But even as new hope flourished, Vladimir Putin’s reign that would sweep it all away was getting underway with his first election victory in 2001. Our Dear Friends in Moscow, a new book from Russian journalists Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan gives an insider account of how Putin dismantled any institution that could check his power and set the country on a path to totalitarianism, war, and the exile of thousands of opponents – including the authors.
Much of the tale is told through the experience of the authors, beginning with their formative years of freedom at work and in their social lives, shared with a “carefree group” of young professionals who would spend their evenings drinking on public benches in central Moscow having philosophical discussions.
The escalation of repression comes by degrees, with friendly invitations to security agency headquarters for ‘interviews’, planting of fake stories, and the quiet presence of agents in newsrooms, eventually giving way to raids, arrests, and killings.
Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov (Photo: Supplied)“For any liberal journalist who had thought there was any possibility for any kind of coexistence with Putin, the illusions they had harboured disappeared after Anna Politkovskaya’s death,” they wrote.
A poignant theme of Our Dear Friends in Moscow is that when the crisis arrives, those friends who shared long evenings and warm relationships with the authors, were willing to embrace the new tide of repression.
Another old friend, Olga Lyubimova, would go on to become Putin’s culture minister. But Soldatov says the most profound sense of betrayal came when his “mentor,” a man whose family were persecuted by the state, defects to the security services.
The authors observe that “The desire to be close to the powerful and wealthy is a temptation shared by many journalists.” But they offer other explanations too for why Putin was able to sway so many ostensible liberals to his side.
Terrorism and war also served to strengthen the President’s position. The authors document two hostage crises, at a Moscow theatre in 2002 and the Beslan school siege of 2004, when the regime’s gung-ho approach led to bloodbaths and civilian deaths that might have been avoided. But in both cases, Putin’s stature was enhanced.
Anna Politkovskaya, who reported on human-rights abuses, was shot dead in 2006 (Photo: Novaya Gazeta / Epsilon / Getty Images)That feeling of national pride fostered by war served Putin well through his intervention in Syria, and then the two phases of the war on Ukraine that began with the seizure of Crimea in 2014. The middle class liberals of the early chapters swiftly turned into nationalist hawks.
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Soldatov says his great fear was being poisoned as many of the Kremlin’s enemies were. “It sounds crazy but you calculate your risks about being just killed or poisoned,” he said. “To be poisoned is much worse because it’s not just about you. You die slowly, which means it’s not just you that suffers but all your relatives.”
Living in the West, Soldatov says his “biggest fear is that that some things which we saw in Russia might be repeated”.
He sees echoes in the US and UK, albeit at a far earlier stage than in Russia, when journalists support Donald Trump’s “attacks on democratic institutions”, and with the “branding of peaceful protests as radical activity bordering on extremism.”
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