With the recent inauguration of new president Dmitry Medvedev, how have things changed in Russia? Is the authoritarian freeze of the Vladimir Putin years starting to melt into a glorious new spring of freedom? Mark Ames, founder of Russian newspaper the Exile ( and Radar contributor), will provide occasional dispatches in pursuit of an answer to that question ... if the authorities don't lock him up first.

As this article is going online, I've either made it out of Moscow to London, or I'm stuck in a border-guard interrogation room in Sheremetyevo International Airport. Nothing will surprise me anymore. Two weeks ago, the Russian government closed down my newspaper, the Exile. And then last Thursday, during a live Moscow radio show on which I was a guest, a Putinjugend-turned-Duma deputy accused me and my newspaper of "extremism." That might be a badge of honor for a journalist anywhere else in the world but Russia, where the word "extremist" has serious legal and extralegal implications. During Putin's reign, the meaning of the word "extremist" was expanded to include anyone or anything who upset the Kremlin—particularly liberal critics such as the Washington-based think-tank analyst Andrei Piontovsky, who last year faced criminal charges over two books that are critical of Putin, on the grounds that they are "extremist."

Thursday was a bad day from the minute I woke up—it started with a rude hangover, following the Exile's staff funeral party. Thanks to the persuasive skills of our sales girls Zalina and Lena, we managed to cop an all-expenses-paid feast at a striptease club/bordello named Violete, located directly across the river from the Kremlin. It was our way of saying "fuck you" to The Man, heavy emphasis on the "fuck." The party rolled on from Wednesday night late into Thursday morning—and it was a very long night indeed, abandoning the slow cocktails for entire bottles of "Platinum" Russian vodka, drowning ourselves in long lugubrious toasts, then disappearing into the dark pole-dance room, where flocks of naked girls vastly outnumbering the males pile on top of you like you're Axl Rose, and then one of them leads you farther back into Violete's catacombs, into one of the lap dance "cabinets" for a little "extremist" activity: a 15-minute reenactment of the Mongol horde's plunder of ancient Rus, with me as Genghis Khan and Nastya playing the war booty. The Exile died that night just as it was born: deep in sin.

And then, in just a matter of hours, I went from Violete to hangover-nausea to the awful news that at 10 p.m. Thursday, I'd be squaring off on a live radio show against one of the most menacing creatures in the new Putin generation: Robert Schlegel, a 23-year-old ginger-haired Kremlin tool whom a girlfriend of mine described as "looking like one of those perverts from a Todd Solondz film."

While it's true that Schlegel has a kind of hairless-scrotum twinkie-porn look about him, when you put that into the context of his frightening "Heil Putin" politics, and the fact that he comes from Volga German stock, you start to suspect that Schlegel isn't entirely human the way you and I are, but is rather some kind of genetically engineered Boys From Brazil product, created so that he might one day serve a cruel and scary tyrant.

And Schlegel's aggressively enthusiastic gig has worked out pretty damn well so far: In just a few short years, he's risen from spokesman for the Kremlin's young goon squad organization, Nashi, which was created to harass and frighten Putin's critics (including even Britain's ambassador to Russia), to taking a seat this year in the state Duma, where he promptly went to work pushing through a bill that would strangle the already strangled Russian media.

When I found out that I'd be debating Schlegel, my sweat glands started to swell up and produced a ghastly odor that I can only trace to my grandfather's ancestors from Fez. So I did my equivalent of Tooter calling for Mr. Wizard, which in my case meant calling up Eduard Limonov, the radical opposition leader whom I was sure would have an opinion on Schlegel.

"This Schlegel is just a schmuck," Limonov said. "He's rather intelligent, young, but very arrogant, and really he's a fascist. And you should tell him that, too. Really, tell him that he's a fascist schmuck, that he's a traitor to the motherland, because he's really a disgusting kid."

Limonov's party members have been violently attacked on more than one occasion by baseball-bat-wielding Nashi youths while Schlegel was acting as their spokesman, so his contempt is easy to understand. But still, an American accusing a high-profile Duma deputy of treason and fascism can be a very expensive affair these days—in more ways than one.

I arrived late at Govorit Moskva's studio, housed in a rundown building just a few hundred yards from the Violete striptease club. I had to run up the stairwell to make it in time. My head was pounding, and I stank up the entire room with fear-sweat as I took the headphones. Luckily, Schlegel wasn't in the studio. Russia's Duma deputies are currently touring the provinces for a kind of "get to know the people whom you're oppressing" ritual they do every so often, meaning Schlegel was phoning in for the show—and I wouldn't have to look at him.

"How long will the interview last?" I asked the radio host as I put on my headphones.

"An hour, of course," he said.

I sank in my seat. My Russian is decent enough under the right circumstances, but in the throes of a hangover, at 10 p.m., debating a fascist hothead Duma deputy with my tongue hogtied was terrifying as hell. The only question now was how to limit the damage, and make it through without completely shaming my ancestors, my country, and my profession.

Right from the start, Schlegel was extremely confident, lamenting the fact that his censorship bill, which he rammed through the Duma this past April almost unopposed on the first reading, was then rudely smacked down by President Dmitry Medvedev. Schlegel admitted with a wry laugh that indeed he had been brought to heel by the new president, and that there was no point in reintroducing the law. But he didn't show much respect for Medvedev's moderation, terming the veto "his opinion."

Then it was my turn. As I explained what happened to the Exile, how the ministry inspectors frightened our investors away, leading to the newspaper's collapse, Schlegel dismissively countered that there was nothing unusual or frightening about a Russian ministry audit of a newspaper's article. But when I explained to him that such government audits only take place in Third World dictatorships and not in serious countries, his tone changed, and his fangs started to show.

"The Russian media is completely free," he claimed. "Our television stations express all the opinions of the people."

How do you respond to that? I told him that he lived in some strange parallel world separate from the world everyone else in Russia lives in; his world was some kind of formalistic fantasy land where all of Russia ran a law-abiding state; the world the rest of us saw was one in which people hid from Russia's cruel and arbitrary powers, so when a media outlet like the Exile gets fingered, people understandably run. Schlegel didn't take kindly to it.

When I started to talk about the shameful self-censorship that went on in the American media in the lead-up to the Iraq war, and the disastrous consequences that followed, Schlegel loudly cut me off: "The American media was right to support the invasion of Iraq, because the American people supported that war. Of course the American media should back the president!"

"But the only reason that the American people supported the war was because the media duped them! They didn't do what they were supposed to do!" I stammered.

"No, Bush was right to invade Iraq!" Schlegel yelled. "I absolutely support his reasons for invading, and I believe the American media did the right thing in supporting the war, because the American people supported this war."

When I explained to him that such government audits only take place in Third World dictatorships and not in serious countries, his tone changed. "The Russian media is completely free," he claimed. "Our television stations express all the opinions of the people"And that's when the young Russian Duma deputy turned his fangs on me: "I understand what type of person you are now, Mark, after listening to you and hearing about your newspaper, the Exile, on this radio program. It's very clear to me now that you are an extremist, and your newspaper is extremist. I have never read your newspaper, but I don't need to now because I already have you figured out. You're an extremist. It's all completely clear to me now."

It was the longest hour of my life, an infuriating and exhausting experience that left me feeling corrupted. I went home late that night thinking what Schopenhauer had said about this world being hell, where men are divided into torturing devils and the condemned. Schlegel was born to be a torturing devil if there ever was one.

When I got back to my apartment, I received an e-mail notifying me that the New York–based Committee to Protect Journalists had issued an alert on my defunct newspaper's behalf. I felt—and still feel—oddly grateful to them for throwing their weight behind our story, but I understand that it won't do much to help me now that I've been labeled an "extremist" by a Russian Duma deputy; nor will it hurt Schlegel, who can say whatever he wants.

About five hours from now, as I'm sending this off to Radar, I'll be on my way to Sheremetyevo Airport. That vacation I've been talking about is now long overdue.

READ MORE: Previously in the Russian Front