May one compare Putin to Hitler? Or Russia’s modern regime to Nazi Germany? How did Germans, who destroyed millions of lives and unleashed World War II, manage to turn their country into a thriving democracy? And, most importantly, does the future hold something similar for Russians after Putin and what will they go through on that path? Psychology has five stages of the grief model. A patient, who has just found out their fatal diagnosis, at first denies the inevitable. Then they go through the stages of anger, bargaining, and depression, and only then do they accept their fate. In the case of Germany, an entire nation is such a patient. It took decades for German society to heal. In search of a recipe for Russia, we went to Germany to talk to people who witnessed the changes and those who still feel responsible for their ancestors’ crimes.
