WHAT IT'S LIKE TO DEFEND DONALD EVERY DAY:

[4]3-year-old Marat Mindiyarov, a teacher by training, spoke by phone with The Washington Post on Saturday from the village outside St. Petersburg where he lives. Mindiyarov worked in a department for Russian domestic consumption. When he took a test in December 2014 to move to the factory's "Facebook department" targeting the U.S. market, Mindiyarov recalled, he was asked to write an essay about Hillary Clinton. Here are lightly edited excerpts of the conversation.

What was your first reaction when you heard about the Mueller indictment?

I congratulate America that they achieved something -- that they put forward an indictment rather than just writing about this. I congratulate Robert Mueller.

How did you end up at the troll factory?

I worked there from November 2014 to February 2015. I ended up there totally by accident -- I happened to be unemployed, and this place had work right by my house. So I went there. I realized quickly that this was the kind of place where I only wanted to spend enough time until I got my salary and I could leave.

How did it feel inside?

I arrived there, and I immediately felt like a character in the book "1984" by George Orwell -- a place where you have to write that white is black and black is white. Your first feeling, when you ended up there, was that you were in some kind of factory that turned lying, telling untruths, into an industrial assembly line. The volumes were colossal -- there were huge numbers of people, 300 to 400, and they were all writing absolute untruths. It was like being in Orwell's world.

What sorts of untruths did you write?

My untruths amounted to posting comments. I worked in the commenting department -- I had to comment on the news. No one asked me my opinion. My opinions were already written for me, and I had to write in my own words that which I was ordered to write.

For example?

When I was there, there were sanctions [by the European Union and the United States in response to Russia's intervention in Ukraine] and the ruble started falling. I was writing everything that was the opposite: how wonderful our life was, how wonderful it is that the ruble was strengthening, and that kind of absurdity. That sanctions were going to make us stronger and so on and so forth.

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