Lloyd Lofthouse

Masha Gessen is a Russian-American dissident who writes for the New York Times and the New York Review of Books.

She wrote this article right after the election, on November 10.

This consists of her six rules for surviving an autocracy. Here are a few excerpts:

“Rule #1: Believe the autocrat. He means what he says. Whenever you find yourself thinking, or hear others claiming, that he is exaggerating, that is our innate tendency to reach for a rationalization. This will happen often: humans seem to have evolved to practice denial when confronted publicly with the unacceptable. Back in the 1930s, The New York Times assured its readers that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was all posture. More recently, the same newspaper made a telling choice between two statements made by Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov following a police crackdown on protesters in Moscow: “The police acted mildly—I would have liked them to…