By Linda Morris
A prominent critic of the Russian leader Vladimir Putin, Masha Gessen, said Australia’s delay in processing their visa illustrated the reach of Russian authorities in the Kremlin’s attempts to silence dissent.
Gessen, who goes by them and they pronouns, said there was a lesson in Australia being more alive to the impact of world events.
Russian-American journalist and anti-Putin critic Masha Gessen at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas 2024.Credit: Dion Georgopoulos
The US-based journalist was speaking at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, a week after they had been “functionally” denied a visa when the Department of Home Affairs applied for additional information from international police authorities about trumped-up charges levelled against them.
The hold-up was resolved 24 hours after going public, but caused Gessen to cancel a planned mid-week public talk at the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne.
Gessen said Russian authorities had used such sham charges and prosecutions against critics and exiles to disrupt their ability to move around the world.
“The whole sentencing in absentia is a way of putting you on notice and a way of constraining you,” Gessen told the sold-out event.
“So you don’t want to go to Indonesia because they have a new extradition treaty with Russia. What didn’t occur to me was that it would create problems for me in places like Australia.”
Born in Russia and raised in America, Gessen is the author of The Future is History, an account of the rise of Putin, and has written extensively on human rights in Russia as well as Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Russian authorities charged Gessen last December with spreading false reports about the Russian army and put them on a watch list. They were convicted in absentia this July and sentenced to eight years in prison.
Despite a huge number of Russian journalists working in exile to burst the bubble of propaganda, Gessen said the majority of Russians continued to be fed “a story of a triumphant war”.
Ukraine’s recent incursion into Kursk region disrupted that narrative, creating hundreds of thousands of displaced people potentially flooding into cities like Moscow, bringing stories of frontline hardships and defeats to the broader populace.
Ukraine’s advance into Russian territory served as an insurance policy against a Trump victory in the November presidential elections, “because if they have been told to sit down and negotiate and let Putin have a bit of land, they have something to negotiate”.
For all their rhetoric, Western powers had not committed enough troops, planes or even closed the skies to end the war, Gessen said.
Ukraine had been funded enough to prevent the war expanding into their territories without ending it.
Gessen said Ukraine understood military aid may have an expiry date were Trump to be elected, and suggested Putin had “zero interest” in peace unless defeated on the battlefield.
The New Yorker staff writer recounted meeting Putin in 2012 when editing a popular science magazine Putin admired. Summoned to the Kremlin, Gessen said they had an “absolutely ridiculous conversation in which he talked to me about nature conservation and I talked to him about media freedom”.
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