Masha Gessen (born 1967) is an American-Russian journalist, translator, and nonfiction author. They identify as non-binary and use they/them pronouns.
Born into an Ashkenazi Jewish family in Russia, in 1981 they moved with their family to the United States to escape anti-Semitism. They returned in 1991 to Moscow, where they worked as a journalist, and covered Russian military activities during the Chechen Wars. In 2013, they were publicly threatened by prominent Russian politicians for their political activism and were forced to leave Russia for the United States.
They write in both Russian and English, and has contributed to The New Republic, New Statesman, Granta and Slate. Gessen is a staff writer at The New Yorker, covering international politics, Russia, LGBT rights, and gender issues.
Books in order of publication:
| The Rights of Lesbians and Gay Men in the Russian Republic | 1993 |
| Half a Revolution: Contemporary Fiction by Russian Women | 1995 |
| Dead Again: The Russian Intelligentsia After Communism | 1997 |
| Ester and Ruzya: How My Grandmothers Survived Hitler’s War and Stalin’s Peace | 2005 |
| Blood Matters: A Journey Along the Genetic Frontier | 2008 |
| Perfect Rigor: A Genius and the Mathematical Breakthrough of the Century | 2009 |
| The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin | 2010 |
| Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot | 2014 |
| Gay Propaganda | 2014 |
| The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy | 2015 |
| Where the Jews Aren’t: The Sad and Absurd Story of Birobidzhan, Russia’s Jewish Autonomous Region | 2016 |
| The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia | 2017 |
| Never Remember: Searching for Stalin’s Gulags in Putin’s Russia | 2018 |
| Surviving Autocracy | 2020 |
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