Over the past year, Russian hackers have become the stuff of legend in the United States. According to U.S. intelligence assessments and media investigations, they were responsible for breaching the servers of the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. They spread the information they filched through friendly outlets such as WikiLeaks, to devastating effect. With President Vladimir Putin's blessing, they probed the voting infrastructure of various U.S. states. They quietly bought divisive ads and organized political events on Facebook, acting as the bellows in America's raging culture wars.

But most Russians don't recognize the Russia portrayed in this story: powerful, organized, and led by an omniscient, omnipotent leader who is able to both formulate and execute a complex and highly detailed plot.

Gleb Pavlovsky, a political consultant who helped Putin win his first presidential campaign, in 2000, and served as a Kremlin adviser until 2011, simply laughed when I asked him about Putin's role in Donald Trump's election. "We did an amazing job in the first decade of Putin's rule of creating the illusion that Putin controls everything in Russia," he said. "Now it's just funny" how much Americans attribute to him.

A businessman who is high up in Putin's United Russia party said over an espresso at a Moscow café: "You're telling me that everything in Russia works as poorly as it does, except our hackers? Rosneft"--the state-owned oil giant--"doesn't work well. Our health-care system doesn't work well. Our education system doesn't work well. And here, all of a sudden, are our hackers, and they're amazing?"