[audio translated from Russian] The Chechen war was one big military crime.
I was in a soldier in that war,
I saw a lot of things, and I know what I’m talking about.
That war was a huge crime.
And what has begun, I would call it dehumanizing.
They were saying 'Chechens are not human beings, they're murderers, and they need to be killed,'
'they need to be destroyed.'
That propaganda campaign was unleashed. It was feeding [the Russian public's] hatred.
So that thing worked.
This mechanism was employed
and it has been employed during the entire time Mr. Putin [has been] in power.
I was always interested to investigate how back in the 1930s, the German population agreed
to mass killings of people, and burning them in furnaces.
So the country goes crazy.
People are ready to kill.
And if you talk to a person, and he turns a blind eye to you - he doesn’t hear your reasons.
It looks like the person you were talking to was drugged and he can’t accept the reality.
That mechanism was used so many times: for instance, during [Russian] aggression against Georgia.
I also attended that war.
The propaganda machine was used in the same way.
They were also saying that 'Georgians are not human beings,'
'that they’re fascists, they need to be killed,'
'they attacked us,' — it was a huge propaganda campaign.
Then, in the future, it peaked during annexation of the Crimea.
When Putin occupied the Crimea, then he occupied Donbass — both [are] parts of Ukraine.
I always say that the most important weapon at the hands of Mr. Putin is not submarines or missiles,
it’s the propaganda.
It’s the ‘zombie-box’ — the box which produces zombies [TV].
I think that Mr. Goebbels is applauding Mr. Putin in his coffin.
In those times, they only had newspapers.
Now, there is also TV —
and the TV signal goes straight into the brain of the people.
But Mr. Putin understood the power of television right away, and he used that mechanism.
The use of TV and the use of hatred is the foundation of the [Russian] government today.
So: the first were the Chechens, then all the immigrants, then LGBT community,
then the Georgians, then the Ukrainians, then it was moved against the liberals
and now, it is targeting the whole world.
It’s not an invention perhaps for you that today, for Russia,
America is the biggest enemy.
This mechanism is working, it’s dangerous.
I left Russia, I escaped from Russia.
For years, I was waiting for an arrest, and that’s a very hard thing to experience.
I would expect an arrest every day.
I would be afraid to go to the entrance of my building.
I was afraid that they would beat me on my head and if there was some noise outside,
I would look out of the window and see whether or not they came for me.
They were watching me, they were opening criminal cases against me.
So this mechanism is working.
So, Putin came to power not because of the Second Chechen war - it was just a consequence.
He came to power because he was successful in dehumanizing the entire country.
People were told that moral norms are abandoned, that there are no more laws, that you can
kill, that you can be bad, that you may not value human life.
And this is something which feeds today’s regime.
So the purpose is not to go out, not to develop a human being, but to suppress.
And that’s the most important thing one should understand about this regime and the country.
And now this is thrust outside [outwards].
A few years ago, it was xenophobia and it was targeted inside the country;
now it is targeted outside, against the whole world.
That’s the truth.
Well, I could speak about that for weeks, unfortunately, my time is up.
Thank you very much for your attention.