A Russian court has sentenced award-winning Russian-Jewish writer Masha Gessen to eight years in prison in absentia for comments she made in 2022 about the country’s conduct in the Ukraine war.
With this ruling, Gessen, who uses the pronouns “they” and “them,” becomes at least the fifth prominent Jewish writer to be targeted by Russia for dissenting comments since the outbreak of the war.
Gessen, a New York Times columnist and former New Yorker writer who fled the Soviet Union as a teenager and has written and commented widely on Judaism there, has also been heavily criticized by Jewish groups for his writings on Israel.
Gessen was not present at the verdict on Monday; the writer lived in Russia from 1991 to 2013, but has lived in the United States since then. In a statement to the Times, the verdict was said to be intended to “intimidate me and prevent me from practicing my profession.”
The sentence was linked to an interview that Gessen gave to a Russian-language news channel in 2022 about Russian behavior in the Ukrainian city of Bucha. Observers found there: Russian soldiers massacred civiliansRussia accused Gessen of being the author of “The Man Without a Face”, an unflattering portrait of Russian President Vladimir Putin, of spreading “false information” about the military, a common accusation the country makes against its critics.
Gessen is one of the few writers who has been criticized in both authoritarian Russia and democratic Europe, in the latter case for her highly critical writings about Israel’s war in Gaza. Last year, Jewish groups protested against an article in the New Yorker that compared Gaza to Nazi-era Jewish ghettos, prompting a local German government withdraw a prize named after the German-Jewish writer Hannah Arendt that was supposed to go to GessenAfter the restructuring, Gessen finally received the prize.
Gessen has also written books on Jewish topics, including “Where the Jews Are Not,” a history of the former Russian Jewish enclave of Birobidzhan; the personal Russian-Jewish family history “Esther and Ruzya” and “Perfect Rigor”, a biography of the Russian-Jewish mathematician Grigori Perelman.
Russia also jailed Jewish-American Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich on espionage charges, sparking international outrage over Putin’s treatment of the press. His closed trial began last month; the final hearing is scheduled to take place this week.
Other Jewish writers who have been in Russia’s sights since the Ukraine war include the Georgian-Jewish crime writer Boris Akunin, who often appears as a Kremlin critic in exile in London. He was Earlier this year he was blacklisted and classified as a “foreign agent” after speaking out against the war in Ukraine and Putin. And the Russian-Jewish dissident journalist Vladimir Kara-Murza has been in a Siberian prison for over a year since his conviction to 25 years imprisonment for high treasonHis wife, who lives in the United States, told Western media this week that she feared for his health if he remained in prison.
In addition, the Russian-Jewish science fiction writer Dmitry Glukhovsky was like Gessen was sentenced in absentia last year to eight years in prison for accusing the Russian military of committing crimes in UkraineGlukhovsky has lived in Israel, speaks Hebrew and has a degree from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Shortly after his conviction his Holocaust play “The White Factory” about the decision of the Jewish ghetto of Lodz to produce goods for the Nazis in order to avert their genocide was premiered in London.
