Masha Gessen Quotes

When you lose your freedom, you lose, first and foremost, the opportunity to choose the company you keep.

When you're part of the opposition you want to stay. It's part of your identity. You're useless if you leave. You feel like you have failed.

Putin needed an enemy, an Other, against which to mobilize. LGBT people are really convenient: we're sort of the ultimate foreign agent.

It's not natural for people in the opposition to leave. It's always a personal catastrophe.

A law is always that much more scary and that much more effective for a totalitarian state if it's selectively enforced.

You risk everything if you so much as join a legal protest demonstration in Russia. It raises the stakes.

One of the things that I really value about Russian culture is that on the private level it allows for a huge amount of variety and individuality with regards to family structure.

It turned out that capitalism alone could make people not only rich and happy but also poor, hungry, miserable, and powerless.