We have the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church talking about how gay marriage is a sign of the apocalypse, or Russian TV talking about how meteorites are coming to punish Russians for homosexuality.

For the first ten years, Vladimir Putin was constructing his power structure, and now he's defending it. He's retrenching, mobilizing a shrinking constituency, constructing an enemy that's really scary. It's war. And when you look at the anti-gay campaign, it's a classic case of war rhetoric: demonstrating an immediate and extreme danger.

What's going on in Russia is not that the public is homophobic, but that the Kremlin has unleashed a war. You don't fight a war by distributing well-meaning books about how the other side really isn't so bad.

Putin needed an enemy, an Other, against which to mobilize. LGBT people are really convenient: we're sort of the ultimate foreign agent.

Donald Trump clearly doesn't have the intellectual capacity to have a concept of what he's doing. I think he has a very strong instinct for using lying to assert power, and that's what he does. Every time he lies, he's saying "I can say whatever I want, whenever I want to, and there's nothing you can do about it." I think he understands that instinctively. He has a finely honed sense for power and manipulation. Bullying is another way to put it. He's a highly skilled bully, but bullying is not a very sophisticated strategy.

What has happened to protesters in the past was that, basically, the government in 2012 put an end to a series of mass protests by changing laws, by making it possible to arrest anybody for protests, and by making basically a show of imprisoning not just protest leaders, and not specifically protest leaders, but activists, rank-and-file protest participants. That gets across the idea that anybody who joins a protest without being an organizer, without being a visible leader, risks arrest, and not risks just arrest, but years in a Russian jail.

There are several dozen political prisoners in Russia. When I cite that number people are often very surprised. They often think there are more. Well - there are hundreds of thousands of people who haven't had a fair trial, who are victims of the political system. But in the Amnesty International sense of the word, most of them are not political prisoners because they are not going to prison for protesting.