Our Dear Friends in Moscow: The Inside Story of a Broken Generation
By Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov
Published by PublicAffairs, 2025, £25
Reviewed by Clare Doyle
Our Dear Friends in Moscow is a difficult book to read but is quite devastating in what it confirms about the brutality of life in Putin’s Russia. Young, mostly idealistic, journalists are on the hunt for sensational revelations about what goes on behind closed doors… in the bowels of the Stalin-era police stations and in the great halls of the Kremlin.
The early parts of the book introduce the reader to so many different characters who are constantly on the lookout for hard-hitting ‘stories’, that it is difficult to keep up with them. The names swirl and a litany of news outlets open and shut their doors to the new generation.
Some major events of the pre-Putin era are touched on in the book. There are references to the infamous coup attempt that brought about the demise of the USSR and to the ‘Perestroika’ and ‘Glasnost’ days before this, when Yeltsin rose to fame as the ‘arch-democrat’, travelling on public transport and championing the ‘transition to the market’ and the fiction of capitalist democracy.
Most of the book, though, deals with the period after Yeltsin’s rise and fall. It shows how Putin, aided and abetted by Dmitry Medvedev (who is still at his side), has manoeuvred for more than two decades to hold on to totally dictatorial power, crushing all opposition.
The authors – a young couple who have written three books together before – describe covering various dramatic events of the period. In 2002 it was the Dubrovka theatre siege in Moscow by Chechen ‘militants’. There were more than a hundred deaths after lethal gas was fired into the theatre by state forces. September 2004 saw both journalists travelling to the town of Beslan in North Ossetia to cover the horrific school siege in which hundreds of children, teachers and parents perished.
Their book also covers journalist Irina Politkovskaya’s assassination in October 2006 on the stairway of her Moscow flat and the gunning down in 2015 of the popular oppositionists, Boris Nemtsov, not far from the Kremlin and Red Square. They are probably among those, like Boris Nemtsov and Alexei Navalny (who died in prison after they left), who believe it is possible to have such a thing as clean capitalism.
In 2016, the two authors were covering the Sochi Olympics when they got the chance to work alongside researchers and human rights lawyers from Toronto and London uncovering a major scandal over digital mass surveillance being set up there by the Kremlin. As the authors ruefully point out, this was just a couple of years after Edward Snowden – “The world’s most famous chronicler of US mass surveillance programmes” – had found refuge for forty days in the transit zone of a Moscow airport. Later, in relation to investigations into the Panama Papers, the authors also draw attention to the pro-Kremlin bias of Wikileaks.
The ‘friends’ in the title of this book were a group of journalists and media people who, over the years, would meet up regularly in quite stylish eating and drinking places in central Moscow. They would also travel together to the country dachas of each other’s families and friends.
As life for the authors, trying to tell the truth about Putin, becomes more and more difficult, they fall out with those ‘friends’ who are making compromises with the dictatorship. Their ‘loyalties’ – or instinct for survival – make some of their fellow journalists more and more devoted to maintaining the status quo: the oligarchic, warmongering dictatorship of Vladimir Putin.
In March 2018, the online media project, Ej.ru, run by one of the authors’ friends, Anna, was blocked. Alexei Navalny’s blog and other liberal sites were also blocked. But one of the ‘friends’, Petya Akopov, welcomes these measures, insisting that they are not censorship but “psychotherapeutic”. Another of them, Olga Lyubimova, now actually leads the censorship operations in the Ministry of Culture. They are now most distinctly on the other side of the fence.
The author of this book, Andrei Soldatov, was himself added to a long list of foreign agents, and all the books of both authors of Our Dear Friends were cleared from bookshop shelves. In 2020, the year the authors leave the country, Alexei Navalny is poisoned with Novichok and Andrei’s own father is sent to prison.
Andrei is not allowed to call his father or even write him a letter as he himself is now on the Russian wanted list. The irony of his father’s arrest is not lost on the authors. Alexey Soldatov was a pioneer of modern communication who had actually set up the very first internet provider in the Soviet Union in 1990. “The man who constructed Russia’s portal to the global world was sealed away from all that he loved”.
Those ‘dear friends’ who stayed behind in Moscow, some of them even self-professed Europhiles, insisted they now hated the West. As the authors put it in the final sentence of this book, “They helped Putin isolate the country”.
Andrei and Irina’s book describes how these friends peel away from the group, accepting more and more pro-Kremlin positions or escaping to the West. In the past, very few citizens of the USSR could travel abroad, but as oligarchic capitalism spread its tentacles at home and abroad, more could go and fewer would return.
The friends in this book are mostly of a generation that would have heard about Stalin. They would be familiar with some of his worst crimes, such as the slaughter of the peasantry and the death camps for oppositionists, but probably knew little about Leon Trotsky and the Left Opposition. The authors mention discussing a hundredth birthday celebration at the newspaper Izvestia for the cartoonist, Boris Yefimov, who had a forward to his book of cartoons written by Trotsky and whose brother had been executed by Stalin “accused of being a Trotskyite”. A friend of Irina’s had tried to find out what happened to her grandfather who was shot as an enemy of the people in 1937 but was refused.
As Putin’s rule became ever more dictatorial and his invasion of Ukraine only added to his paranoia about criticism from within, media outlets were stifled and journalists hounded. The scandal of political murders such as that of Nemtsov and Navalny had been forcing the best of Russia’s journalists (and foreign ones too) to get out of the country rather than end up in prison or worse.
The ‘friends’ in the title of this book were witnessing an extraordinary period in the history of what was once the Russian Empire. I was living in Leningrad at the beginning of the 1990s (when Putin was a KGB man in that city) and I witnessed the brutality of the capitalist counter-revolution as it unfolded. Trying, as a Trotskyist, to advocate genuine workers’ democracy when the vast state-owned bureaucratically run economy was grinding to a halt was a bit of an uphill struggle.
For me, unlike for the two young authors of this book, leaving Russia was nothing like as personal a wrench, although friends I made have indeed been left behind. Life for Irina and Andrei in London is not friendless. They recently spoke at an event at Pushkin House, Bloomsbury, giving much more fascinating detail about their lives and their erstwhile friends. In Moscow their ‘dear friends’ will prosper in their careers only as long as they remain lackeys of an indefensible police state.
Brave journalists like Irina and Andrei illustrate why one of the first demands in any socialist programme is freedom of the press and all media. May the working class of their vast homeland rise to its feet and throw off the shackles of the Putin dictatorship and the rotten capitalist system he has imposed on its long-suffering population.