Real tyranny

I remember flying from Stockholm to Moscow in July 2014, and the shift in atmosphere as we left a free democracy and entered a city in which everything was so subject to surveillance that all behaviour felt deliberate and willed, as if we were acting being ourselves.

- CHARLOTTE GRIMSHAW

Here I was smiling and relaxedly showing my tourist visa. And here I was innocently googling, and marvelling in the car at the monumental size of totalitarian architecture. And here I was cheerfully having conversations in cafes, the hotel and the street. Yet all the while I was feeling as if it was a performance of normality that was being scrutinised by cold-eyed functionaries expert in sorting out who was normal and who was putting it on. None of this seemed real – and yet it was entirely real, because we were in the smoke-and mirrors land of President Vladimir Putin, who is infamously steeped in the dark arts of surveillance, repression and control.

It was summer and the city was baking in the heat. Across town, the fugitive National Security Agency whistleblower, Edward Snowden, was meeting journalists from the Guardian in the Golden Apple Hotel.