1: Masha Gessen, the Rise of Putin

Olga and Mo journey back to the 90’s with Russian-born journalist Masha Gessen who describes their odd introduction to Vladimir Putin by way of Saint Petersburg and beyond.

MASHA GESSEN

Masha Gessen is a staff writer for the New Yorker and the author of eleven books, including “Surviving Autocracy” and “The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia,” which won the National Book Award in 2017. Gessen has written about Russia, autocracy, L.G.B.T. rights, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump, among others, for The New York Review of Books and the New York Times. On a parallel track, Gessen has been a science journalist, writing about aids, medical genetics, and mathematics; famously, Gessen was dismissed as editor of the Russian popular-science magazine Vokrug Sveta for refusing to send a reporter to observe Putin hang-gliding with the Siberian cranes.