ALWAYS BET AGAINST THE dEEP sTATE:

In Russia, power is a pyramid. This pyramid was built by Ivan the Terrible in the 16th century - an ambitious, brutal tsar overrun by paranoia and a great many other vices. With the help of his personal army - the oprichnina - he cruelly and bloodily divided the Russian state into power and people, friend and foe, and the gap between them became the deepest of moats. His friendship with the Golden Horde convinced him that the only way to rule the hugeness of Russia was by becoming an occupier of this enormous zone. The occupying power had to be strong, cruel, unpredictable, and incomprehensible to the people. The people should have no choice but to obey and worship it. And a single person sits at the peak of this dark pyramid, a single person possessing absolute power and a right to all.

Paradoxically, the principle of Russian power hasn't even remotely changed in the last five centuries. I consider this to be our country's main tragedy. Our medieval pyramid has stood tall for all that time, its surface changing, but never its fundamental form. And it's always been a single Russian ruler sitting at its peak: Pyotr I, Nicholas II, Stalin, Brezhnev, Andropov... Today, Putin has been sitting at its peak for more than 20 years. Having broken his promise, he clutches onto his chair with all his might. The Pyramid of Power poisons the ruler with absolute authority. It shoots archaic, medieval vibrations into the ruler and his retinue, seeming to say: "you are the masters of a country whose integrity can only be maintained by violence and cruelty; be as opaque as I am, as cruel and unpredictable, everything is allowed to you, you must call forth shock and awe in your population, the people must not understand you, but they must fear you."

Alas, Yeltsin, who came to power on the crest of the wave of Perestroika, did not destroy the pyramid's medieval form, he simply refurbished its surface: instead of gloomy Soviet concrete, it became colorful and was covered over with billboards advertising western goods. The Pyramid of Power exacerbated Yeltsin's worst traits: he became rude, a bully, and an alcoholic. His face turned into a heavy, motionless mask of impudent arrogance. Toward the end of his reign, Yeltsin unleashed a senseless war onto Chechnya when it decided to secede from the Russian Federation. The pyramid built by Ivan the Terrible had succeeded in awakening the imperialist even in Yeltsin, only a short-lived democrat; as a Russian tsar, he sent tanks and bombers into Chechnya, dooming the Chechen people to death and suffering.

Yeltsin and the other creators of Perestroika surrounding him not only didn't destroy the vicious Pyramid of Power, they didn't bury their Soviet past either - unlike the post-war Germans who buried the corpse of their nazism in the 1950s. The corpse of this monster, which had annihilated tens of millions of its own citizens and thrown its country back 70 years into the past, was propped up in a corner: it'll rot on its own, they thought. But it turned out not to be dead.

After coming to power, Putin began to change. And those who initially welcomed his reign gradually understood that these changes didn't bode well for Russia. The TV channel NTV was destroyed, other channels began to pass into the hands of Putin's comrades-in-arms, after which a regime of strict censorship came into effect; from that point forward, Putin was beyond criticism.

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