"But the collapse of the Berlin Wall catches him in Dresden, and there are accounts of Putin frantically shoveling documents, sensitive documents into the furnace as Germany is changing around him and the Iron Curtain is essentially evaporating before his eyes. He calls. There's also a famous story about this. He calls home. He calls Moscow, trying to understand what he is to do, trying to get orders. And Moscow doesn’t respond. And this is, according to many biographers who have chronicled Putin’s life, a massive, massive trauma for him, that this massive historical event is happening. Soviet influence is collapsing before his eyes, and he calls home; he radios home, and home isn't there. And this is something that he has been trying so hard never to repeat. As soon as you start loosening the controls a little bit, start letting oxygen into the system, it starts to rot. It starts to rust. It starts to fall apart from the inside. And he, I'm sure, was reminded of these moments in Dresden, when openness eventually brought collapse of the empire. And he was going to do everything he could to stop it." --- "these former Soviet republics—Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine, the Baltics; these countries that Russia hasn’t fully realized, on a visceral level, are now independent countries — they're promoting democracy there. They're trying to promote democracy inside Russia, too. And now, what is democracy promotion becoming? It becomes removing a leader who suppresses democracy. And Putin knows what this means for him. It means that, at some point, it’s going to be his turn, especially as the U.S. starts criticizing him, as he starts cracking down in Russia, starts cracking down on protesters, on the free press, he starts getting lectured on all of this stuff by Washington. He’s not stupid. He makes the connection that, at one point they're going to go from lectures to removing him from power; that regime change is going to come for him, too. And this becomes the driving fear of the Putin regime." --- "So you have on the one hand all these years of democracy promotion and foreign NGOs funding the Russian opposition. You have Hillary Clinton suddenly saying something about these contested parliamentary elections, and then you have Michael McFaul, the primary expert on color revolutions in the U.S., suddenly arriving in Moscow, and one of his first meetings is with the Russian opposition. So Putin, being paranoid and conspiratorially minded as he is, sees this as not coincidental. They're coming for him. They have been saying they were going to come for him in much more veiled terms, but now that day was finally here. And that was it. He decided to take the gloves off."

"So one of the very first things Putin does is he goes after anybody who can criticize him and undermine him. And to this day, TV remains one of his main levers of control over the Russian population. Over 90 percent of Russians, even in the age of the Internet, over 90 percent of Russians get their news from TV. Most of them trust TV. Most of them think that it’s OK for the TV to lie to them if it’s in the service of the state. And again, even in the age of the Internet, it is their main source of news, and they believe what they see on it. And the fact that it’s either directly controlled by the Kremlin or controlled by oligarchs who are friendly and loyal to Vladimir Putin and owe everything to him is not a coincidence."