The Despair of Enduring Putin's Reign Before He Falls MOSCOW - I've long told myself and anyone else who would listen that things in Russia will get a lot worse before they get better. I have even thought, in accordance with an old dissident adage, that "the worse, the better": the faster and more cruel the crackdown, the sooner the regime itself will crack. What I did not realize was just how bad "worse" was going to feel. I did not imagine that it would get to the point where I would wake up in the morning, get my bearings - where I am, what happened yesterday, what is expected to happen today - and feel like howling in pain. For the last two weeks, I watched as Parliament passed and then President Vladimir Putin signed into law a ban on American adoptions from Russia. About 50 children who had already met their future parents will now have to stay in orphanages, and thousands are losing a chance to gain a family. I have long known that it is increasingly difficult for foreigners to adopt in Russia (and there not nearly enough potential Russian adoptive parents), and the law itself is cruel and cynical, but what I found devastating was the spectacle of Russian politicians clamoring to argue for it - and the upper house of Parliament unanimously voting in favor. I have also long followed the practice of denying Russian visas to journalists and activists who have been critical of the government's policies. I have also known that this has derailed careers and separated friends and families. But last week a friend's child, visiting relatives in Moscow, became seriously ill, and the mother could not come to her child's bedside because she is banned from getting a Russian visa. Another new law bans Russians who also hold U.S. passports from leading or even being members of nongovernmental organizations; several people I respect may have to give up their lives' work. And Russian politicians are already demanding that the ban be extended to journalists. The last few days of the year also brought news of the firings of several journalists and television hosts who had expressed opposition views; all were dismissed from nominally independent, privately owned media outlets. It is one thing to know that it is increasingly difficult to practice journalism in my country; it's another to talk on the phone to someone I like and respect and hear just how lost and hurt a person feels when his career is effectively declared to be over. And as the year drew to a close, there was a spate of hunger strikes. Mothers of three or more children in Moscow stopped feeding themselves to protest being denied housing guaranteed by federal law. An activist named Vladimir Malyshev has been holding a hunger strike in a central Moscow shopping mall for more than a month; he demands the release of the more than a dozen people held in connection with police clashes following a protest on May 6. And one of those people, 51-year-old Sergei Krivov, has been on hunger strike fore more than two weeks. These hunger strikes are not publicity stunts - they have received precious little publicity. They are acts of pure despair. When I said to myself and others that things would get worse, I did not imagine this despair, other people's or my own. We humans are not very good at imagining how we will feel in the future. More to the point, we have a way of forgetting that dictatorships are frightening places, where people get killed, jailed and hurt - not just any people but people we know, our friends, our kids, ourselves. That makes "the worse, the better" a very frightening bargain.