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.

You risk everything if you so much as join a legal protest demonstration in Russia. It raises the stakes.

It is the first time since 1993 that Russians have come out into the streets without an explicit permission from the government to do so. The main difference between the protests of 2011-2012 and these protests today is that they didn't have permits. These were - the people who were coming out into the streets were very young people, for the most part, who knew that they were all risking arrest. It's an extraordinary event.

One of the most famous lines in contemporary Russian poetry is "Erica makes four copies and that's enough." That's the ethos we're aiming for. This is not to say I don't want lots of people to read my book, I do. I especially want people to read it who will feel better, and safer, or at least understood.

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.

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.

When I was touring with my Vladimir Putin biography, which was published all over the world, people would ask me, How come you're still there, why haven't you left? I would say, I'm staying, it's my home. He can leave! It felt very good to say that. But now - he wins. It's not natural for people in the opposition to leave. It's always a personal catastrophe. And yet he's gotten people out of the country. That's the most terrifying thing about the current situation, and for the future of the country.