![]() So I flew to Moscow actually on Thursday the 24th. What was it like to be there during the early days of the invasion? masha gessen So you’ve been in Moscow in recent weeks. As always, my email PLAYING] Masha Gessen, welcome to the show. And it makes Gessen’s perspective particularly essential right now. And that question is so horribly relevant right now. It’s both a remarkable book, but it’s remarkably relevant now because a core question of that book - and that is a book partially about Putin - a core question of that book is how authoritarian regimes shape not just what a public knows, not just what a public believes, but how they think - the tools and information and raw material they have to order and understand their world. They wrote a biography of Vladimir Putin’s rise, “The Man Without a Face,” and then the National Book Award-winning, “The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia,” which I cannot recommend more highly. This is an interest that goes way back in their work. And Gessen has paid particular attention to what Russians are seeing and not seeing. Masha Gessen covers Russia for The New Yorker and has been doing remarkable reporting from Ukraine and Russia alike. This is a country that already was filled with propaganda where information and untruth were in an unusually intense competition and information is being choked off that much more and that much more rapidly.īut if you don’t know you’re at war, then how do you understand war’s consequences? What do Russians know of the sanctions that are beginning to destroy their economy and change their lives? How are they being understood? And importantly, how are they being narrativized? And then this separate, but related question - what is it exactly that Putin is telling Russians? If you were to listen to him, to trust and believe him, what would you believe is happening in Ukraine? He’s wiping out independent news operations. It’s a special military operation.Īnd under a new law, to say anything that Putin’s government thinks is false about his war in Ukraine is punishable by up to 15 years in prison. But the question that raises is what are Russians supporting? What do they know of the war being waged in their name by their government? Do they even know it’s war? The Russian government does not call it a war. ![]() And as of today, the two polls I’ve seen out of Russia found majority support for the war in Ukraine. I’m recording this on Thursday, March 10 - this intro. ![]() I’m Ezra Klein, and this is “The Ezra Klein Show.” ![]() The Russian American journalist on how Putin’s war in Ukraine is playing out inside Russia’s highly controlled media environment. ![]() Transcript Putin Is ‘Profoundly Anti-Modern.’ Masha Gessen Explains What That Means for the World. ![]()
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