How Putin crushed all resistance in Russia and secured total power ...Middle East

Moscow around the turn of the millenium was a time and place of rare optimism in recent Russian history, with living standards beginning to recover from the dog days of the Soviet Union, a greater openness finding expression through popular culture and social diversity, and media outlets enjoying license to challenge power. The US and collective West were widely seen as allies rather than enemies.

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.

Soldatov and Borogan, now based in London, are specialists on Russia’s state security services, creating the Agentura database as a resource to shed light on their activities. Their story of Putin’s takeover is told through the prism of its increasingly severe effects on journalists and the media, but widens its scope to take in crackdowns on civil liberties, NGOs, minority groups, and even the FSB – successor to the KGB – as Putin’s list of enemies at home and abroad extended.

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.

But Soldatov and Borogan are forced to bounce between media outlets as the space for their investigative reporting shrinks, with jobs ending due to clashes with regime-aligned bosses, or by the regime moving to shut down non-compliant outlets.

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.

The 2006 assassination of pioneering investigative reporter, Anna Politkovskaya, gunned down in her Moscow apartment block, and Putin’s sneering response that her work was “extremely insignificant”, marks a point of rupture for the authors.

“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.

That killing fuels rare public demonstrations but they mostly serve to demonstrate how far Putin’s takeover has progressed, with protesters brutalised by police and defamed as traitors in the media, and failing to mount a serious challenge to an increasingly confident and brutal regime.

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.

One confidante begins writing increasingly extreme nationalist screeds, promoting assassinations of dissidents, and attacking members of the Jewish and LGBT+ communities. Soldatov and Borogan find their friend has named them on a list of subversive enemies.

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.

“When I discovered that actually he started participating actively in the FSB disinformation campaigns, that was really shocking,” Soldatov said in an interview with The i Paper.

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.

At a time when the emerging middle class enjoyed a new level of affluence, “Putin found a way to explain that prosperity has nothing to do with democracy,” said Soldatov, adding that he offered stability after a long period of turbulence. “He played time and again on middle class fears of unrest.”

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.

Those incidents where followed by Putin’s first major war, with Georgia in 2008, and that too played well with the public and the authors’ circle. One suggested that “Russia rediscovered its swagger” with the war, after the blows of the collapse of the USSR, and failed conflicts such as Afghanistan.

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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Domestic repression escalated with Putin’s use of the military, with assassinations of opposition leaders and dissidents such as Boris Nemtsov becoming more common. As the security services Soldatov and Borogan were once able to investigate become increasingly threatening, they begin to watch their backs.

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.”

The writing was on the wall with the arrest of Soldatov’s father Andrey in 2019, and the pair travelled to London shortly after, where they watched Putin’s war on Ukraine and his own society unfold from afar. His accounts in Russia were frozen, and he was recently added to the Kremlin’s international wanted list.

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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