Is Putin the Last Tsar?

3Book One: The Fever Dream

Part 1: ISOLATION

Chapter 1: 1. The Bubble

Yuri Alexeyevich, the Minister of Finance, had long ago mastered the art of projecting effortless calm. For thirty years, it had been his armor in the brutal corridors of power. Today, for the first time in a decade, the armor felt thin.

He stood alone in a room of impossible whiteness. It had no furniture, no windows, no decoration. It was a sterile antechamber, an airlock between the real world and the President’s. Before him stood a narrow, glass-and-steel tunnel, shimmering under harsh LED lights. Two figures, silent and imposing in full white hazmat suits, flanked the entrance. One gestured for him to proceed.

A metallic voice from a hidden speaker issued the command. “Proceed through the tunnel.”

Yuri Alexeyevich felt a prickle of resentment, hot and sharp. He was a minister of the Russian Federation. He managed a two-trillion-dollar economy. And he was being treated like a piece of contaminated meat. He crushed the feeling instantly, his face settling back into its practiced, neutral mask. This wasn’t about health. This was a ritual of submission.

He stepped into the tunnel. A fine, cold mist enveloped him, smelling of ozone and chemicals. It clung to his suit and chilled his skin. He held his breath. When he emerged, the second figure raised a scanner gun and aimed it at his forehead. A clinical beep echoed in the silent room. A green light on the scanner’s side confirmed his purity. The figure nodded, and a seamless door hissed open, revealing the cavernous hall beyond.

The room was designed to crush the human spirit. The ceiling soared into darkness, and the floor was a polished tundra of black marble. In its center sat the table. It was not a piece of furniture; it was a monument to distance. A vast, bleached-oak airstrip that seemed to stretch on for fifty meters.

At the far end, a solitary figure. The President.

At his own end, two chairs were set for him and the Head of the Central Bank, Elvira Nabiullina. They sat, their folders of data and charts before them, looking like schoolchildren at the wrong end of a cathedral.

“Yuri Alexeyevich,” the President’s voice said. It was not loud, but it filled the cavernous space, unnaturally clear and intimate, amplified by a hidden microphone. “Your report.”

Yuri had to raise his voice, to project as if he were on a stage. “Mr. President, the macroeconomic indicators remain stable. We are seeing resilience in the face of external pressures.” He and Elvira took turns, shouting their optimistic reports across the chasm, their voices sounding thin and desperate in the echoing void.

The President watched them, motionless, his face an impassive mask. He did not look at the data they gestured towards. He looked at them.

Finally, Yuri took a calculated risk. “There is one area of mild concern. Food price inflation is showing a slight uptick in the domestic market, impacting household budgets.”

The silence that followed was heavy and cold. Elvira shot him a sideways glance, a micro-expression of pure terror.

The President leaned forward, just an inch. His amplified voice was soft, almost gentle, yet it carried the chilling weight of absolute power. “Discipline, Yuri Alexeyevich. The people understand the need for discipline. Do you?”

“Yes, Mr. President. Of course.”

“Good,” the President said, and the meeting was over.

Later, alone in his private study, the President sat with a secure tablet. He did not read the economic reports. They were irrelevant. He scrolled through his daily digest, a world filtered for his consumption. He skipped past reports on domestic grain harvests and factory outputs. He lingered, instead, on a story detailing a chaotic debate in the British Parliament. He read another about a transport strike crippling Paris. He watched a short, soundless clip of protesters clashing with police in Berlin.

A thin, satisfied smile touched his lips. He felt a profound sense of confirmation. The West was weak, decadent, sick with its own freedoms. He, in his sterile fortress, was not paranoid. He was clean. He was strong. His isolation was not a prison; it was the source of his unique clarity, a necessary shield to protect his nation from the world's contagion.

He turned the tablet off. The screen went dark, his own impassive face reflected in its black mirror. He looked out of the thick, triple-paned window at the perfect, untouched snow covering the forest of his residence. He was the master of a silent, orderly, and completely artificial world. The fever dream had begun.

A Note on the Discourses: Each chapter of the story is followed by a "Discourse" section. These sections are optional, in-depth analyses of the themes and ideas presented in the narrative. The reader is free to skip them and proceed directly to the next chapter at any time. 

The Discourse, 1: The Psychology of a Hermetic State

Section 1.1: Legitimizing Dissent: The UN's Ignored Counsel vs. The Prevailing Narrative
The now-dominant historical narrative suggests that the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic—prolonged lockdowns and a sustained campaign of societal fear—was an unavoidable necessity. This is a falsehood. The claim that this was the only responsible path is directly contradicted by authoritative sources from the time. As early as autumn 2020, formal reports and senior representatives from the United Nations itself publicly and forcefully advised against the use of lockdowns as a primary strategy, citing their catastrophic economic and social consequences. This crucial advice was not hidden; it was simply ignored. The WHO, in concert with national governments and mass media, chose to perpetuate a singular, high-fear narrative, effectively drowning out the more nuanced, and ultimately more prescient, warnings from the UN. This fact provides a legitimate, evidence-based foundation for the argument that the subsequent years of societal damage were not an inevitability, but the result of a deliberate and disastrous policy choice.

Section 1.2: The Human Catastrophe of Indiscriminate Fear
The core flaw of the chosen fear campaign was its profound lack of nuance, which transformed a manageable public health challenge into a human catastrophe. The messaging relentlessly failed to stratify risk, creating a perception of equal danger for all. The data was clear from the beginning: the threat was overwhelmingly concentrated in the elderly (over 99% of fatalities were in those over 50) and in those with specific vulnerabilities, notably Vitamin D deficiency—a condition known to mediate the body's inflammatory overreaction to deep lung infections and disproportionately affecting those who stay indoors (like the elderly), people of color in temperate climates, and the overweight. Yet the public narrative was one of universal, indiscriminate peril. This monolithic fear campaign did more than just distort reality; it severed the bonds of society. It taught the young to fear potential romantic partners, neighbors to suspect neighbors, and individuals to view all human contact as a potential death sentence. This manufactured terror was the true contagion.

Section 1.3: The Autocrat's Perfect Storm: How Isolation Forged a Madman
The global fear campaign was the perfect storm that allowed the President's pre-existing paranoia to metastasize into a full-blown psychosis. The core point is this: rational, humane conclusions are overwhelmingly the product of social interaction, debate, and the simple, moderating influence of relating to other human beings. By physically sealing himself off from literally everyone, the President severed this fundamental tether to reality. He had no one to challenge a flawed assumption, no one to offer a dissenting view, no one whose simple presence could temper his worst impulses. His isolation was not just physical; it was intellectual and psychological. In the sterile silence of his bunker, with no human friction to grind against, his darkest obsessions and most grandiose visions grew unchecked in the perfect echo chamber of one. It can therefore be argued that the immense suffering caused by the campaigns of fear was tragically compounded; the world would go on to suffer even more, at the hands of a madman that the very same campaigns had forged in the crucible of isolation.

Section 1.4: The Authoritarian's Paradox: Sowing the Seeds of Defiance
Herein lies a comi-tragic paradox of modern geopolitics. For decades, a central pillar of the Kremlin's foreign policy has been the active cultivation of social and political discontent within Western nations, aiming to create managed chaos. During the pandemic, this strategy produced an unexpected and ironic result. Much of the dissent it fostered coalesced around a profoundly anti-authoritarian ideology: a deep suspicion of top-down government mandates, a rejection of official media narratives, and a fierce defense of individual sovereignty. In a moment of supreme historical irony, an authoritarian state, in its quest to weaken its democratic rivals, found itself accidentally promoting the very ideological antibodies that are most toxic to autocracy itself. This spirit of reflexive defiance against perceived overreach, often pejoratively labeled, is historically the very social immune response that can prevent the rise of a figure like Hitler. The tragic comedy of the situation is that the Kremlin was breeding, outside its borders, a global political culture that was fundamentally ungovernable and deeply hostile to the very principles of its own existence.