- With great regret, the lecture by Masha Gessen as part of the series Schauspiel-Recherchen has to be cancelled due to health reasons. Due to Masha Gessen's unique journalistic and personal connection to the thematic concept, we have therefore decided that the planned research must unfortunately be cancelled without replacement.
Whether it’s Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán or Vladimir Putin: democracies around the world are under pressure, and autocratic systems are increasingly on the rise. Masha Gessen, born in 1967 in Moscow, brings a rigorous analytical eye to the spread of authoritarianism in journalistic and literary writing — most recently in Surviving Autocracy, a hard-headed appraisal of the political situation in the United States. Having emigrated to the United States in 1981, Gessen later returned to Russia, worked for Russian and American media, and was active in the LGBTQI movement. Today, Masha Gessen lives in New York and writes regularly for The New Yorker, as well as other American and international publications. Gessen’s award-winning book The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia follows the lives of four Russians, examining Russian society from the post-Soviet years to the Putin regime today.