One of our most trenchant observers of democracy, M. Gessen is the author of eleven books, including the National Book Award-winning The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia and The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. A Pulitzer Prize-winning Opinion writer at The New York Times, they have covered political subjects including Russia, L.G.B.T. rights, Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and the rise of autocracy among others. They are currently at work on a biography of Hannah Arendt. 

Gessen’s essential book Surviving Autocracy is a bracing overview of the calamitous trajectory of American democracy under the Trump administration. In the run-up to the 2016 election, they stood out from other journalists for the ability to convey the ominous significance of Donald Trump’s behavior, unprecedented in a national candidate. Within forty-eight hours of his victory, the essay “Autocracy: Rules for Survival” had gone viral, and their coverage of his norm-smashing presidency became essential reading for a citizenry struggling to wrap their heads around the unimaginable. Highlighting not only the corrosion of the media, the judiciary, and the cultural norms that were supposed to be a salvation, they also illuminate how a short few years have changed Americans from a people who saw themselves as a nation of immigrants to a populace haggling over a border wall, heirs to a degraded sense of truth, meaning, and possibility. The book garnered starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, and Booklist, with The New York Review of Books raving “Gessen’s credentials as an observer of autocracy are impeccable… Surviving Autocracy sharpens an edge of disgust lately blunted by relentless use.”

Gessen’s understanding of the events and forces that have wracked Russia in recent times is unparalleled. In the National Book Award-winning The Future Is History, they follow the lives of four people born at what promised to be the dawn of democracy, charting their paths against the machinations of the regime that would crush them all to the unobstructed reemergence of the old Soviet order in the form of today’s terrifying and seemingly unstoppable mafia state. “Ambitious, timely, insightful and unsparing” (The Washington Post), The Future Is History won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and the New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

In the New York Times bestselling The Man Without a Face, Gessen delivers a chilling account of how a low-level, small-minded KGB operative ascended to the Russian presidency and, in an astonishingly short time, destroyed years of progress and made his country once more a threat to his own people and to the world. As a journalist living in Moscow during Putin’s ascendency, Gessen experienced this history firsthand, even famously being dismissed as editor of the Russian popular-science magazine Vokrug Sveta for refusing to send a reporter to observe Putin hang-gliding with Siberian cranes. 2014’s Words Will Break Cement investigates the activism of the artists known as Pussy Riot, who resurrected the power of truth in a society built on lies.

Gessen spent many years as a staff writer for The New Yorker and has contributed to The Washington Post, Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, and Vanity Fair. They are currently an Opinion columnist at The New York Times, and were recognized with the George Polk Award for opinion writing in 2024. Gessen is a founder of the Russian Independent Media Archive, a digital archive focused on preserving the last two decades of independent Russian journalism. They are the first Distinguished Professor at Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, and have taught at Amherst, Oberlin, and Bard Colleges. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, a Nieman Fellowship, the Hitchens Prize, and the Overseas Press Club Award for Best Commentary, Gessen has lived in New York since 2013 after more than twenty years as a journalist and editor in Moscow.

For more information on M. Gessen, please visit them on Twitter and their page on The New York Times.