Keith Gessen, 48, is an Assistant Professor of Magazine Journalism at the Columbia Journalism School. He is the founding editor of literary magazine "n+1" and a contributor to "The New Yorker", the "New York Times Magazine", and the "London Review of Books". He is the editor of three nonfiction books and the translator, or co-translator, from Russian, of a collection of short stories, a book of poems, and a work of oral history. He is also the author of two novels, "All the Sad Young Literary Men" and "A Terrible Country," as well as a book of essays, "Raising Raffi." Most of Gessen’s journalistic work has focused on the effects of the collapse of communism on the countries of what used to be the Soviet Union. He has written about the wars and revolutions in Ukraine, as well about the experts in the US government who work on the region.
Gessen was born in Moscow and grew up outside of Boston. He graduated from Harvard with a B.A. in History and Literature, and holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Syracuse University. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. His older sister, Masha Gessen, ist also a bestselling writer mostly known for her work on Putin’s Russia.
STANDARD: Walking around New York City in the spring of 2023 and talking to folks about Ukraine, it feels like most people here – even in neighborhoods with a high density of migrants from former Soviet republics – do not care much about what it going on. Is that impression wrong?
Gessen: US foreign policy is and has always been an elite pursuit. So while New York City might not be the best place to meet people who care about the war, in D.C. people care about it a lot. First and foremost the Biden administration – at the end of the day, it is their war. Just like the Putin’s government, it has to be able to plausibly sell whatever happens, namely what constitutes a US victory. Certainly, in a way they could do that right now, as they helped defend Ukraine’s sovereignty, they helped take back some territories, and Ukraine still exists as a nation with a democratically elected government in power.
STANDARD: In Ukraine, there is a sense of unease about what will happen if the next US president is a Republican. What are we to make of some high-ranking GOP politicians voicing skepticism about keeping up support for Ukraine?
Gessen: Well, there is Donald Trump, who is totally unpredictable. On the one hand, he says things that are highly isolationist, like: "What are we doing in Ukraine? Why are we engaging in this?" But then he also says things like, "Oh, we are losing this war and that would not be happening if if I were president." The thing with this kind of rhetoric is that him and the other people using it do not really care about Ukraine or Russia. So while a considerable isolationist strain exists in today’s Republican Party, these politicians are just trying to score political points in a domestic context. In the Democratic Party that strain is less prevalent but there certainly is one, too. I am personally sympathetic to the latter because it asks questions like: How does an open-ended commitment to support Ukraine serve American interests?
STANDARD: How does it not?
Gessen: In the end, it is Ukraine that has to decide whether it wants to keep fighting or not. But the US also has a choice, and given its amount of support so far, I think it is entitled to an opinion about what it thinks is best for Ukraine. There are non-far-right, realist, or neo-realist people in D.C. right now who argue that in reality the US achieved all of its strategic interests in the spring of last year: a weakened Russia, a humiliated Russia, and now it is not clear how much more the US is going to achieve if the war continues. The way one of these people recently put it to me sounded pretty much like this: "A weak Russia is good for the US, a rogue Russia is bad." So if we are looking at a totally isolated, North Korea-style Russia, that would not be in the interest of the US. Or anybody’s interest, for that matter.
STANDARD: So if the isolationist factions or the so-called realists succeed, help for Ukraine will end?
Gessen: Here is what I know about America: In the end, the US will betray its allies, and it will also betray Ukraine. Sure, at first it will come to the rescue a little bit, but then, when it becomes too difficult, or too expensive, or too boring, it will leave. So people who count on the US to live up to its official rhetoric on democracy and freedom, and what have you, will be very disappointed in the end. Again, at least that is what I have learned about our behavior from history. Not unlike Russia, the US is a complicated country with many different interest groups, and a vibrant democracy where power changes every few years. As a consequence, its commitment to Ukraine is going to end sooner or later, and anybody who tells the Ukrainians differently is lying to them.
STANDARD: You were born in Moscow but have been one of the premier American authors writing about Russia in the last two decades. You have also spent a good amount of time in the country throughout the last 30 years, and have also been to Ukraine many times. How personal does this war feel for you?
Gessen: I certainly do not feel great, but compared to what Ukrainians are going through, my heartbreak and my disappointment is pretty minor. Thing is, I do not feel a particular attachment to Russia as a political entity, and never have. Like most Russian Jews, my grandmother was born in Ukraine, while my other grandmother is from Poland. Another part of my family is from Belarus. Still, what I always tried to argue was that there are other possibilities open to Russia than what we have now. It is a complicated country that has many different kinds of ideas and people. It has produced Stalin and Putin but also Tolstoy, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya and Marina Tsvetaeva. So I think you can still make the argument that it has produced the worst but also some of the best people. We must also not forget those who are risking their lives to protest the war, and are given very long prison sentences. Some of these people I have met and interviewed myself, and now they are going away for ten, 20 years. So while that is incredibly courageous and inspiring, it is nevertheless hard to escape the fact that Russia’s main activity right now is murdering people in Ukraine. Then again, this is what the Russian State has done over and over and over again, throughout its history. So, unfortunately, it is kind of business as usual.
STANDARD: If we follow the logic of this argument, it means that Putin is just the latest manifestation of a typical Russian leader?
Gessen: I think he was until 2022. But the question now is: Has Putin become the new Hitler – a person, that some people were saying, he was all along? Because I would argue that before 2022, he was not. He was certainly behaving in a way that was anti-democratic and authoritarian, but he was not a full-blown dictator.
STANDARD: So is he a new Hitler or not?
Gessen: I would say he was not, but now he is.
STANDARD: Why does there seem to be very little resistance within Russia against him and his cronies?
Gessen: When the mobilisation happened in September 2022, it looked like there were a lot of protest. But then it quickly disappeared, it just dissipated. So even when there are large-scale protests, that does not necessarily mean the country is entering some kind of revolutionary phase. I was in Russia in early 2012, during the mass protests against the results of the Duma election. That time when Alexei Navalny emerged as the leader of the opposition. Back then, when you talked to people in Moscow, most of them would tell you without hesitation that Putin is an idiot and that they hate him – even people who up until then had been quite loyal to him. In those days, it really felt like the days of his regime were numbered. And yet here we are, over ten years later, and Putin is still in power.
STANDARD: One effect of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is that it is getting framed not just as a fight between a militarized dictatorship and a liberal democracy but as a colonial war. What do you think about that?
Gessen: I have to admit I am still wrapping my head around the colonial stuff. I mean, it was literally called the Russian Empire for centuries. After the 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks saved the empire and then reconstructed it. They gave nominal borders to the various republics but ruled them from Moscow, and there was a conscious effort to settle areas in Ukraine or the Baltics with ethnic Russians. So I am not quite sure what to make of that debate, because all of that was never a secret. Hence, I guess the more salient question today is: Is Russia irredeemably imperial? Can it be no other way, and must it therefore disappear?
In the spring of 2014, I had a conversation with the poet Boris Chersonsky in Odesa about this. I had been to Kyiv before and talked to the people on the Maidan and they were like, "We had this amazing revolution, we toppled the dictator, and then Putin comes in and invades our country." It just seemed so incredibly evil, and based on these experiences, I remember asking Chersonsky flat-out: "Should Russia be destroyed?" And he answered: "You cannot think this way. You cannot wish for that, because it is just a kind form of saying that you wish for the destruction of a people." While I admit I had that thought at that point, I tend to agree with Chersonsky. Not at least because I have also seen a completely different Russia than the one there is now. I was there in the 1990s, when it was a place with a great amount of freedom of expression, and a vibrant civil society. So yeah, having experienced that, I seriously believe that another kind of Russia is possible. I do not think it is going to happen next week, but the current regime is not going to last forever. (Klaus Stimeder, 25.5.2023)