Ingredients:

• ​1 cup magnesium
• ​1 cup silicon
• ​2 cups iron
• ​2 cups oxygen
• ​1/2 teaspoon aluminum
• ​1/2 teaspoon nickel
• ​1/2 teaspoon calcium
• ​1/4 teaspoon sulfur
• ​dash of water delivered by asteroids

Blend well in a large bowl, shape into a round ball with your hands and place it neatly in a habitable zone area around a young star. Do not over mix. Heat until mixture becomes a white hot glowing ball. Bake for a few million years. Cool until color changes from white to yellow to red and a golden-brown crust forms. It should not give off light anymore. Season with a dash of water and organic compounds. It will shrink a bit as steam escapes and clouds and oceans form. Stand back and wait a few more million years to see what happens. If you are lucky, a thin frosting of life may appear on the surface of your new world.

The heads of the networks were obsessed, for example, with Neuro-Linguitic Programming (NLP), a form of subliminal influence pioneered in the United States after 1975. The biggest of the Ostankino channels made a pilot for a show based on Lifespring, the controversial U.S. private, for-profit “life training” courses that went bankrupt in the 1990s after former participants successfully sued for psychological damage. Lifespring’s approach, informed by NLP and Gestalt Therapy, was to “reprogram” people—first by confusing them to the point where their critical thinking breaks down, then by frightening and humiliating them with the recollection of past traumas, all before lifting them up with the promise of success and then, when they are putty, implanting key messages to make them pliant to the demands of the Lifespring “trainers.” The pilot program Ostankino produced replicated the Lifespring sessions in a studio, with participants and the audience at home meant to experience the emotional roller coaster, and addictive effect, of the trainings.

As the decade came to an end and as the Kremlin became ever more aggressive and paranoid, I began to notice how Ostankino TV was increasingly starting to reflect, however haphazardly, the underlying principles of a Lifespring training. It’s programs confused viewers with bizarre conspiracy theories and itched at unresolved traumas about Stalin, the collapse of the USSR and the destitution of the 1990s—all before lifting the viewer up with stories of Putin-era triumph. Meanwhile current affairs TV presenters would pluck a theme (oligarchs, America, the Middle East) and speak for 20 minutes, hinting, nudging, winking, insinuating though rarely ever saying anything directly, repeating words like “them” and “the enemy” endlessly. It was a powerful technique. As I watched programs where political pundits would lecture to the camera, such as Mikhail Leontiev’s Odnako, or more recently Dmitry Kiselev’s Vest Nedeli, I could tell they were deeply manipulative. But would still find myself nodding my head as I watched them, their paranoid mindset (temporarily) imprinted on my mind.

Then there was the television, which I never worked on, with a more sinister mission: political-psychological control. The approach could be deeply counterintuitive. NTV, for example, one of the country’s biggest networks, doesn’t try to pretend Russia is a rosy place like Soviet channels used to do—which is also how they lost credibility with viewers. Quite the opposite: It shows non-stop horror stories about how dangerous the country is, encouraging the viewer to look to the “strong hand” of the Kremlin for protection. Even supposedly “science-based” programs are used for manipulative effect. The most expensive documentary ever shown on Russian television aired in 2009 and was called Plesen (“Mold”). It argued that mold is taking over the Earth—an invisible but omnipresent enemy whose evil spores have been invading our lives, causing death and disease. When the film aired it caused a panic, with people running out to buy anti-mold machines and calling into the network from all over the country, asking for help.

There was another spate of prime-time documentaries about “psychological weapons.” One was The Call of the Void, which aired in 2009 and featured current secret service men who informed the audience about the new psychic weapons they had developed. The Russian military, the program claimed, employed “sleepers,” psychics who can go into a trance and enter the world’s collective unconscious, and from there penetrate the minds of foreign statesmen to uncover their nefarious designs. One had entered the mind of President George W. Bush, they said, and then reconfigured the intentions of one of his advisers so that whatever hideous plan the United States had hatched failed to come off. The message was clear: If the secret service can see into the U.S. president’s mind, they can definitely see into yours; the state is everywhere, watching your every thought.