I remember just two years ago, I enjoyed speculating: how, interestingly, could the German people, who not only took pride but boasted of their complex culture, refined and wise literature, advanced philosophy, humanistic tradition — their great, truly great civilization — become completely savage in just two decades? How did they transform first into a mob, then into a pack, unlearn to think — eagerly, passionately unlearn — believe in an uncharismatic cannibal, elevate him to their national leader, and begin, with German systematicity and love for order, to exterminate living people of different blood?

What interested me was not Hitler, whose charisma I couldn't feel but acknowledged, but the ordinary Germans: why were law-abiding citizens ready to become brutish, why did they need to hand over their neighbors to concentration camps, and why was it so easy for them to carry their children in strollers sent from Birkenau?

I tried, but I couldn't understand which details of the human soul were responsible here. My own country also went through totalitarianism, through repressions; but in Stalin's Soviet Union, it seems to me, a different mechanism was at work: there, due to the massiveness and unpredictability of the repressions, people were instilled with animal terror, they completely lost the ability to reason sensibly and resist, and waited submissively for whom Moloch would devour next.

And then a year ago, I was shown how it happens. How a people, who for twenty years, seemingly, lived freely, who were allowed (for the first time in their millennia-long history) free-thinking and the opportunity to choose their faith and ideology, could in a few months roll back not just to Soviet, dictatorial times — but further, deeper — into some kind of Middle Ages.

It turned out, all that was needed for this was to turn television from a means of information into a means of propaganda. This was done: simultaneously crude, primitive — and masterful. Joseph Goebbels would have dreamed of having such a tool as modern Russian TV. What took Goebbels a decade, we accomplished in a year. The people were ready for it. Ready to believe that we are surrounded by enemies. That they want to tear us to pieces, occupy us, colonize us, suck out our precious oil and our beloved gas. Devour us and digest us. Finish us off and raise the star-spangled banner over the Kremlin. And why did we believe them, why did we buy into such sometimes obvious lies? After all, we didn't truly lose the Cold War. After all, we weren't occupied by enemies, weren't forced to pay billions in reparations, American marines didn't march victoriously across Red Square, and no one took back Kaliningrad from us. Where did this feeling of national humiliation, defeat, which the TV channels inflated, come from?

Of course, the empire, which was built over three hundred years, is collapsing and sinking. No nation has easily said goodbye to an empire — even the Hungarians still can't come to terms with it. And yes, it turned out that the entire value system in which we were raised, the ideology — suddenly proved to be erroneous. But mainly — the people in the new Russia didn't have a sense of chosenness, uniqueness, greatness, didn't have the feeling of belonging to a power that is respected and feared by everyone in the world, and that changes this world.

The Russian person has never been truly free: in personal life, perhaps, and even then not always. And he has never been well-fed. And the state has never allowed him to feel respect for himself. At all times, this respect was replaced by pride in his country. Based, of course, on propaganda. And in recent years, the country provided no new reasons for pride, only for contempt and doubt. That is why the state celebrated Victory Day, May 9, every year with more grandeur and pomp. There have been no victories in modern Russian history more important than the USSR's victory over Hitler's Germany. The myth of the fight against fascism and victory over it became the main ideological myth of modern Russia, the main unifying factor for the motley, multinational population of our country.

That's the entire psychoanalysis.

But is it really enough for nine out of ten of my fellow citizens to suddenly believe that a million people on Kyiv's Maidan — people just like any Russian TV viewer — were paid by the U.S. State Department? They believed it. And they believed that real fascists came to power in Kyiv, the kind from old war movies. They believed in crudely painted hysterical propaganda stories about little children crucified by Ukrainian fascists in the squares of eastern Ukrainian cities.

They believed that if we hadn't annexed Crimea, the Americans would have taken it and placed their Sixth Fleet in Sacred Sevastopol. Even my educated friends believe this! I tell them: no one needs Sevastopol! Turkey, whose army is not inferior to Russia's, has been a NATO member for half a century — and fully controls the Bosporus and the Dardanelles. No one needed Crimea, except Putin — to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO! They don't listen, don't understand, don't believe. They don't even want to think that it was Russia that invaded Donbas. Say it out loud — they'll call you a traitor. "No, it's the Ukrainian fascists conducting a punitive operation against the Donbas militias." That's why the mythology of the Great Patriotic War was needed! I thought: mothballed nonsense, black-and-white photos with unfamiliar faces... It turned out: useful developments.

And it won't get better, it isn't getting better: now they've killed Nemtsov, and it seems the television, out of respect for the deceased, has cooled down a bit, didn't mock the corpse; but you read the Internet — and there, agitated, disturbed, wound-up by propaganda citizens — shout: "A dog deserves a dog's death!" And those ten, probably now percent, who from the very beginning saw behind the entire Crimean and Donbas campaign, behind the lie about the continuation of the Great Patriotic War, behind the inflating of anti-Western hysteria — pragmatic calculation, cold-blooded manipulation of a dulled population — now, yes, they are afraid. They say they are not afraid, and come out by the tens of thousands to march in the center of Moscow — but they are afraid, of course. If they could kill Nemtsov — then, probably, they could kill anyone. Whoever it might be. And now — after Crimea, after Donbas, after Nemtsov — anything can happen. And camps, and repressions, and strollers from Birkenau. Somehow, it turns out, this happens unnoticed with people. And not only Germans are capable of this, but we, apparently, too. I don't want to believe it. I want to reassure myself: it's panic, it's paranoia. But in Germany, I think, there were their ten percent, who didn't vote, didn't march, didn't riot — and also didn't want to believe that all this was possible.

It turned out, it was possible. And now, it seems, anything is possible.