PERSON: Masha Gessen

Columnist

Masha Gessen (born 13 January 1967) is a Russian-American journalist, author, and translator. Gessen is nonbinary and trans and uses they/them pronouns. Gessen has written extensively on LGBT rights.

Gessen writes primarily in English but also in Russian. In addition to being the author of several non-fiction books, Gessen has been a contributor to The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, New Statesman, Granta, Slate, Vanity Fair, Harper’s Magazine, The New Yorker, and U.S. News & World Report. They have been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 2017, and an opinion columnist at The New York Times, under the byline M. Gessen, since May 2024.

Gessen was born into a Jewish family in Moscow to Alexander and Yelena Gessen. Gessen’s paternal grandmother Ester Goldberg, the daughter of a socialist mother and a Zionist father, was born in Białystok, Poland, in 1923 and emigrated to Moscow in 1940. Ester’s father Jakub Goldberg was murdered during the Holocaust in 1943, either in the Białystok Ghetto or a concentration camp.

Gessen’s maternal grandmother, Ruzya Solodovnik, was a Russian-born intellectual who worked as a censor for the Stalinist government until she was fired during an antisemitic purge. Gessen’s maternal grandfather Samuil was a committed Bolshevik who died during World War II, leaving Ruzya to raise Yelena alone.

In 1981, when Gessen was a teenager, their family moved via the US Refugee Resettlement Program to the United States. As an adult in 1996, Gessen moved to Moscow, where they worked as a journalist. They hold both Russian and US citizenship. Their brothers are Keith, Daniel, and Philip Gessen.

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