Among their subjects were the banning of so-called 'homosexual propaganda' and other related laws the harassment and beating of journalists, and the depreciation in value of the ruble. They contributed several dozen commentaries on Russia to The New York Times blog 'Latitude' between November 2011 and December 2013. In an extensive October 2008 profile of Vladimir Putin for Vanity Fair, Gessen reported that the young Putin had been 'an aspiring thug' and that 'the backward evolution of Russia began' within days of his inauguration in 2000. Gessen was on the board of directors of the Moscow-based LGBT rights organization Triangle between 19.

Masha Gessen at the Moscow International Book Festival, 2011 Their brothers are Keith, Daniel, and Philip Gessen. They hold both Russian and US citizenship.

As an adult in 1991, Gessen moved to Moscow, where they worked as a journalist. In 1981, when Gessen was a teenager, their family moved via the US Refugee Resettlement Program to the United States. Gessen's maternal grandfather Samuil was a committed Bolshevik who died during World War II, leaving Ruzya to raise Yelena alone. Ruzya Solodovnik, Gessen's maternal grandmother, was a Russian-born intellectual who worked as a censor for the Stalinist government until she was fired during an antisemitic purge. Ester's father Jakub Goldberg was murdered during the Holocaust in 1943, either in the Białystok Ghetto or a concentration camp. 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. Gessen was born into a Jewish family in Moscow to Alexander and Yelena Gessen. Gessen worked as a translator on the FX TV channel historical drama The Americans. Since 2017, they have been a staff writer for The New Yorker. In addition to being the author of several non-fiction books, they have been a prolific contributor to such publications as 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. Gessen writes primarily in English but also in their native Russian. Described as 'Russia's leading LGBT rights activist,' they have said that for many years they were 'probably the only publicly out gay person in the whole country.' They now live in New York with their wife and children. Gessen has written extensively on LGBT rights. Gessen is nonbinary and trans and uses they/them pronouns. Masha Gessen (born 13 January 1967) is a Russian-American journalist, author, translator and activist who has been an outspoken critic of the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, and the former president of the United States, Donald Trump.

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