PROFILE
Masha Gessen Rides Her Bike to the Kremlin
A number of journalists bicycle — your colleague at The New Yorker, Hendrik Hertzberg, and Michael Musto are cyclists, and Bill Cunningham rode a bike everywhere. What is the connection?
I don’t know if that is statistically representative, but if we actually knew that journalists were disproportionately more likely to ride bikes, then I would hypothesize that journalists move through the world a little bit differently than a lot of other people. Even though a lot of journalism is group work, there is not a group pursuit in journalism. You are always alone, and you are always trying to figure out the passages — whether they are mental passages or informational passages, or often, physical passages — that will take you through the world alone and let you learn alone. And biking is like that. When I am biking I always feel like I am charting a route, even if I am just going up and down the Hudson River Greenway.
I suspect a lot of celebrities ride bikes in New York because you can disappear in the crowd and not be bothered.
Biking is really solitary. Every time I get on public transportation I feel so suddenly exposed because I am used to biking and not having that. There’s also an etiquette to it. I’m not a celebrity per se, but when I’ve been recognized while biking, the most I get is a smile and a wave, which is lovely. When I was biking a day or two after I won the National Book Award, a stranger just shouted out congratulations to me. It was the sweetest thing.
Did you ride a bike when you lived in Russia?
I have often been quoted as saying that, in the 90s, I was probably the only publicly out person in Russia; I also think I was the only person biking in Moscow. At one point, I had a 25 kilometer commute to work, but it would take me more than an hour and a half to ride because Moscow was so unfriendly. You were constantly having to stop. It was like cyclocross. I would always be carrying my single-speed bike over things, or diving into an underpass.
In the mid-aughts, people started slowly getting into bikes, and now it is really fashionable. Before I left Russia in 2013, there was a summer when I actually had that experience of stopping at a light and having other bicyclists stop with me. After the sense of riding in a desert for the last 20 years, it was really shocking. At first, I would smile at people, thinking they were so awesome for riding. Then it just became a thing that everybody did. And then I started getting resentful, the way that I get resentful when I am on the Hudson River Greenway or in Central Park on the first sunny weekend of April and everybody comes out. All of a sudden I am not the only person riding, and I think: Where were you? I’ve been riding these streets for twenty years.
Now, when I go back to Russia — which isn’t very often anymore, but I was for quite a while when I was reporting my most recent book [The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, published in 2017 by Riverhead Books] — it has become really difficult for me to ride in Moscow. It is not a bike-friendly city, and I would just ride, thinking: Oh my god, how did I used to do this?
Speaking of biking in Moscow, I heard that you rode your bike to meet with President Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin.
I did. It was hilarious. My meeting with Putin was a big deal. It was a very unusual thing to have happen. He never calls journalists unless they are pocket journalists, his personal friends. And because he never calls journalists to come in for a meeting, there was this whole scramble, with his administration, on the one hand, and the press office, on the other hand competing for who was going to actually organize the meeting. So they kept calling me and debating.
The Kremlin is a fortress, literally a fortress, so there’s always a negotiation about whether you get to drive into the Kremlin or whether you have to park outside the Kremlin, and which gate you enter through. All of this, in terms of protocol, is very involved. They call me to ask, “Where is your driver going to be when you’re in the Kremlin?” And I say, “Well, I don’t have a driver. I’m actually going to bike in.” That was such a weird concept to them. The administration said that I would be able to ride my bike onto the Kremlin grounds. And the press office said no way, that I was going to have to park my bicycle a mile away.
So I did ride my bike right up to the Kremlin gate and I tried to enter with my bike. They said I could not enter with a bicycle, and I said, “Why not? I am going to the Working Office,” which is the equivalent of the Oval Office. The guard said, “Well, that’s why. You can’t go into the Working Office with a bicycle.” So I had to suffer the indignity of locking it up at the bus stop outside the fortress.
Then, after I wrote about that meeting, I am told that they now have a bicycle stand on the grounds. I have not seen it; I do not think I will ever be invited back. But my meeting with Putin produced a bike stand on the Kremlin grounds. I very much doubt that anybody actually uses it. But it is there. I think of it as sort of a monument to me.
When did you start riding a bike in New York City?
I moved to New York to go to college and immediately started riding. I moved in on a Sunday, and on Monday, I rode all over the city, then I locked up my bike at the parking meter and went to sleep. I heard them ripping out the parking meter in the middle of the night. That was my first experience with biking in New York City. I’ve had six bikes stolen in New York City since that one was stolen on my first night.
When I first biked in New York in the 80s, it was such a strange and dangerous proposition. It was also kind of perfect for a young person. New York in the 80s was the perfect place to be young, and to be a young person on a bicycle. When I came back in the 20-teens, I discovered that New York had become a really great city to be a grown-up with kids, and also a really great city to bike as a grown-up. I don’t really have the stomach anymore for the kind of risk that was involved in riding a bike in New York City in the 80s. Fortunately the city has accommodated my aging as a bicyclist, and now there’s the Hudson River Greenway, and protected bike lanes; not enough, but still. To this day, every time I’m on the Greenway, I think to myself at one point or another: I can’t believe I get to live in this city and this is my daily ride.
Transportation Alternatives will keep fighting for more of those protected bike lanes.
Thank you for doing that. I follow your work and your educational efforts, and your bike lane efforts. This is incredibly important work that you do.
