“They ran all kinds of operations against me,” McFaul told me when we met this winter at the Olympics, in Sochi. There were demonstrators outside Spaso and the American Embassy. Russians, presumably paid stooges, posted on social media that McFaul was everything from a spy to a pedophile. There were death threats. Russian intelligence agents occasionally followed McFaul in his car, and even showed up at his kids’ soccer games. The family felt under siege. “They wanted us to know they were there,” he said. “They went out of their way to make us feel their presence, to scare us.”

McFaul was pleased to see that some of his old friends—human-rights activists like Lev Ponomaryov—had remained steadfast friends and true to their principles, but many had sold themselves out for money or Kremlin favor. People he had first met in the pro-democracy movement more than twenty years ago were now feeding at the trough of authoritarian power and the various business conglomerates aligned with it: they were Kremlin officials and advisers, oil and gas magnates, highly obedient intellectuals. Sergei Markov, one of his closest friends from the old days, and a co-author with him of a book called “The Troubled Birth of Russian Democracy,” was now a Putin loyalist.

Markov, who speaks decent English, frequently goes on foreign television to make the Kremlin’s case. He has accused Blackwater of assassinating innocent Ukrainians at Maidan. He has said that Russian doctors were devising a “special medicine” to “cure” gays and lesbians and move them toward “normal sexuality.” He is always on call to attack Obama.

I knew Markov, too, when McFaul did, and I had a hard time believing that he had become so reactionary, so shameless. I asked him about his outlandish remarks about gays on television. Was it true what he had said—that Russian doctors were working on a “special” gay-reversal medicine?

“I will speak frankly,” he said. “Russian medicine is not working on this. But I don’t want to talk about gays—but every time they ask about gays! I personally believe homosexuality is part of a human mind’s nature. And I believe homosexuality is behind every human being’s nature, one per cent, two per cent, and it can develop under some circumstances. And I am very sorry, but I will make a strong comparison—it’s like sadism. Sadism is in every human’s psychology. But it can develop only under some circumstances. If someone becomes gay, it is also, I believe, bad for him. . . . Someone can say, ‘I am proud that I am gay.’ O.K., I can believe. But if they say, ‘I am happy I am gay,’ I don’t trust that. It just isn’t true.”

Markov holds a variety of academic and governmental advisory posts, and when I paid him a visit at his office he allowed that he was “a little bit” conspiratorial in his thinking these days. He said that “the international oligarchy—Soros, the Rockefellers, the Morgans—all these big, rich families and networks” were backing an attempt to topple Putin. “They want to take control of Russian gas and oil resources.” That there is such a conspiracy afoot is also “clear to Putin.”

Putin himself has not been reluctant to express his sense of such hidden intrigues. When Secretary of State John Kerry came to town for the first time, he and McFaul went together to see Putin. At one point, Putin stared at McFaul across the table and said, “We know that your Embassy is working with the opposition to undermine me.”

“What do you mean?” Kerry said.

“We know this,” Putin said.

“Putin didn’t want to go into details,” McFaul continued. “He stared right at me. . . . That kind of threatening, we-will-prevail look.”

On February 4th, McFaul announced that he would step down as Ambassador following the Sochi Olympics. Angered by the anti-gay-propaganda laws, the Obama Administration had scaled back its delegation to the event. They sent no top officials and made sure that the most prominent figures were gay athletes. When I had breakfast with McFaul in Sochi, he made it clear that he was keeping a low profile and leaving after just a few days. His family was waiting for him in Palo Alto. For such an easygoing guy, McFaul can show surprising flashes of temper and irritation. In Sochi, he just seemed sombre. He had lasted two years in Moscow, hardly a truncated term, and he had poured his heart into the job, but his ambassadorship had not been a success. It couldn’t have been, not when, in McFaul’s words, the U.S.-Russia relationship was “at its lowest point since the post-Soviet period began, in 1991.”

In March, after Putin annexed Crimea, McFaul wrote what he saw as his “Kennan” manifesto for the Times’ Op-Ed page. He endorsed the Administration’s policy—sanctions, isolation, expulsion from international organizations like the G-8—but he also admitted that the U.S. “does not have the same moral authority as it did in the last century.” He recalled that when he was Ambassador and challenged his Russian interlocutors on issues of international law and a commitment to sovereignty, he was met with “What about Iraq?” And, in a subtle jab at Obama, he wrote, “We are enduring a drift of disengagement in world affairs. After two wars, this was inevitable, but we cannot swing too far. As we pull back, Russia is pushing forward.”

A few months after our meeting in Sochi, I went to see McFaul in Palo Alto. We rode around town in his car. It smelled as if he had bought it last week. His offices—he has three of them, for various bureaucratic reasons—overflowed with books that now seem superfluous: endless volumes on the perestroika years, books about transitions to democratic governance. I glanced at the book McFaul had published with Sergei Markov and remarked on how much Markov had changed.

“When I met him, he was against the status quo, he was for change,” McFaul said. “He was for social democracy. But, remember, they hadn’t had decades to discuss ideas. They were against the regime—that was the main thing, being against. This happens in lots of transitions: a coalition against Them. And then what they are for gets worked out in the post-revolutionary phase. That’s natural and normal. What’s a little more depressing are those others who get bought out and co-opted for financial reasons.”

Although McFaul feels a deep sense of outrage about Putin, he also understood the mind-set of resentment and conspiracy. “I didn’t go to foment revolution,” he said. “I went to take the reset to the next stage. That was my mandate.” He added, “Obama people don’t sponsor color revolutions. Other Administrations had done this. Has the U.S. used covert operations to foment regime change? The answer is yes. I don’t want to get in trouble or go to jail, but has the U.S. supported the opposition to bring about political change? Serbia is a paradigmatic case: direct money to the opposition to destabilize things, and it was successful.” He also cited the overthrow of Mossadegh, in 1953, in Iran, and the support for the Nicaraguan Contras.

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“Putin has a theory of American power that has some empirical basis,” McFaul went on. “He strongly believes this is a major component of U.S. foreign policy. He has said it to the President, to Secretary Kerry. He even believes we sparked the Arab Spring as a C.I.A. operation. He believes we use force against regimes we don’t like. . . . By the way, he damn well knows that the government of the Soviet Union used covert support. He worked for one of the instruments of that policy. He really does kind of superimpose the way his system works onto the way he thinks our system works. He grossly exaggerates the role of the C.I.A. in the making of our foreign policy. He just doesn’t get it. Or maybe he does get it and doesn’t portray it that way. I struggle with that: is he really super-clever and this is his psych op, or does he believe it? I think he does believe that we are out to get him.”