A prominent critic of the Russian leader Masha Gessen said Australia’s delay in processing their visa illustrated the reach of Russian authorities in the Kremlin’s attempts to silence dissent. Gessen, who goes by them and they pronouns, said there was a lesson in Australia being more alive to the impact of world events. Russian-American journalist and anti-Putin critic Masha Gessen at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas 2024.
Credit: Dion Georgopoulos The US-based journalist was speaking at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, a week after they had been “functionally” denied a visa when the Department of Home Affairs applied for additional information from international police authorities about trumped-up charges levelled against them. The hold-up was resolved 24 hours after going public, but caused Gessen to cancel a planned mid-week public talk at the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne. Gessen said Russian authorities had used such sham charges and prosecutions against critics and exiles to disrupt their ability to move around the world.
“The whole sentencing in absentia is a way of putting you on notice and a way of constraining you,” Gessen told the sold-out event. “So you don’t want to go to Indonesia because they have a new extradition treaty with Russia. What didn’t occur to me was that it would create problems for me in places like Australia.
” Born in Russia and raised in America, Gessen is the author of The Future is History , an account of the rise of Putin, an.