Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov are two of Russia’s foremost investigative journalists, who have dedicated their careers to researching the Russian security and intelligence services .
Their latest book – Our Dear Friends in Moscow: The Inside Story of a Broken Generation – traces how the hopes of their generation of optimistic Russians was replaced by autocracy, fear, and betrayal, and how their journalist peers became intimately involved with Putin’s regime. Irina and Andrei told us about the story behind their book, the books which inspire them, and more.
Our Dear Friends in Moscow was our June Book of the Month, and we were delighted to host Irina and Andrei at Pushkin House on 2 July, where they discussed their new book with BBC journalist Grigor Atanesian.
What are your top recommended books?
Andrei:
- The Oligarchs and The Dead Hand by David Hoffman — absolutely indispensable for understanding modern-day Russia.
- Defending the Realm by Nick Fielding — helped me understand how to write about intelligence services.
- The Hidden Hand by Richard Aldrich — a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the intelligence history of the Cold War.
- Flat Earth News by Nick Davies — crucial reading for anyone concerned about present-day journalism.
Irina:
- 1984 by George Orwell is becoming increasingly relevant today, as dictators and tyrants around the world silence critics and successfully spread propaganda to entire nations.
- Brave New World by Aldous Huxley reminds us how a tech-driven society — including social media—can lead us to trade freedom for comfort, unless we think critically about the world around us. Together, these books serve as a powerful antidote to the poisonous mix of fear spread by dictators and the seductive spell of social media.
- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy is arguably the best psychology book ever written—a must-read for anyone aspiring to be an investigative journalist.
- Untraceable by Sergey Lebedev is a brilliant thriller about two special forces assassins tasked with eliminating a defector. It vividly portrays the mindset of the Kremlin’s intelligence services.
- The Blood on the Snow by Robert Service, an excellent history of the Russian revolution.
What is a book that inspired you as a young person?
Andrei: The Three Musketeers by Dumas; and then Julius Fucek’s Reportage with a Noose Around his Neck - I thought about him and journalism as a profession a lot, and what I would do in his place.
Irina: What Is to Be Done? by Nikolai Chernyshevsky: I was so inspired by the main character, Rakhmetov, that I asked my parents to bring me a wooden slab to sleep on instead of a bed.
What is a book that takes you back to a specific place or time?
Andrei: Napoleon by a Soviet historian, Tarle. When I read it I immediately get back to the late 1980s, perestroika years, when I had long discussions with my granddad. It was his book. I’m lucky to have it in London.
Irina: Notre-Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo.
What are you reading at the moment?
Andrei: I wanted to read a couple of books in French to brush up on the language, so I’m reading Anéantir by Michel Houellebecq and Le Barman du Ritz by Philippe Collin.
Irina: Fintan O’Tool’s We don’t Know Ourselves, a mix of memoir and history of Ireland.
Which book are you looking forward to reading?
Andrei: Vanished Kingdoms by Norman Davies - I started reading it while we were still in Moscow, then dropped it, and the copy remained in Moscow. But recently I got another copy!
Irina: Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen.
What is your desert island book?
Andrei: The Three Musketeers would do!
Irina: The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾ by Sue Townsend, it always cheers me up.
What is a book or poem that cheers you up?
Andrei: PG Wodehouse! His Psmith, Journalist helped me in a very dark moment once.
Irina: The Twelve Chairs by Ilf and Petrov, a satirical novel about an adventurous who tried to find diamonds hidden in a chair in the Soviet Russia
If you were having a fantasy dinner party, who would you invite?
Andrei: We’ve lost several very good friends among journalists over the past five or six years — they all died, for different reasons. There are also a few people very close to me who passed away while we were already in exile, and I never had the chance to say goodbye. I’m sorry if that sounds too macabre or gloomy.
Irina: Keanu Reeves and Amal Clooney.
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Why did you decide to write Our Dear Friends in Moscow?
We believed we had few illusions left after challenging Putin and his security services for two decades. Still, the level of support for the war within Russian society was shocking. Blaming it all on the ignorance or backwardness of the average Russian felt far too simplistic. We wanted to understand why some of the best and brightest – so to speak – also chose to side with the Kremlin in the war.
For answers, we turned to people we thought we knew – hoping to make our account of what happened to the country as perceptive as possible. We believe we found some answers.
As reporters, you are usually outside of the story, observing from the sidelines. How was it to write a story in which your personal experiences are a central part?
We wanted to be honest with our reader, and in such a book, it means you need to tell not only what happened to your characters, but also with you, not only how they responded to the crises and challenges, but how we did that.
In the year 2000 you and your friends were a group of intelligent young journalists with huge opportunities in a newly open world. You ended up on very different paths. What influenced your different worldviews and career trajectories?
Unlike our friends, we never felt nostalgic for the Soviet Union. We understood very clearly that the collapse of the Soviet regime gave us all those opportunities we cherished – from the right to travel abroad to the very possibility of working as journalists, writing on the country’s most sensitive topics. We knew that becoming journalists under Soviet rule would have been impossible for us (they were all propagandists).
Our friends, however, felt differently about the Soviet past – for a variety of reasons: their family backgrounds, and also nostalgia for the lost superpower status the country held when they came of age in the 1980s.
Some of your friends implied that Russia's path into authoritarianism was inevitable. Was this the case? Was there a particular moment when you realised that Russia was going in the wrong direction, or a particular point of no return?
We believe Russia had a chance. Look, the 1990s was a difficult decade but at least Yeltsin didn’t suppress media freedom. And yes, there was a very particular point when we felt it was going to be bad: when Yeltsin gave up the country to Putin in his infamous address to the nation on 31 December 1999. He mumbled his speech, and we were watching him with horror. We had no illusions about Putin from day one.
Your investigative research into the security and intelligence services gave you a unique perspective of Russia’s descent into authoritarianism. Can you tell us more about that?
It’s quite common to compare Putin’s security services with the Soviet-era KGB, which is understandable, given that the KGB is a direct predecessor of Putin’s agencies. However, there is a striking difference between them: in the late Soviet years, the KGB was firmly under the control of the Communist Party—every department of the KGB had a party cell. (The KGB was not very happy about this, of course, and that was one of the primary reasons it supported perestroika—to get rid of party control.)
Putin’s security and intelligence services, by contrast, operate without any oversight whatsoever—neither parliamentary nor party control. This lack of accountability has made them much more aggressive and brutal over the years.
Since 2022, there has been another significant development: the agencies have shifted firmly onto a war footing. These days, a more accurate comparison would be with Stalin-era agencies, rather than the KGB of the 1970s and 1980s.
Your careers involved writing about some very sensitive and difficult topics including terrorism, the security services, and increasingly repressive politics. The reaction of the Kremlin and FSB was fairly predictable. But how did ordinary readers respond to your stories?
Unfortunately, fear as an emotion often overrides rational thinking. When people are scared—particularly during or after terrorist attacks—they tend to react more emotionally. They seek reassurance from the authorities and are easily provoked into blaming the messenger, so to speak—that is, the journalists who ask difficult questions. We experienced this firsthand after the theatre hostage crisis in Moscow in 2002.
But sometimes, people feel so confused and disoriented that they turn to journalists—because they want to understand what the hell is going on. That includes not only ordinary Russians, but also people within the security services and the military. In fact, this is how we developed some of our best contacts in the agencies.
In the process of writing your book you contacted your former friends, some of whom you hadn’t spoken to for many years. How was that experience?
It proved to be very hard emotionally – more challenging than we had expected.
The events of your book have some disturbing parallels with other countries that are slipping into authoritarianism. What lessons do you hope people can learn from your book?
When Putin came to power, one of our older, more experienced colleagues wrote an article for our website, headlined: "Don’t fool yourselves – you can’t make friends with a crocodile". He warned: it will eat you eventually; all you can do is buy yourself some time. He referred to Pinochet, the infamous Chilean dictator who, at the time, was enjoying a surge in popularity among Moscow’s intellectuals.
Dictators are highly skilled at winning over intellectuals by promising access and the illusion of influence in exchange for silence – but such romances never last. In Russia, many public intellectuals chose to ignore the early signs of the repressive regime Putin was building, justifying it by saying the country needed fixing and had to become strong. In the end, they found themselves trapped in a country walled off from the West and waging a brutal horrible war.
Did you find support, and new friends, in the international journalist community and in London?
As it happened, we had many friends among British journalists long before we moved to London, and for us the emigration was less painful than for many other colleagues who were forced to move out of Russia.
Also, because of the sensitivity of our main topic we’ve been writing about for two decades – Russia’s security and intelligence services – we found ourselves in some sort of emigration when we were still living in Moscow. For instance, we’ve been writing our books in English, for the American publisher (PublicAffairs) since 2009, because it was impossible to get a Russian publisher – too risky, so our way was to write in English, get our books published in the US and then find a Russian publisher to translate and publish them in Russian. And all our books, except this one, were published in Russia - so it worked pretty well. Alas, now we will need to come up with something different, obviously.