In its struggle against Alexei Navalny, the Putin state strives with all its might to present itself as something inexorable and indestructible, deaf and ruthless, soulless and inhuman.

The sentences and court decisions regarding Navalny's fate are read out at high speed from a script by interchangeable executors who allow themselves no emotion, even intoning sentences incorrectly, like a telephone voice assistant.

Officials—from Putin's overseer of the press to his overseer of deputies—now speak of Navalny using Soviet propaganda clichés, piling dusty Cold War phrases one on top of the other. Some kind of spy mania, some CIA agents, the machinations of some West: a ridiculous archaic officialdom, the language of the black-and-white "Vremya" program with Igor Kirillov. The laws they are now passing aim to crush and strangle anything alive: to forbid people from arguing, objecting, or talking too much. These laws are produced at an inhuman speed, as if generated by artificial intelligence, based on the task at hand—to retain power at any cost.

Putin himself, with a wax figure's face—immobile, filled with some unknown filler—with a face where only the eyebrows remain from the Putin of twenty years ago, retaining some mobility, also tries in every way to emphasize that he is not human. He does not acknowledge his women, does not acknowledge his children, does not declare his property, even ages in a non-human way, allowing himself neither anger, fear, nor doubt on camera, only smirking, mocking; once he could feign sincerity, but he has long since forgotten how.

Those dissatisfied with the mechanical sentences and laws meet on the streets with representatives of the Putin state: the OMON and the National Guard. The new OMON uniforms and equipment are perfect—huge spherical helmets with mirrored visors, through which faces cannot be seen, behind which people cannot be discerned—designed to relieve those inside the shell of the fear of being recognized, of responsibility for the violence they commit. In these helmets, they are meant to appear not as humans, but as unyielding, invincible robots, devoid of human feelings—fear, conscience—and therefore invulnerable to the human crowd. The threatening, caged trucks in which they move—towering over civilian cars, just as the OMON officers tower over civilians with their gigantic heads. The brutality with which the faceless beat the crowd with sticks in witness videos suggests that they have long and diligently been stripped of compassion for the people in that crowd.

Navalny and his wife, against the backdrop of all this well-oiled machinery, appear surprisingly vulnerable, fragile, like ordinary, living people. Fifty thousand faceless OMON officers, the imperial guard, are intertwined like black shiny scales of an impenetrable dragon's skin.

In the duel between a living person and a cold-blooded dragon, not all spectators manage to root for the dragon. But the dragon demands that they do. Silent consent is no longer enough for it; it now requires unanimous approval. It demands unconditional loyalty, demands love. It constantly raises the stakes for its subjects. If you are loyal to it, you must approve of the war against a brotherly nation. If you are loyal to it, you must believe that the past has not ended, and the future has not arrived, and that we live between the Great Patriotic and Cold Wars, under wartime laws. If you are loyal to it, you must consider all the discontented as enemies of the people, and the thieving billionaires and faceless black robots with batons as friends of the people. If you are loyal to it, you must acknowledge its right to secretly, with poisons, kill those who displease it.

The Putin state dehumanizes itself, but it also wants to dehumanize all Putin's subjects. It plans to involve ordinary citizens in the collective complicity that binds the country's highest political leadership. They are required to jeer when the dragon tears to pieces—publicly in the arena or secretly in the dungeons—the person who challenged it. They must become not just spectators, but accomplices—because if the subjects agree to take on part of the guilt, part of the victim's blood, then afterward, to preserve their sanity, they will have no choice but to adore the dragon and hate all its future enemies. A method well-proven in world practice.

The man's name is Alexei Navalny, but in reality, it doesn't matter much what his name is. We are now concerned not so much for the man sitting in "Matrosskaya Tishina" as for the person inside each of us. It is for him that we must fight.