M Gessen and The Colonial Gaze

Last Saturday I was walking around Kharkiv with a young Ukrainian journalist, when he suddenly noted that before coming to Kharkiv he’d read a New York Times article by a Russian-American journalist M.Gessen about the city in 2022. To my frown, he wondered what was it that could be wrong with such a distinguished journalist, a person who evidently was against the Russian invasion and who focused so much on our country.

“This is exactly the problem”, - I said after a moment of thinking. - “Why is a Russian journalist be the one to show Ukraine to the global reader? Why don’t American audience read a first-hand Ukrainian account? What is the whole obsession with looking at us through the Russian gaze?”

Several days after on the fourth anniversary of the full-scale war M.Gessen presented another authoritative article on the past and present of Ukraine.

I found the audacity fascinating. And quizzical. With the fading interest in Ukraine, why would the authoritative journalist continue to insist on speaking for (and instead of) Ukraine. About our future and past, no less.

I started reading and immediately, a russian gaze presented itself. I started to look at Ukraine through this gaze by reading the sentences in my head. Here Ukrainians are suddenly feel that “this 4th anniversary is very special as it coincides with the number of years of the “great patriotic war”, and Ukrainians like russians” consider this artificial division from WW2 “sacral”. (No one in my circle thought about this connections at all, for for a russian journalist it seems self-evident that we should have and so they write about it as of a fact).

Later in the text M.Gessen start to judge Ukraine’s level of democracy as “falling”. And, sure, who else but the representative of the two empires would qualify to speak of that.

Ultimately, it felt in the text that Ukrainians were the captives. Not of their government or russian state, but of M.Gessen’s imagination where Ukrainians think like russians and are essentially “little russians”. We were plastered into a form that the russian gaze prepared for us. And so, the 1990 Revolution of Granite becomes a “new invention of Ukrainians” who create “new history” for themselves, where “russia was always an enemy”. And that concerns and torments M.Gessen who from the heights of their Moscow upbringing never heard of such a revolution.

Ultimately, thinking why numerous russian intellectuals continue to be so obsessed with Ukraine, I come to a conclusion that they, as ever, seek “greatness”. Suddenly they feel that Ukrainians have something, if not “great”, then “significant”, and nothing significant can go past a Russian gaze.

I only hope that one day the paper that still hold Walter Duranty’s legacy will allow a Ukrainian gaze to seep through. Not great. Just humane.