M. Gessen

How is it that for three-quarters of a century, we Americans have bungled our foreign policy that we have systematically empowered Iranian extremists? They call us the Great Satan, but in truth, our ineptitude has made us their benefactors.

Next, from the Times opinion page, an opinion by M. Gessen, there is a word so powerful it need be spoken only once.

If you've heard anything about NASA, the new documentary about the war in Gaza, it might be that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel was so outraged by it that he has proposed legislation that would revoke the filmmaker's citizenship.

So you could assume that the film, which has not yet been released, is about him, or maybe that it's about the suffering of Palestinians with lots of images of bloody corpses, weeping children, and hungry families.

For more on Putin, check out the YouTube movie called Putin's Palace.

Also, Masha Gessen's book, Man Without a Face.

Someone else has read On the Couch by Andrew Jamieson, which, uh, looks at a few identities, including Vladimir Putin.

Yeah.

I was trying to find the title, Masha Gessen's Surviving Autocracy, has a very powerful chapter in it, Institutions Fail Us.

Part of the American ethos is that we have the three branches of government and those institutions will uphold democracy.

And she goes, no, they don't.

There's a wonderful woman who writes for the New York Times.

Masha Gessen is her name.

She grew up in Russia and is very, you know, outspoken in her critique of Putin.

But she's just so smart about a million different things.

the most part yeah it's it's a Right at the end, when Bella was kind of teetering on the edge of being fired, she went to Russia.

And while she was in Russia, she met M. Gessen, the contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Times.

And M. Gessen mentioned that they were... doing a profile of Luzcaya at the time and had spoken to Luzcaya about Bella's translation.

And Luzcaya had said that there were some kind of technical difficulties, but on the whole that she was happy with the translation.

So there is some evidence that perhaps she was happy with it or happy with a version of it or happy with it at one point in time.

At that time, Putin was his KGB liaison.

As Clodo recalled in a conversation with journalist Masha Gessen, even when he and his comrades went to West Germany to commit terrorist attacks, Putin always asked them to bring him some goods.

Though, truth be told, he always offered money for it, all fair and square, once they stole a car to carry out some operation.

They also pulled an expensive audio system, Blaupunkt, from that vehicle and later brought it to Putin in Dresden.