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.

Take the people facing charges in connection with the protests that occurred on the eve of Vladimir Putin's third-term inauguration, May 6, 2012. Hundreds were arrested but what's important is that most of those charged are not leaders in the movement. In fact, only one is an identifiable leader. The rest are rank-and-file activists, or people who just came to the protest. This indicates a very particular kind of crackdown - it communicates the message that there's no safe zone.

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.

There's this American pretense, which is the pretense of the journalist with the view from nowhere - which has somehow morphed into the journalist who was born this morning. So, he doesn't know that Donald Trump lied yesterday, and the day before. So, he concludes that he doesn't know whether Trump lied accidentally or on purpose. You can only pretend not to know that if you don't know that he lied yesterday, and the day before. So, to my mind when NPR says they don't know if he's intentionally lying, they're lying. We have to be smarter about it.

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.

It's not natural for people in the opposition to leave. It's always a personal catastrophe.

There's not a whole lot of similarity between the two societies, Russian and American. There are similarities behind psychological forces. One thing we can learn is that things can change pretty fast. And this idea that we know who we are and that things can only get so bad in this country - that's wrong.