“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 Jewish ghetto in Nazi-occupied Europe, an idea that began as a rebuke to the oft-floated analogy of Gaza as “the world’s largest open-air prison”. “It doesn’t seem like a very good comparison because there are no prison guards, there’s no regime,” Gessen says.
The same month, Gessen was awarded Germany’s Hannah Arendt prize for the essay, but the ceremony was cancelled when the Greens Party-affiliated Heinrich Böll Foundation withdrew support, stating only that “debates have flared up in various places”, a probable reference to tensions within the country because of Germany’s support for Israel. Eschewing controversy is an ironic stance given the prize is awarded to those “who are not afraid to enter the public realm by presenting their opinion in controversial political discussions”. Germany has some of the world’s strictest historical regulations and considers the Holocaust a singular event that is beyond comparison.
Gessen’s essay wove together official and unofficial ways the Holocaust is remembered, how the boycott-Israel movement is framed as antisemitic in Germany, and how charges of antisemitism are now wielded by the right against critics. The German-Israeli Society obliquely accused the essay of being antisemitic, important considering Gessen is Jewish and had a grandfather who was murdered by the Nazis. The ceremony was later rescheduled without the Böll foundation’s involvement.
Given the complexity of making historical comparisons and the fact that the internet has become a living example of where bad analogies, particularly about Nazi Germany, are prominent, I wondered what responsibilities a writer had when making them. According to Gessen, who is visiting Australia this month, there is nothing unique when it comes to making historical comparisons; there are only the “fundamental” responsibilities demanded of all writers: “They’re to use your voice, they’re to use your words, they’re to use your platform and to be as accurate and honest as you can possibly be at any given time.” As Gessen suggested, a historical comparison deciphers the present, particularly during a crisis.
It prevents the reader from vanishing into the relentless churn of social media and 24-hour news coverage and instead urges us to look back, to forge meaning. Unfortunately, insights are not always consoling. Gessen uses the wisdom of past thinkers, often survivors of totalitarianism, such as Václav Havel or Arendt herself, to illuminate the current moment and by doing so implies history can repeat itself.
“There’s no such thing as a one-to-one comparison in history or in life,” admits Gessen. Reality is far too complex for a comparison without qualification. For example, how can the stagnant Soviet life articulated in Gessen’s non-fiction novel, The Future is History , be compared with our superfluid information landscape? “I was thinking about the static and dynamic dimensions of totalitarian propaganda,” Gessen explains.
The static dimensions are the fixed ideology, the public face familiar to the West. “You learn in school that the working class runs our country [the former Soviet Union] and is good and the bourgeois class is bad, and these things will never change.” Lesser appreciated were the so-called dynamic dimensions of Soviet life.
These demanded the citizen intuit subtle shifts in official direction. “You have to pay attention ..
. because your life depends on it,” Gessen explains. “The only way you can know what you’re supposed to know is if you listen to what the regime tells you, because you can’t gather this knowledge independently because it’s not connected with reality.
And I think that’s the Trumpian model,” says Gessen. It’s also “the lived experience of a lot of Americans ..
. what they hear, what they’re being told is completely divorced from their lived experience.” The Man Without a Face by Masha Gessen.
Gessen, who in 2012 wrote a biography of Vladimir Putin, The Man Without a Face , says both Trump and Putin lie not to deceive but to attack the concept of truth. So by honouring their responsibilities, a writer can counteract this. A technique Gessen uses is the academic practice of defining words to reestablish meaning in an eroded landscape.
Gessen says that one editor wanted Gessen to use polling numbers to claim that President Joe Biden was acting “undemocratically” by refusing to step down. But as they point out, there’s a huge distance between polling and democracy. The editor was “this super smart, clued-in person who I think had not paused to consider the definition of a term that we throw around all the time”.
In Surviving Autocracy , Gessen quotes the Russian poet Sergey Gandlevsky, who explains that journalists needed to rebuild trust with a deeply cynical public after the Soviet collapse. He advocated the “language of the hardware store”, meaning using simple, unadorned sentences. “It’s good writing hygiene,” argues Gessen, using the example of a phrase such as “rust belt”, which is so loaded with deindustrialisation baggage, that “everyone attaches their own ideas”.
Gessen argues that it’s easy enough to jettison the baggage and name all the states that the “rust belt” covers. For Gessen, journalists helped normalise Trump with their “objective style”. They took “horrendous things” and “translate[d] into political language in covering them and render[ed] them almost invisible”.
One example was a letter from Trump to the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. “The journalist shouldn’t also call it diplomacy because it isn’t – it’s an unhinged letter that sounds like an eight-year-old wrote it.” Gessen is now working on a book about “imaginative political projects”, which explores “parallel polis”, a theoretical model advanced by Czech and Polish dissidents in the 1970s of how to be political in a totalitarian regime.
Rather than clash with power, this model proposes a ready-to-deploy alternative in the event of regime collapse. Gessen had just finished revising a chapter on the Israeli co-living village Neve Shalom (Wahat al-Salam) when the Hamas attack on October 7 changed everything. They realised that it was not enough to consider political projects in isolation as per the original theory.
They had to situate them in the host country’s aggressions and geopolitical ambitions. “Now I’m revising it again,” says Gessen. The work of comparison, it seems, is as alive and fluid as the present moment.
Masha Gessen appears at The Edge, Federation Square, Melbourne for the Wheeler Centre on August 21( wheelercentre.com ). They appear at Carriageworks in Sydney on August 24-25 as part of the Festival of Dangerous Ideas ( festivalofdangerousideas.
com ). The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from books editor Jason Steger. Get it delivered every Friday .
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