A little Moscow in New York

lives Where Our Masha, Moscow is never far, and it was in the North of the Central Park. A few streets behind your Block with the "Deli Harlem Empire" to extend the Projects, bare plate buildings on skeletal game stands and old trees. From a tree Branch, a black bra dangling. Apart from the Laundry in the branches of large parts of the Russian capital, not only to the social weak.

Masha Forgotten lives in the Projects, but since moving from Russia to New York in the year 2013, in a nearby Brownstone, with steps and hand towel large green stain. On the way to the kitchen the visitors of Gypsy accompanied, a kind of a black giant poodle of disarming trustfulness. Wood table, mirror-like pots on a hook by the window, a gay Putin as a Paper puppet with a rainbow flag and wreath of flowers: beinhart Masha Gessens political descriptions, it must be in a different, more playful side.

Yesterday evening, Masha Forgotten to get at the start of the Leipzig book fair prize for European understanding for her book, "The future is history" (in German by Suhrkamp). For many, it is the currently most convincing exegesis of the Russian post-communism, it is certainly one of the darkest. In the United States, you have made your autocracy-analysis one of the most sought-after commentators. But under the Putin-puppet in your kitchen it must of course go to Russia.

What is the reputation it has in Russia, meanwhile, learned she ordered, as a fellow lawyer in Russia, an English copy of your book. "He was appointed to the customs, where he should sign, that the book of common no extremist content. Then he said that he knew that he had not read it yet." After some Back and Forth he got the book, but moved because of the confiscation of the book in court, where he could see the internal justification of the customs officials. "The customs officer was looking for me on the Internet, where I am considered as someone of homosexuality being propagated," she says. "The book was so conceded not because of its content, but because of the author. Therefore, it will be translated never."

homosexual as the ideal victim

Masha is born Forget in Moscow, in the United States grew up, in 1996, to Russia returned, she left again in 2013, with your wife and three children in New York. As a lesbian, Jewish journalist, their maximum distance to the Kremlin is almost logical: The Russian history knew only a few phases, in which only one of their properties would be met with tolerance, even in the post-Communist quarter of a century. In a "totalitarian society ruled by a mafia state," said Masha Forget Russia, describes gay sexual ideal victims, their gay identity, their claim to equal rights could easily as a Western influence to denounce: "No one knows a Gay person, it's perfect." It may be that she's exaggerating, probably, even very much, but she has every right to see it that way.

Among the four portraits of Russian young people in their book, the gay scientists is not Ljoscha also the most interesting. Gessens favorite character is a young woman who is also Masha, a dangerously idealistic survivor, who experienced the post-Communist state as a kind of vacuum in which your mother under the pain of breast cancer must die because they get no morphine. One of Maschas Jobs is to organize the payment of bribes for a cosmetics company: the state as prey. This Masha would have liked to go to the army because of the order and of the higher meaning, but not to the Russian, for what higher purpose would have served this washed-up troupe in the nineties already?

There is no contradiction, but only in that Mashas Masha in the protests against Vladimir Putin in the fall of 2011 on Bolotnaya square homes. There is a contradiction, but almost logical that it offers today, after the suppression of protests and the introduction of High Putinism, of order and higher meaning, or at least the Simulation of both, for the state's international broadcaster, Russia Today is working, but. "She then goes wherever the Wind carries you," says Masha Forgotten.

critics have accused Forget that in your book up to the Putin ideologist Alexander Dugin only critical of the government people will be presented. Would it not have been important to have an eloquent Putin-supporters get a word in? The Masha does not Forget at all, you believe that someone close to the Regime, could analyze the Situation wisely. This is on the one hand correct, on the other hand leads to the impression that Russia consists of only opposition, or executors, that there is no such a thing as a follower. The existence of Impartial keeps you actually an Illusion: "In totalitarianism, the offender and the victim constantly swap places. There is no audience."

The failure of the intelligentsia

in the Meantime, like the T-word a few times already. But the more frequently it is Forgotten use – in your book you dedicate a lot of theoretical considerations, in the American Original it shows up even in the subtitle: "How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia" – the more disruptive it is for the German reader. The Suhrkamp publishing house was smart enough to choose another line: "How Russia won freedom and lost", which raises the interesting question of when Russia was in fact even close to the freedom. In the interim presidency under Dmitry Medvedev, perhaps, to some Liberal thinking is full of nostalgia?

"of Course not", and calling up Forgotten: "The people were excited because they wanted it to be. And I have understood you even. I remember that I had heard on the car radio a Medvedev-speech and taken: After ten years, someone spoke for the first Time in a convincing language about Russian policy." It was another Illusion. Putin and Medvedev were targeted at different Audiences, you know today, Putin on a larger, more traditional, Medvedev to a smaller, more urban, younger: "they divided Russia." But it was the same project.

The intelligentsia would have had the Chance to design a different, more humane Russia, a new Russian message to the world, she says. That you didn't make it, once again, not managed, because Sakharov was dead, and Russia is not Estonia, it was the biggest tragedy of the Nineties.

About at this point in the conversation, a cloud of Steam hisses from the radiator. This was completely normal, says Forget, there is no reason for concern. Gypsy sleeps unimpressed on the Coach in the living room. In the meantime has responded to Forget to SMS your daughter. In such moments, one suspects behind the intellectual Streiterin a loyal, warm-hearted, in spite of all the articles to maybe even a person who has committed just shy, a few questions, no compromises.

For the audience in the US she has raised the Status of an Oracle. She speaks in talk shows, writes a column in "New York", your journalistic influence is so great as never. What, then, of the Russian influence in the U.S. policy? The Robert Mueller investigation of Trump to make the case? These are the Considerations to which it thrusts again and again and for which she is a typical response: "America is obsessed with Russia, but this Obsession can be the simple fact besides Eight that Trump the Americans was chosen," she says. Regardless of what Mueller finds out: "Trump is not going to disappear suddenly."

But they don't feel it as a tragedy that has left the autocracy under Putin, to take on the anti-democratic fantasies of Donald Trump? She laughs: "Apparently, I'm bad luck." The opposite is the case: Masha Forgotten at the right time in the right place, because little of the USA need currently, more than Russia expertise, and to comprehend only what thinks Putin about Trump. He think it is "jarkij", Putin said once. An American Journalist translated it as "brilliant". It means "bright". As a result, historical legends.

(editing Tamedia)

Created: 20.03.2019, 20:22 PM