On language as a political act
ONRS: You've written extensively about how authoritarian regimes manipulate language. Has your thinking on this evolved since leaving Russia?
Masha Gessen: Language is always political, but in exile you become acutely aware of it. When you lose the daily context — the street signs, the overheard conversations, the bureaucratic forms — you start to see your own language from the outside. And that distance can be clarifying.
ONRS: Clarifying how?
Masha Gessen: You notice the words you've been trained to avoid. You notice the euphemisms that have become so embedded they feel like plain speech. "Special military operation" is the obvious example, but there are hundreds of smaller ones.
The first act of resistance is to call things by their real names.
ONRS: How do you navigate writing in English about Russian realities?
Masha Gessen: It's a constant negotiation. Some concepts don't translate — not because the words don't exist, but because the cultural weight behind them is different. Poshlost, for example. Nabokov spent pages trying to explain it.
On exile and audience
ONRS: Who are you writing for now?
Masha Gessen: That's the question every exiled writer faces. The honest answer is: I don't always know. Sometimes I write for the people who left. Sometimes for the people who stayed. Sometimes for the people who have no connection to Russia at all but need to understand what happens when a state decides that truth is optional.