In this episode of “The Opinions,” the editorial director David Leonhardt and the Opinion columnist M. Gessen discuss the very human inclination to try to return to normal life in the midst of a serious crisis.

David Leonhardt: I’m David Leonhardt, the director of the New York Times editorial board. Every week, I’m having conversations to help shape the board’s opinions, and today I’m talking with my colleague the columnist Masha Gessen.

Masha is one of the country’s sharpest thinkers on the threats that President Trump poses and on the best ways to resist them. Masha recently wrote about shock exhaustion, a feeling they know well from Vladimir Putin’s rule in Russia. Under Putin, so many awful things happened in such close succession that the shock eventually faded and the crimes that Putin committed became routine. Masha is worried that we’re entering a similar phase in the United States.

So today we’re going to talk through this together: the shock of Trump’s first months in office, the defiance that does exist, and how all of us can refrain from becoming numb.

Masha, welcome.

Masha Gessen: Great to be here.

Leonhardt: So I want to start with this feeling of shock exhaustion that you described so well. Can you give us some sense of what that looked like from your time in Putin’s Russia? And for listeners who aren’t familiar with your whole history, when was it that you were in Putin’s Russia?

Gessen: So I am Russian. I went back to Russia from the United States as a correspondent in 1991 and stayed for 22 years, until I was forced to leave by the Kremlin. And then I continued going back and forth and reporting until a couple of weeks after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine commenced. So I reported on Russia for more than 30 years, and on Putin’s autocratic rise, autocratic breakthrough and autocratic consolidation for the duration.

And it’s interesting — you call it shock exhaustion. It’s not a term I would use, actually, because I don’t know if it’s about exhaustion. I think it’s a very human, and in a way very beautiful, desire to normalize, to habituate, to find our footing in any situation, and to keep on living. It’s sort of a great, life-affirming ability that we have, except it has a way of normalizing things that we really shouldn’t live with. I think I first became aware of how it works when I was a war correspondent. And you know, you go into a country — if you get there at the beginning of a conflict — for the first few days, people are just shocked. They’re literally and figuratively shellshocked. Their entire way of life has vanished and they can’t believe it’s happening. Then, two, three days in, people are cooking on the sidewalk or having classes in bomb shelters, and it’s routine, and it’s as though it’s always been like this. And it’s this incredible human ability, but it’s also in itself shocking to me.

And to finally answer your question, how did it happen with Putin? With Putin it happened for me over and over again, so in 2000, 2001, when he went after independent media. It started as a sort of all-out attack, and it was shocking that it was that open, that frank and that brutal. And then we just got used to the fact that there was little, less and then no independent media in Russia. Then, in 2004, Russian troops shelled a school where children had been taken hostage, and then Putin used that terrorist attack as pretext for canceling gubernatorial elections in perpetuity. And that was shocking. Then we got used to that.

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