Moscow to New York. Members of the President’s cabinet were making public threats against her family.
“When I was touring with the Putin book,” she tells me in a coffee shop in New York, “people would ask me why I was still staying in Russia. And I would say, ‘Well, it’s my home, you know — you can leave, but I’m staying.’ And all sorts of other applause lines. And then they made it clear they were after my children. And that was it. That was a no-brainer.”
Gessen and her partner, Darya Oreshkina, have three children, the oldest of whom is adopted. They were being targeted with the Russian propaganda law, which effectively makes “non-traditional relationships” a criminal offence. Vitaly Milonov, a politician and the propaganda law’s loudest supporter, delivered thinly veiled warnings on Russian TV mentioning Gessen by name. And so, as she was writing “The Tsarnaev Brothers” in the autumn of 2013, the author was helping her own family make the transition to the US, reflecting on their own “traumatic experience of immigrating” as she considered that of the Tsarnaevs.
Her outspokenness has led to Gessen acquiring a few detractors. In a review of The Tsarnaev Brothers for “The New York Times”, Janet Napolitano, the former American secretary of homeland security, called her a “conspiracy theorist” for raising the question of the true nature of Tamerlan’s relationship with the FBI, which had questioned him as a potential terrorist two years before the bombing.
Gessen calls Napolitano’s characterisation “interesting”, saying: “I just raised a question.” Still, it’s not the first time Gessen has faced the accusation.
Russia being a paranoid country, there are plenty of conspiracy theories about her there, too. Some Russians, she says, actually believe that she works for the FSB — the organisation the KGB became after the end of the Soviet era — and was “turned” during her meeting with Putin in 2012.
“I really can’t abide conspiracy theories, because I believe that everything in the world stems from idiocy and incompetence,” she says. “That’s certainly true of most of what’s happened in Russia under Putin. I think very little of it was pre-planned. And I think that, for the most part, is the explanation for what’s happened in the Boston bombing.”
Her career has made her the enemy of idiocy par excellence. She’s grown bolder, too. As she works on her new book, which looks at how Putin has “retrofitted totalitarian ideology” on to the country he governs, she travels frequently back to Russia. She has no fear — only displeasure. She describes her home for the majority of her life as “such an awful place”.
“The idea that this mediocre man, who doesn’t have a plan, doesn’t have a strategy, who is running around waving his nuclear weapons, is a real threat? That’s really nuts! But it’s what’s happened,” she says.
She loves Moscow, she tells me, but it’s become hostile: there are nationalists wearing orange and black ribbons, the symbol of support for Russia’s mobilisation against Ukraine. She hadn’t noticed how noxious it was until she left. “My life was too comfortable there,” she says.
When I ask her if she received any significant threats before her decision to leave Russia for good, she responds with comic matter-of-factness: “I got death threats all the time. I didn’t take them particularly seriously. The problem with death threats is you’re right not to take them seriously.” She pauses very briefly. “Until you’re dead.”
Gessen, who has both Russian and American passports (she became a US citizen in 1989), was born in Moscow and moved to Boston with her family in 1981, when she was 14. In Moscow, her parents were members of the Jewish intelligentsia at a time when many of their social circle was already moving to the US. She struggled in adolescence, though, attending college at the Cooper Union in New York but dropping out before graduation because she was already working full-time as a journalist.
In March 1991, with the Soviet Union on the verge of collapse, she returned to Russia for the first time. She was on assignment for the magazine “Ms.” about the first Soviet Independent Women’s Forum, which happened to be held in the town of Dubna, outside Moscow, where Gessen’s grandmother still lived. She moved back permanently in 1994 and stayed for 20 years, doing a variety of journalism jobs — some of them inevitably for publications Putin was trying to influence, as he had taken over the media industry — but keeping a foot in America, gradually revealing the corruption of Putin’s Russia in the mainstream US press.
Of The Tsarnaev Brothers, she says, “The one thing that I absolutely brought from personal experience is what happens to you when you go back to the place where you lived as a child. That sense of being ambushed by a feeling of home — that’s very particular to people who didn’t leave of their own volition. I talked to people who went back to the place they were born 40 years after leaving and they’d describe the same thing: I felt at home. I felt like everything was as it should be.”
Tamerlan returned to Dagestan from the Boston area in 2012 and felt, Gessen writes, “as if his body had been plugged into its place in a puzzle”. The accepted narrative about Tamerlan is that he went back to the region where he grew up, “received training”, to steal a phrase from US Congressman Michael McCaul.
Gessen’s book revises this theory. “It’s really difficult and scary to consider the possibility that there’s sort of a small agency involved in such big tragedies,” she says. The so-called “radicalisation narrative” perpetuated by the FBI and the house committee on homeland security involves a terrorist organisation — Daesh (the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant), for instance, or Al Qaida (“or whoever is getting good PR at the moment”) — actively recruiting the disillusioned and guiding them through the steps to becoming a violent fundamentalist.
“It seems that it happens the exact opposite way,” Gessen says. “You have someone who wants to volunteer, wants to join something, and build on it, and be great and belong. The essential difference between the radicalisation narrative and what I’m talking about is who does the wanting. And the fact that these horrible things stem from the desires of small, unhappy people — it doesn’t sit right.”
–Guardian News & Media Ltd
