Journalist takes audience inside Putin's war on West

Masha Gessen
Lindsay France/University Photography
Masha Gessen, Russian-American journalist, author and activist noted for her opposition to Russian President Vladimir Putin, speaks in the Guerlac Room in the A.D. White House Oct. 22.

Describing her experience writing the 2012 book “The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin,” Russian-American journalist and LGBTQ activist Masha Gessen recalled feeling optimism while writing the book’s epilogue during protests against Russian government corruption. Later, she would write about crackdowns on the protests.

In her Oct. 22 campus lecture, “Putin’s War Against the West,” Gessen tied Putin’s state sanctioned homophobia to his need to keep control of the nation.

Gessen’s most recent book, “Words Will Break Concrete: The Passion of Pussy Riot,” describes the arrest of three Pussy Riot band members and the farcical, religiously charged trial after their boundary-pushing performance at Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior in February 2012. Gessen noted that the trial characterized a change in Russian politics.

“For the second half of the 20th century, the U.S. was the enemy,” she said. “After the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia didn’t know what it was.”

She tied the trial to Putin’s view of Pussy Riot’s protest as a foreign-influenced attack on the Russian state. Both the trial and Putin’s statements reflected a growing, new ideology through which Putin maintains power. Gessen described Russia’s historical identity as a “country always under siege,” that is always defending itself. Gessen recalled a view expressed by Russian philosopher and political scientist Aleksandr Dugin, who said Western civilization and its push for universal human rights was rival to a civilization of traditional ideals. In suppressing homosexual rights, Putin and the Kremlin accept this view and use homosexuality as shorthand for Western ideals being forced on post-Soviet society.

According to Gessen, this rejection of homosexuality and Western ideals was easy for the Russian public to accept because up until that point, the Russian government had never directly talked about sex. Putin gained control of the conversation and set Russia’s national character to be not a nation-state based on boundaries, but a civilization-state based on traditional ideals and whose enemy was the West.

To maintain this identity, Putin needed a war, and the pro-European Union Euromaidan protests that began in November 2013 in Ukraine provided an opportunity.

“Russia doesn’t believe in the existence of Ukraine,” said Gessen. “It sees Ukraine as a reflection of itself.”

In the eyes of the Kremlin, the EU expanding into Ukraine would expand its “homosexual lobby,” a phrase, according to Gessen, that was more shorthand for foreign influence and the primary reason for the recent invasion of Ukraine.

Gessen lamented the ease with which Russian media controlled the language surrounding the conflict and said Western media failed to understand and take control of the story. This allowed Russia-backed militants in Eastern Ukraine to be called “pro-Russia rebels,” which painted the conflict as humanitarian, and mistakenly attributing the crisis to Ukraine rather than to Putin's need to maintain power.

“The story of Russia’s war is not and was never about Ukraine,” said Gessen. “It is a story of a civilization war, and Putin must continue it in order to stay in power.”

When asked about what could be done to combat Putin’s grip on Russian politics, Gessen was pessimistic; she said Putin must be combated but nothing can be done about the aggressive stance the Russian government has taken against the Western world.

“It doesn’t mean nothing should be done, but there is no strategic solution that can stop [Putin’s] escalation,” she said.

Gessen’s talk was co-sponsored by the Society for the Humanities; the LGBTQ Studies Program; Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Cornell Institute for European Studies; and the Departments of Government, Music and Comparative Literature.

Mark Kasvin ’16 is a writer intern for the Cornell Chronicle.

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