Have you killed anyone lately?

No, I didn’t think so. But suppose you had, and the question in the title is put to you by the disembodied voice of a phone pollster.

Now, you know you’ve just dismembered your neighbour and dumped him piecemeal into rubbish skips. So how do you answer that question? Yes or no? You realise that if you say ‘yes’, the pollster will probably forget all about confidentiality, call the police, and you’ll be in for a long stretch at His Majesty’s pleasure.

Hence you suppress whatever impulse you might have to come clean and say something like “Of course, I haven’t. Who do you think I am?”

Does this hypothetical scenario make psychological sense? It does? Good. Now you understand where the 80 per cent support for Putin comes from in Russia.

Even the meekest opposition to the Special Military Operation (SMO, otherwise known as Russia’s aggressive war on the Ukraine) is punishable by draconian prison terms, never less than five years and sometimes as long as 25. Each time such a sentence is passed, all Russian media publicise the verdict widely and incessantly, pour encourager les autres.

Suddenly, out of the blue, the phone rings, and a Russian citizen living his life in fear of putting a foot wrong is asked to answer these four questions (the questionnaire is recent and real, not imaginary).

1. Do you support Vladimir Putin’s domestic and foreign policies?

2. Do you consider Putin’s decision to start the SMO to be correct?

3. Do you support the SMO?

4. Do you consider the negative information about the Russian army to be true?  

Suppose for the sake of argument that our respondent 1) detests Putin’s policies, foreign and domestic, 2) considers the decision to start the SMO to be criminal, 3) emphatically doesn’t support the SMO and 4) believes all negative information about the Russian army to be true.

How likely is he to respond in that vein? Knowing that he may well spend the rest of his life in prison? Oh, I’m sure some intrepid individuals still speak their mind – I remember doing so myself, in my Soviet youth. But such people were in the minority then, and they are in the minority now.

In fact, in my day that minority was smaller than it seems to be now: if statistics are to be believed, 20 per cent of the Russians reply ‘no’ to some such questions. Given the circumstances, that’s a respectable number.

Those people would rather risk their liberty than strike the Faustian deal with the devil. And their liberty isn’t the worst risk they take.

Putin’s fascist thugs are just as likely to dispense with the casuistic shenanigans of quasi-legal proceedings and settle political or business scores the old-fashioned way: with guns, crowbars, poison or a simple push out of the window.

Dozens of journalists and opposition politicians have suffered that fate in recent months. And the number of top Russian businessmen falling out of windows makes one wonder about the structural safety of Russian residential architecture.

Just a few days ago, Kristina Baikova, vice president of a major bank, plunged to her death from her flat window in Moscow – and she is far from the only one. There is a veritable epidemic of defenestration afflicting Russian executives, especially in the oil industry and banking, practically the only money-making parts of the Russian economy.

‘Unexplained’ deaths of healthy, vigorous executives in their 30s and 40s are also rife. These are typically described as suicide, with those upwardly mobile youngsters either poisoning themselves with exotic compounds or beating themselves to death with aforementioned crowbars.

The political situation inside Russia can only be properly understood in the right context: that of fascist Italy or Nazi Germany. And Russia’s business climate evokes fond recollections of Chicago during Prohibition.

Hannah Arendt’s phrase, the banality of evil, was meant to describe the Nazi Holocaust. However, it deserves a wider application. In Putin’s Russia, evil has become the norm, part of the daily routine that is as likely to cause ennui as outrage.

People used to think of evil acts as one-off incidents and even try to find rational explanations for them.

Razing the capital of Chechnya, Grozny, whose population was 80 per cent Russian? Oh well, there’s a war on. Things happen, even very nasty things.

Attack on Georgia? That’s unpleasant, but those Georgians must have asked for it.

Journalists murdered by the dozen? Shame, that. But perhaps they weren’t murdered after all, or else the guilty parties were jealous spouses or jilted lovers (the FSB put forth this last explanation when Paul Klebnikov, the American editor of the Russian Forbes, was machinegunned by two people in the centre of Moscow – jealous husbands tool up well in Russia, and they bring friends along).

However, as such crimes multiplied, the people’s nerve endings began to atrophy. The self-preservation instinct kicked in, and personal survival became the order of the day. Along with the hope that the outer limit of evil has already been reached.

Yes, Putin grabbed the Crimea. But surely he won’t move into mainland Ukraine. Oh, he has, hasn’t he? At least he won’t bomb civilians in their houses, hospitals and schools. Well, never mind that. Surely he won’t blow up the Kakhovka dam? That would destroy one of the best agricultural areas in Europe, not to mention the ensuing ecological disaster. He did? You don’t say. But that’s it – he won’t blow up the nuclear power station at Zaporozhe. That would be ten times worse than Chernobyl… but then the radiation wouldn’t reach me.

At least we still have enough food, and nobody has bombed our apartment block. People getting murdered and imprisoned for no good reason? Perhaps. But as long as I keep my head down, I’ll be all right…

And then the phone rings. A man with a velvety voice wonders if you wouldn’t mind answering a few yes or no questions…