Last week, my colleague Masha Gessen announced their resignation from the board of PEN America, a group that advocates for free expression. The controversy began when two Ukrainian writers, both of whom serve in the Ukrainian Army, threatened to bow out of a PEN World Voices panel after hearing that Gessen was hosting a separate panel featuring two Russians. When PEN tried to move Gessen’s panel off the World Voices slate, Gessen resigned. Two days later, at a public gathering, Suzanne Nossel, PEN America’s chief executive, admitted, “As a free-speech organization, we must go to the utmost lengths to avoid sidelining speech or being seen to do so. We should have found a better approach.”
Gessen is a citizen of both the United States and Russia. For the past decade, after the Putin regime began harsh crackdowns on the L.G.B.T.Q. community in Russia, they have been living primarily in the U.S. Gessen’s work—including a number of books and many pieces for this magazine—has cast a harsh and critical eye on Vladimir Putin’s reign, and on the problem of autocracy more broadly.
Gessen and I recently spoke by phone. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed how the PEN controversy came about, why Gessen believes that cultural spaces should make more room for Ukrainian voices, and why—despite their decision to resign from PEN—Gessen believes the prominence of Russian culture in the West is problematic.
Why did you resign?
There were two reasons. One had to do with PEN as a free-expression organization, and the other had to do with my personal position in this predicament. I think that free expression is a complicated, broad, nuanced field, and I’m not a free-speech absolutist. We make decisions about speech and expression all the time, and that’s the job of a free-expression organization. The question of whether a festival should feature both Ukrainian and Russian writers is a perfectly legitimate one, and it raises all sorts of other questions: is it O.K. for them to speak in the same spaces, or for them to speak in different spaces on the same topic, or in different time slots?
But that’s not what happened. What happened was that both Russian and Ukrainian writers were invited. And then, when the Ukrainian writers arrived and said, “We can’t speak at the same festival with Russians,” the Russians were disinvited. To disinvite them is not just impolite, but it’s also basically saying, “Look, we thought your expression was legitimate and desirable until other people said it wasn’t.” That, I think, violates the principles of free expression. A free-expression organization can’t be in that business of saying, “We don’t want you to speak because someone else doesn’t want you to speak.”
The other reason was personal. I was the vice-president of PEN’s board of trustees, and I was put in a position of going to these two Russian writers, who are people I respect immensely and love, and are my friends, and telling them, as PEN, that this had happened. That’s an untenable position for me. So I felt like I had to resign.
It has been reported that there was some attempt to have the Russians speak in a different forum. What exactly was the conversation about that?
The Ukrainian writers, as I understand it, said, “Look, it’s a huge political risk for us, possibly even a legal risk for us, to be seen as speaking in the same festival with Russian participants.” Nothing personal, just the political risk. PEN said to them, “O.K., well, look, do you want us to change the banner? Instead of PEN World Voices, the banner that you’ll be speaking in front of will be PEN America.” The Ukrainians said, “No, you invited us to PEN World Voices. We don’t want to speak under a different banner.”
So then PEN came to the Russians and said, “How about we change your banner?” Same problem. We would never have any objection to Ukrainian writers saying, “We don’t want to have any interaction with Russians.” But to say that you can’t sit at the big table because Ukrainians are also sitting at the big table at a different time, because you were born in Russia, and you carry Russian passports—again, that feels horrible in my mouth to say.
Earlier, you said that there were legitimate questions about whether Russians and Ukrainians should be invited to the same event. Is that an interesting question? I don’t really understand the idea that people of Russian descent or people holding Russian passports should ever not be invited to an event simply because of something their country is doing. That actually doesn’t seem all that complicated to me. What am I missing?
I think you’re missing a little bit of context. This is an imperial war in a not-quite-post-colonial situation. Ukrainians are constantly confronted with Russian dominance in cultural spheres and in academia. People who purport to know something about Ukraine in academia are—in their plurality, and there are certainly exceptions, but, in their plurality—people who spend most of their lives studying Russia or the Soviet Union. Ukrainians, I think quite rightly, look at all sorts of cultural venues, events, and universities as scarce commodities and say, “O.K., Russians have taken up so much cultural room, so much vocal space, that we have to campaign. Just set it aside for a while and listen to the other voices in this vast space, because the Empire has silenced those voices systematically.”
Maybe the distinction goes back to something you said earlier: that it’s one thing to decide how you invite people, and it’s another thing to invite people and then disinvite them after others make their displeasure known. And, in this case, there is a distinction between doing a panel on the invasion and only inviting Russians, or talking about Ukrainian history and only inviting Russians, and disinviting a specific person because of the passport they happen to hold.
Exactly. That’s a distinction.
One of the Ukrainians writers, Artem Chapeye, whose fiction we have published, told Gal Beckerman of The Atlantic, “The Russian participants decided to cancel their event themselves because we as active soldiers were not able to participate under the same umbrella.” The piece continues, “Chapeye said he couldn’t make distinctions between ‘good’ Russians and ‘bad’ Russians in this case. ‘Until the war ends,’ he wrote to me, ‘a soldier can not be seen with the “good Russians.” ’ ” What did you make of this argument?
What Artem actually said was that he does differentiate between good and bad Russians, but, as long as he’s on active duty, he can’t be seen even with the “good Russians.” [Beckerman had asked Chapeye whether he makes a distinction between Russians who actively or passively support the war and those who are anti-Putin, and Chapeye responded, “Of course. Nevertheless, until the war ends a soldier cannot be seen with the ‘good Russians,’ you can’t dig into everyone’s biography.”]
But let me unpack the trope. The phrase “good Russians” does not refer to people like me or the people who were going to be on this panel. “Good Russians” are people who actively participated in creating the regime and upholding the regime who then decided they were against the war. They are people who most loudly declare that they have no responsibility for this war, but often are heavily implicated in creating the conditions that strengthen the regime that made this war possible. So when people say “good Russians” they’re not necessarily talking about dissidents. They’re talking about people who they feel take up all the attention on the international stage. Because of their prior positions of power, they have a lot of connections, they have a lot of media exposure, and their voices talking about how much they oppose the war are once again louder than Ukrainian voices. So that’s what the phrase “good Russians” refers to.
As one Ukrainian put it to me, “The actually good Russians are the ones who are not trying to talk to me.” She says these Russians are “alright Russians,” who don’t stick their noses in our Ukrainian affairs and just deal with Russia. Now, that’s exactly what our panel was going to be. As far as what Artem said about whether he can be seen with any Russians, including on a screenshot of a festival program, I’m not aware of any legal requirements or possible repercussions. But I can’t speak to whether his commanding officer or some newspaper would run away with that as damaging to his reputation. He can speak to that, but there’s no legal reason why he should be in trouble.
Is part of the notion of “good Russians” that even Russians criticizing the war in some way is inappropriate? Or is it the way they’re going about it?
In general, a lot of Ukrainians feel that Russians are habitually drawing too much attention to themselves. This war is an act of Russian aggression that’s happening on Ukrainian territory. To Ukrainians, certainly, it’s not about the Russian regime. As someone who spent their entire working life writing about the Russian regime and Russian history, of course it’s about the Russian regime and Russian history. But, again, I can see why, in a situation that’s often experienced genuinely as a situation of scarcity, an article about Russia, Russians, “good Russians,” Russian exiles who are suffering so much because they oppose the war—I’ve written those articles—and I can see how that feels, how it drowns out the Ukrainian experience. The more painful aspect is that war is incredibly boring and repetitive, right? One Ukrainian spending twenty-three days in a cellar, unable to get drinking water because of Russian shelling, is going to be very much like another Ukrainian going through the same experience. Then you see how, gradually—even though this war has had an inordinate amount of media coverage—attention for that type of thing drops. “Good Russians” who are writing books, creating media, staging shows, writing songs about how much they oppose the war—they’re different from one another. I’m intentionally being somewhat reductive here, but just pointing out that there’s a variety of painful experiences and a variety of ways for Ukrainians to genuinely experience being overshadowed and drowned out by Russians even while this war is going on.
Can you talk about the positive ways Western or American forums can engage with Russians right now? There have obviously been a lot of controversies about cancelling operas and so on.
On the subject of cancelling operas and all that, I think I’m very much on the side of people who say, “Look, if we don’t hear Tchaikovsky for three years, even though Tchaikovsky really has no relationship to this war, but, if we don’t hear him for three years or whatever, it will not be a great loss to world culture. Tchaikovsky will not be forgotten. A Ukrainian composer may be discovered by audiences and perhaps we’ll put a dent in Russian soft power without quite realizing it.” I guess that’s the debate I actually don’t find terribly interesting, except when it becomes a conversation like the one I’m personally involved in, which is: in addition to Tchaikovsky, there are musicians who play Tchaikovsky, right?
This is a pretty great example as far as I’m concerned: the Cooper Union had a show on a revolutionary art movement crushed by Stalin. The show was originally supposed to go up in January. But then there were a couple of articles in architecture newsletters that criticized the show, including one which accused the curator, completely unfairly, of being a Putinite. [In response, the Cooper Union announced that it was postponing the show. Twelve days later, after fielding criticism for that decision, it announced that the show was back on. The show opened in April.]
At first I thought, That’s crazy. Right? These people were working a hundred years ago. Why would you cancel that show? And then my colleague at Bard, Maria Sonevytsky, said to me, “Look, it is Russian soft power. It may be sort of a tangential expression of it, but it is Russian soft power. It is another sign of the dominance of Russian everything, because we’ve been studying Russian everything, and that’s the kind of show we can put on.” But, as far as I’m concerned, it is not about those architects, some of whom died a hundred years ago. It’s about the curator who put several years of her work into this, and was unfairly maligned in the media, and then almost had this work just literally erased. This kind of thing is inevitable because we’re talking about war, and this campaign of Russian soft power is part of this war, and war is dehumanizing. But, for people who are not fighting the war, it’s important to look at the human victims.
I wonder if it comes back to the distinction we were talking about earlier: if an institution decides that it’s not going to do a performance of Tchaikovsky, and it’s going to do some Ukrainian composer, that seems fine. But it also seems a little weird to cancel programs because people freak out about them or say that they’re offensive or whatever else.
I do feel that way, for a very specific, human reason. When you’re cancelling something that’s on the program, you’re also causing suffering to somebody who maybe put in five weeks of their lives or even two years of their lives to rehearse this Tchaikovsky concert and is not going to be able to perform somewhere. Again, not all loss is comparable to the losses of people that are going through war. So it’s not for Ukrainians to draw these fine distinctions. It’s for people who run these programs.
So then what was your plan for the PEN panel?
Right after the war began, I started a project with PEN America and Bard College called the Russian Independent Media Archive. The idea is very simple, which is that, with independent journalists having had to leave the country en masse and independent journalism being made illegal in Russia, we’re at risk of losing these vast archives of independent media, losing the historical record. So this was a project just to organize and safeguard an archive of independent Russian media, and make it searchable and usable, before it disappears.
Another part of this project is to create a tool kit for other countries in political crises where independent media suddenly comes under attack—to quickly be able to collect our archives and set them up in usable ways. In that regard, it’s the opposite of talking about the war in Ukraine, because this is a topic that’s irrelevant to Ukrainians. Ukrainians live in a democratic country where the independence of the media is not threatened.
This is why the other thing we were going to talk about on the panel was just what it’s like to be a journalist in exile, which I think is a new and under-contemplated phenomenon. We’ve had journalists who had to go into exile before, but we’ve never been in the type of situation that is technologically enabled now, in which entire media outlets can exist outside of the country they’re covering and outside of the country where their main audience is and continue to do journalism—and even continue to do really interesting and important and influential journalism. That’s not specific to Russia. That’s actually specific to a lot of tyrannical governments, where we’re seeing this emergence of journalism in exile. The panel was going to be the three of us who were working on this archive and a Chinese journalist in exile.
You have talked about certain cultural performances as Russian soft power. At the same time, it does seem that Putin wants to use negative reactions to Russian cultural events to his propagandistic advantage. I don’t know if that means it’s actually helpful to him, propaganda-wise, or if it’s just something he talks about. How do you think about that?
Well, it certainly does play into Russia’s sense of victimhood and of having the whole world against it. I’m not overly concerned about that, given what a high percentage of Russian propaganda is just outright lying. Whether something actually happens in reality in this country has very little impact on what ends up on Russian TV.
You’re someone who’s thought about the issues of free expression for a very long time. How do you feel that your own views on this issue have changed since the war began?
I think they have definitely developed, and I’m sure they will develop further. I have very little use for universal, absolutist metrics. So I like to think that, the more I learn, the more fine-tuned and specific my ideas are. I’ve certainly thought more about Russian imperialism in general, and cultural imperialism, and the way it functions in the world. I have thought more about it in the past fifteen months than I had before. It’s been a learning curve in part because there has been this heated debate, one initiated by Ukrainians. And rightly so.
On several occasions, you’ve used the framing of imperialism when it comes to Russia and Ukraine. Why do you think that framing is so helpful?
I think it’s helpful by virtue of being accurate. I even hesitate to think of other framings, to be honest with you. There are obviously people who observe a war, especially a horrific war like this one, and want to find explanations for it. There’s the Russian explanation, which is partly that Russia is under threat from NATO, and that in fact Russia is fighting an anti-imperialist war, and that explanation obviously doesn’t hold water. I think we have to look for other explanations. I think the imperial one is most helpful because it brings to the conversation concepts that are really helpful in understanding what Putin’s end goals are. Thinking about it as an imperial war and a post-colonial site for liberation also helps clarify why culture is so important and why it’s such a hugely sensitive topic. Elif Batuman has written about it for us, and about why, for Ukrainians, removing monuments to Pushkin in Ukrainian cities is so important. It’s not because they hate Pushkin or his poetry, but because Russia coming in and putting Pushkin on every street corner was an imperial gesture. ♦
