“Comparison is how we know the world,” says Masha Gessen, the Russian-American journalist, New Yorker writer, New York Times columnist and author of 11 books. Their most recent, Surviving Autocracy , was published in 2020. It drew on Gessen’s early life as a child in the Soviet Union and then as a Russian journalist to compare Eastern Bloc and post-Soviet autocracies with Donald Trump’s America.
With Trump on the verge of a possible return to the White House, that comparison is again particularly relevant. Their coverage of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine brought Masha Gessen an eight-year Russian jail sentence in absentia. Credit: Alamy Stock Photo This comeback has threatened to scuttle our interview; the attempted assassination of Trump meant it was all hands on deck for journalists.
But, according to Gessen, the attempt was not a “Reichstag moment”, an analogy blunted through overuse. For Gessen, history is alive and nuanced analogies require reporting, but this has become increasingly difficult as in July they were sentenced in absentia to eight years’ prison in Russia for their coverage of the invasion of Ukraine. “It’s quite constraining,” Gessen says, with some countries – even EU ones – off limits because of the threat of extradition.
Even with full access, comparisons are fraught. Gessen’s essay In the Shadow of the Holocaust , published in The New Yorker in December, drew fire for comparing conditions for Palestinians in Gaza with a.