With the recent inauguration of new president Dmitry Medvedev, how have things changed in Russia? Is the authoritarian freeze of the Vladimir Putin years starting to melt into a glorious new spring of freedom? Mark Ames, founder of Russian newspaper the Exile (and Radar contributor), will provide occasional dispatches in pursuit of an answer to that question ... if the authorities don't lock him up first.

Today's lesson is that even after the Russian authorities have destroyed you, they're not satisfied; they still have to humiliate you in little ways. And even then, they're annoyed with you.

I went to the Russian state bank and paid the 500 ruble ($22) fine to the government for all of the little administrative screw-ups in my now-defunct newspaper, the Exile, which was effectively shut down over a week ago by the authorities. The fines I paid today are completely separate from the alleged "extremism" or "drug-promotion" or "mockery of Russian traditions" that our paper is currently being investigated for. We were indeed guilty of all sorts of little errors that starched 'n professional media types would never flub—we forgot to put in our new address, forgot to use Cyrillic fonts in the masthead, forgot to print our license number—but more than anything, we forgot to show the appropriate enthusiasm for President Medvedev, an enthusiasm which should be calibrated just a respectable notch or so below his mentor, the slightly-less-vertically-challenged Vladimir Putin.

Now that the Russian government has successfully frightened our paper out of existence, they can start working on their new spin: this had nothing to do with censorship, and everything to do with making sure that we got our address properly written down. Sort of like how Third World despots shut down opposition media outlets for "tax evasion," rather than opposing the local Boss.

It was a strangely humiliating experience, standing in line for half an hour in a crowded, sweaty Sberbank outlet, waiting to pay the government for the pleasure of losing my newspaper of 11 years. Two meat-heads to my left almost got into a free-for-all fight over who was ahead of whom in line—cutting is a Russian tradition, and threats of violence are all part of the line-cutting ritual.

When the teller took my passport and the ticket for the fine, she froze for about 2 long minutes, clutching my US passport like it was a live wire. What's an American doing paying a fine to the Russian government? Doesn't Russia only levy unnecessary fines on its own citizens? What if the world found out about this?! Clearly she didn't relish the potential scandal that this might cause. She called over her manager, and the two of them conferred for about 10 minutes, discussing whether or not accepting an American payment for a fine could turn into what Russians call "an international incident."

My (now former) sales director Zalina tapped on the teller window and told them that they had to let me pay, that my American passport was valid and named on the ticket for the fine, and that they shouldn't worry, it was unlikely to spark World War Four. A Gary Powers incident at most, but nothing more.

War or no war, according to a few journalists who interviewed me today, the ministry officials are starting to get seriously annoyed with me. One foreign correspondent told me that the press spokesman for the Federal Agency for Media and Communications (as it's now called) snapped in annoyance at his questions, claiming that the audit was "completely normal," and that I had apparently lied about it being an "unplanned audit." So I emailed a scan of the ministry's official notification of their audit to the reporter, on which it reads in plain Russian "Unplanned Audit." He wrote me back, "Do they think we're fucking morons?"

A better question would be, "Do they fucking care?"

Another Western reporter told me that when he called the ministry spokesman, that the man "exploded" and barked, "Why is everyone calling me about the Exile?!" As the reporter explained, "It sounded like my call was about the 15th call he'd taken in the last hour, and he couldn't take anymore. It was kind of funny."

Perhaps. But pissed-off Russian bureaucrats don't have a bygones-be-bygones habit of popping open a Miller with people who piss them off at the end of the day. When they get angry, they have a nasty habit of...actually I'd rather not think about that right now. They already made me pay this humiliating fine for a paper that they'd taken away from me.

Tomorrow I'm to be interviewed in the anti-Kremlin media outlet New Times. Meanwhile, the story is finally getting delayed coverage in the English-language print media. I'm not sure if that's buying me some time here, or just pissing off the ministry officials even more.

READ MORE: Previously in The Russian Front