Our Dear Friends in Moscow: A Story of Russia And A Warning to the West
This post reviews Our Dear Friends in Moscow: The Inside Story of a Broken Generation by Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan (Public Affairs, 2025)
RIGHT FROM THE DAWN OF THIS CENTURY, in the early days of their careers as journalists, Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan saw where power was heading in post-Soviet Russia. In the year 2000, with Putin newly arrived in the Kremlin, they decided, ‘Here was our chance to make something unique. Putin had come from the KGB, after all, and the security services were destined to play an increasing role in Russian society.’
The result was their website, Agentura.ru–the name a Russian word best translated as ‘ring of spies’. Soldatov and Borogan cannot have foreseen, in those much more optimistic times for media freedom, that the influence of former KGB officers–though a Russian saying holds that ‘there is no such thing as a former chekist’–would become so strong that Russia would turn into a country where they could no longer work, for fear of imprisonment, or worse.
Nor could they have foreseen that so many of their friends and colleagues from those years would become cheerleaders and propagandists for Putin’s militaristic form of neo-imperialism.
Our Dear Friends in Moscow is the story of how those friendships faded and died–along with media freedom the like of which Russia had never known.
Soldatov and Borogan skillfully blend their account of the fracturing of their personal and professional circles with the broader trends in Russian society. This is the story of a dying dream by those who witnessed its death.
There are warnings on the way. The official response to national disasters such as the sinking in 2000 of the submarine Kursk, or the Beslan school massacre of 2004 include restrictions on the media, and an expectation that journalists will not question the Kremlin.
Suddenly, it is too late to respond. As the authors note in the aftermath of the murder in 2006 of the indomitable investigative reporter, and implacable Putin critic, Anna Politkovskaya, people, ‘realized they’d surrendered their country to Putin and the FSB, and that they’d completely forgotten how to protest.’
Soldatov and Borogan reflect that Politkovskaya’s murder prompted bigger protests in Paris than in Moscow–a sign that Russia was rejecting liberal values that have deeper roots in the West.
This is part of the dilemma politically liberal Russians face. ‘Being European was not only a cultural choice but also a political one,’ the authors write. That cultural choice was reflected by the fact that much of their former circle’s social life took place in Jean-Jacques, a Parisian style bistro in central Moscow. As a correspondent in the Russian capital in the early 2000s, I remember attending Russian colleagues’ birthday parties there. Now Moscow is a much less friendly place for foreign correspondents.
It is of course even more hostile for Russian journalists who choose not to duplicate dutifully Kremlin statements on the ‘special military operation’, as the war in Ukraine is officially known. Even before the escalation of that war in 2022, Soldatov and Borogan heed the threat behind a gruesome piece of bureaucratic documentation that declares Soldatov dead. The message is clear. They are in danger.
Faced with the prospect of gaol–or perhaps even sharing Politkovskaya’s fate–they leave for western Europe. As they do, they follow a long trail of Russians leaving their country for political reasons. They end up renting a small flat in the Bloomsbury area of London. They later discover that Alexander Herzen and Vladimir Lenin had lived in the houses on either side of their building.
And here they remain. The book ends with interviews with some of their former friends whose lives have taken them in a completely different direction. They make fascinating, if sad, reading. I will not cite them here in the hope of encouraging more people to read this rare and important book.
For if this is a story of Russia, it is also a warning to a wider world, including the West.
In the week I wrote this review, ABC in the United States took a presenter off air after the regulator threatened action over remarks he made mocking the response to the killing of the conservative activist, Charlie Kirk. Donald Trump tried to sue the New York Times, accusing the newspaper of disparaging his reputation as a successful businessman. The newspaper countered that the lawsuit had no merit.
As Russia’s recent history shows, however hard freedoms have been won, they can be taken away–and it may be too late to do anything when the time comes.
Yet Soldatov and Borogan’s story also lends itself to a more optimistic interpretation. The regimes that drove previous political exiles from Russia all eventually ended. While they endured, the journalism the exiles continued to produce from beyond the borders was not just reporting, but resistance.
© James Rodgers 2025