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.

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.

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 another piece of legislation in Russia that would make "allowing for nontraditional sexual relations" a cause for removing parental rights, and remove children from same-sex families altogether. It was withdrawn, most likely temporarily, under international pressure. What "allowing for nontraditional sexual relations" means, nobody knows. And this is part of the point of all of these laws. They have to be vague to not just enable but require selective enforcement.

LGBT people are really convenient: we're sort of the ultimate foreign agent in Russia. There's no doubt in anyone's mind that the values that affirm nontraditional relationships, that affirm feminism, come from abroad. If you've established - and this isn't up for discussion - that foreign agents are bad, and foreign influence is bad, and the West is our enemy, then there's no better expression of the West's influence than gays and lesbians.

I think some people have blind faith in American institutions without knowing a whole lot about them and think they will stand up to Donald Trump and are indestructible. I actually think democracy is not a definable and achievable state. Any country is either becoming more democratic or less democratic. I think the United States hasn't tended to its journey toward democracy in a long time. It's been becoming less democratic, and right now it's in danger of becoming drastically less democratic.

With Pussy Riot - this was a prank! It was a brilliant, artistically gifted prank. But they didn't expect to go to prison! They were college girls who became political prisoners for two years. That makes them very similar to the people who were "just going to a protest one day" and got arrested. They had no idea they were risking the rest of their lives. Because you're never the same after you've spent two years in a gulag.