For the first stage of his dictatorship, Vladimir Putin was involved in destroying public space. On the first day he was in office, he introduced legislation that reformed and over five years effectively dismantled the electoral system. So anything that passes for elections in Russia today has nothing to do with actual elections.

I received the Media for Liberty Award from Swedish PEN, and the prize was awarded by the Swedish minister of culture, who also happens to be the minister of sport. When she handed me the award, I said, Thank you, it's wonderful to be recognized, but we journalists always want more. So madam minister, I have a personal favor to ask you: Do not go to Sochi. And she announced that she was going to Sochi, but she's not attending the ceremonies, for political reasons. It's a very pointed stance.

When you lose your freedom, you lose, first and foremost, the opportunity to choose the company you keep.

Here in the U.S. we do have a problem with a president Donald Trump who uses language in two distinctly destructive ways. One is to lie, and to use words to mean their opposite. Like, when he calls the Russian investigation a "witch hunt." He can't call it a "witch hunt" because a witch hunt is something that a powerful person does against a powerless person. The most powerful man in the world cannot be the object of a witch hunt.

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.

For example, if you are a blogger who wrote something about a local official and you're going to prison for that, you're a political prisoner. If you're a businessman who has refused to cede his business to the local official and you're going to prison for that, you're not a political prisoner. In that second category there are hundreds of thousands of people in Russia.

As a gay parent I must flee Russia or lose my children