As part of Smith’s 2021-2022 Presidential Colloquium series, Masha Gessen, a transgender and nonbinary Russian-American author and journalist, was invited to deliver a webinar on Feb. 15 to the student body and Smith community members. Following the theme of “Year on Democracies,” Gessen’s talk, titled “Hope and Hopelessness,” touched upon issues of political dissent, activism and what today’s generation can learn from the history of anti-authoritarian movements.
Gessen began their talk with a claim: today’s generation “probably has the most profound sense of hopelessness that certainly I have ever seen. And possibly that we have known in human history.” They attributed that sense of hopelessness to many things, but mostly tied it to the recent political climate in the United States.
Their talk on “imaginative political projects” was rooted in history. “I propose that while we know that the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century are a cautionary tale about the worst that humanity is capable of,” Gessen explained. “There’s also a lesson there, one that I draw cautiously about the best that humanity is capable of.”. Gessen used the story of Czech dissidents during the 1968 Prague Spring to call on listeners to combat the rise of political hopelessness.
They explained how the dissidents would meet in secret in the mountains to protest the authoritarian regime. “Every time they got together on this mountaintop, they wrote a grand proclamation, which could be summarized as we’re together and we want democracy,” Gessen said. “There’s such joy in that summary.”
They also covered current events, talking about how activists are standing up to authoritarian regimes in Eastern Europe. They touched upon the current situation in Ukraine and praised Biden’s strategy towards Putin’s threatened invasion of Ukraine. They also advocated for “thinking about foreign policy as a moral pursuit.”
They ended their talk with advice for the Smith student body. “Hope is a moral imperative,” Gessen said. “I don’t think you find hope; you make hope.” Drawing on the lives and actions of Czech dissidents, Gessen urged Smith students to make their own hope to combat the hopelessness they see as a rising trend.
“In order to see that something is possible, you have to create the conditions in which it is possible,” they said. “And I think that is how we make hope.”
Mlada Bukovansky, chair of the Government department and professor of international relations, sat down with The Sophian to discuss what she took away from Gessen’s presentation.
“There were a lot of holes in the talk,” she said.
She took issue with Gessen’s assertion that the current generation is hopeless. “I just immediately said I don’t see that. That’s not my experience of the students with whom I work. That put me off at the beginning. Then answering a question about hope at the end, where Masha Gessen said ‘hope is a moral imperative.’I thought, well if I were a hostile critic, I would conclude that they’re saying that your generation does not have the moral imperative of hope, which is probably not the message they were trying to give.”
“I equate hopelessness with apathy and I don’t see a whole lot of apathy here,” continued Bukovansky. “I see effort, exhaustion and anxiety. Maybe what Masha Gessen was reading as hopelessness, I see as anxiety… I don’t know if anxiety equates with hopelessness. If you’re hopeless, you are pretty certain there’s no hope. But if you’re in a world of uncertainties and you’re anxious about it, that’s a different thing.”
She was not all negative, though. “I think just by their very presence, by their strength as a writer, there’s a lot of value added to our conversation about the meaning of democracy. I would have loved to hear Masha Gessen talk more about writing, and tell more stories about their own experience. I think that it is really useful to see how this person navigated the challenges they came across.” She also agreed with Gessen on the importance of local papers as a source of news and expressed dismay at their dwindling numbers. Gessen, a journalist, cited the disappearance of local papers as contributing to the rise of hopelessness.
However, she still warned students to be critical about where they get their information. “What I’m afraid is that this will continue this trend that I see where anyone with a platform and compelling identity that meshes with some of the liberating aspects of transcending the old gender binaries and all that will then claim to speak with authority on a matter that they shouldn’t be claiming authority on,” she said. “I think Masha Gessen is an interesting figure and one who offers a model for a certain kind of intellectual, a certain kind of writer, [someone who is] nonbinary and the way you can work with this identity, but as an analyst of politics, not so much.”
One Smith student agreed with Bukovansky’s assessment. “I wasn’t sure what they were trying to say,” said Ivy Newman ‘25. “It was a little hard to follow. It was interesting, but I was definitely lost.”
Masha Gessen is an award winning journalist and outspoken critic of authoritarian leaders like Putin and Trump. They have written many books, including Surviving Autocracy, about US and Russian politics. They are currently working on a book about imaginative political projects.
