Maria Baronova was a brash anti-government activist in Russia. Why did she join the Kremlin’s propaganda network? Photograph by Sefa Karacan / Anadolu Agency / Getty

What makes a person collaborate with a repressive, hateful, or criminal government? There are simple answers: Greed, vanity, the lack of a moral compass. But I am interested in the more complicated answers, which have to do with the desire to do good when all available options are bad.

A well-known Russian opposition figure disclosed recently that she was accepting a senior position with RT, the state propaganda conglomerate. (Its foreign-language operation had been known as Russia Today.) Maria Baronova, who is thirty-four, was active in the anti-government protests of 2011 and 2012. In June, 2012, she was charged with inciting a mass disturbance—she was one of a dozen people whom the government chose to punish, in order to frighten people from protesting again. In December, 2013, while her trial was under way and on the eve of the Olympic Games in Sochi, Baronova, like the members of the art-protest group Pussy Riot, who were then in prison, was given amnesty. During the following five years, Baronova worked primarily as an organizer on behalf of political prisoners in Russia.

I know Baronova well. We met during the 2011-2012 protests, and I wrote about her when she faced charges. Later, I made her one of the four main characters in my book “The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia.” In the course of about eighteen months, from 2014 to 2016, I spent roughly thirty hours interviewing her. To be honest, she was my favorite character in the book, because she was the most complicated and, in some ways, the most self-aware. As a kid, she had wanted to be a military officer, and by thirty she very nearly ended up a political prisoner. She was keenly aware of her need to be a part of something great and her desire to act together with others; she saw both her childhood patriotism and adult activism as functions of these desires. But as much as I might have thought of Baronova as a character, she was an actual person, whose story continued after my book was published.

I asked Baronova, on Facebook Messenger, if the decision to work for RT had been morally difficult. “I didn’t have pangs of conscience,” she responded. “Or I did, but only because I knew I would upset people whose opinion is important to me.” I knew that she meant me, among others.

Baronova was educated as a chemist and had worked in the medical-imports business, where she made a very good living thanks to profits from corruption. She had quit that line of work some time before she joined the protests, in order to focus on her son’s learning difficulties. She had been divorced. In the protest movement, she was fearless. She recited the Russian constitution to a platoon of soldiers. She staged a one-woman protest, in a church, in support of the imprisoned members of Pussy Riot. Most memorably for me, in June of 2013, she tried to get the police to explain why they had released a man who had beaten up an L.G.B.T. activist. For this, she was physically attacked and had to be hospitalized. Baronova was loud and confrontational, even by protest standards; she made a lot of people very uncomfortable. I had seen Baronova act more bravely—act more, period—than almost anyone I know.

The problem with Russia is that it is becoming more and more difficult to act with others in any way. Baronova’s second profession was journalism—she did some groundbreaking reporting from Ukraine during the revolution there, in 2014—but TV Rain, the independent television channel where she was working, came under attack from the authorities and has since been reduced to a primarily Web-based operation. Most independent media outlets have disappeared, and a few outlets remain as bare shadows of their past selves. Most of my former journalism colleagues have gone into other fields: edutainment, museum work, charitable projects. A distinct kind of charity has taken shape in Russia: professional journalists will report online on people or families in trouble or about projects that need funding, and readers are encouraged to donate to the cause. This kind of direct assistance has become a lifeline in a country where the welfare state has been virtually destroyed and civil society is under extreme pressure.

The Russian state fights civil society in at least two distinct ways. One is direct pressure: organizations are raided and shut down; leaders are threatened and some are even arrested. The other strategy is imitation. For almost any kind of civil-society group—from a movement to document potholes and demand road repair to human-rights defense—there is a government-funded equivalent. This serves both to muddy the waters and to insure that everything remains under the Kremlin’s control. It’s an old totalitarian impulse: in the Soviet Union, even the trade unions were run by the state, which was also the sole employer in the country. In May, 2017, RT launched its own media-charity operation, complete with a legal-defense arm; this is the project that Baronova will lead.

“It’s 2019, and everything is dominated by the state,” she wrote to me. “I’m never going to have another country. I’m not going to have another life, either. I want this country to be livable.”

In the past couple of years, after she had wrapped up a job at the exiled ex-oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s Open Russia Foundation, Baronova had tried looking for other work. She told me that she received no fewer than twenty rejections—at least in part, she is sure, because she is known as being so loud and brash and because her personal style has made her many enemies. (I think she is right.) She needed money desperately. On top of everything else, her ex-husband and his current wife had a baby who became severely disabled as a result of trauma sustained at the hospital after birth. The two families are close—they are neighbors, and Baronova and her ex-husband are raising their older son together—so they pooled resources and efforts. Money had long since run out, and energy was running low when RT came knocking.

“They asked me to join them in doing something I know how to do,” she wrote. “Everyone likes to be treated nicely and to have the opportunity to do something they are good at. I started to feel better for the first time in many months.”

I’ll probably never stop thinking of Baronova as a character in a book. She is still a gratifyingly complicated one, especially because she is given to self-reflection. And though her story is specific to Russia, it contains a universal lesson about collaboration: in a situation in which the choice is between abandoning hope and working for the state, some of the people who thrive on action—the kind of people who could probably do the most for their country—will become collaborators.