Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov, "Our Dear Friends in Moscow: The Inside Story of a Broken Generation" (PublicAffairs, 2025)

Summary

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Podcast Summary

Podcast: New Books Network
Episode: Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov, "Our Dear Friends in Moscow: The Inside Story of a Broken Generation" (PublicAffairs, 2025)
Date: November 18, 2025
Host: Erica Monahan
Guests: Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov

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Episode Overview

This episode features a riveting discussion with Russian investigative journalists Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov about their new book, Our Dear Friends in Moscow: The Inside Story of a Broken Generation. The conversation delves into their motivations for writing the book, their personal journeys from Russian newsroom colleagues to exiled journalists in London, and the tragic, complex ideological transformations of their friends who now form the book’s central “broken generation.” Through the lens of these six protagonists, Borogan and Soldatov reflect on the fracturing of Russian society, the seductive power of propaganda, and the haunting costs of opposing an increasingly repressive regime.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Motivation Behind the Book

• Personal Shock and Disillusionment ([03:26])
  • The invasion of Ukraine in 2022 devastated Borogan and Soldatov, both emotionally and personally, given their deep ties to Ukraine.
  • The catalyst for the book was reading a pro-war article by their old friend, Petya Akopov, which called for the "final solution of the Ukrainian question"—a phrase chillingly reminiscent of Nazi rhetoric.
    • Irina Borogan: “I was literally just, I was speechless when I read that. ...His article hit me so, so hard that we decided to write the book about that and understand what is he thinking?” ([03:26])
• Reconciliation With Old Friendships
  • The book investigates how former friends and colleagues—people who once shared the same ideals and careers—could diverge so fundamentally, with some embracing the Putin regime and its propaganda.

2. Origins of Their Journalism and Investigation

• Founding “Agentura.ru” ([08:05])
  • Launched in 2000 at the birth of the Russian internet, their website became a key watchdog on Russian security services—a rarity given the climate of secrecy and lack of transparency in Russia.
  • Inspired by American models but forced to adopt more investigative methods due to the lack of Freedom of Information mechanisms in Russia.
  • “We decided to launch the website, which would be a collection of information... and create some sort of watchdog of the Russian security services.” —Andrei Soldatov ([08:05])
• Connection to Izvestia Newspaper
  • Working at the prominent newspaper Izvestia provided access to the political elite and led to the formation of the core group of protagonists in their book.

3. Early Warning Signs of Authoritarianism

• Putin’s Rapid Crackdown on Independent Media ([17:39])
  • The transition to outright control of media happened almost immediately after Putin rose to power, beginning with the attack on oligarch Gusinsky’s independent media empire.
    • Irina Borogan: “When Putin came to power...we understood that things went wrong because they didn’t have any illusions about the guy who came from the KGB.” ([17:39])
• Public Complicity and “The Arrangement” ([20:07])
  • Society and journalists largely acquiesced to media repression in hopes that Putin’s promise of order and prosperity would be delivered.
    • Andrei Soldatov: “If that means that you need to give up your public freedoms, that’s okay, because you would be safe and you would be given an opportunity to make money.” ([20:07])

4. Confronting Conspiracy and the Security State

• Classmates Becoming Agents of Power ([33:18] - [44:43])
  • Friends differed in motivations: personal trauma, nostalgia, ambition, and Soviet legacy.
  • The breakdown of liberal ideals and the allure of status, power, and national greatness lured them to become active agents of propaganda or even government operatives.
    • Example: Yevgeny Krutykov, former liberal editor, gradually abandoned journalistic principles to work as a disinformation officer for Russian intelligence.
• Conspiratorial Worldviews Within Institutions ([25:55])
  • Their early investigative reporting revealed mainstream belief in outlandish conspiracy theories within the Russian security services—all the way up to the drafting of government strategy.
  • Andrei Soldatov: “One particular conspiracy theory became extremely popular...that under the mountains of Ural there were hidden treasures of a lost civilization of Hyperboreans.” ([25:55])
  • Attempts to expose this led to professional retaliation and their first firing.

5. Portraits of a Broken Generation

• Yevgeny Krutykov ([33:18] - [40:54])
  • Came from a high-ranking Soviet family that experienced loss and trauma.
  • Initially a fair and liberal-minded boss, but became disillusioned and began working with security services, eventually abandoning journalism for intelligence work.
    • Andrei Soldatov: “He helped the Russian security services, FSB, in at least one disinformation campaign...he participated in this campaign willingly.” ([37:59])
• Petya Akopov ([41:26] - [46:06])
  • Eccentric, brilliant, and ideologically extreme, he openly called himself a “Russian fascist.”
  • His identity and career reflect the tension between cosmopolitan cultural experiences and deep nationalist convictions.
    • Irina Borogan: “He told me that he's in internal exile, so he works for liberal media, but he doesn't support these ideas.” ([41:26])
  • Devotee of Russian exceptionalism—attracted to political philosophy that placed Russia as a “sacred place” with a unique, misunderstood destiny.
• Svetlana Babaeva ([14:49])
  • Once a respected journalist, she became so marginalized after being expelled from Putin’s inner circle that she pursued military training and died in friendly fire, attempting to physically fight in Ukraine.

6. Dangers of Intellectual Complicity and Erosion of Institutions

• Echoes for the West ([48:12])
  • The authors warn that intellectuals’ willingness to undermine institutions for proximity to power can lead to disaster—a lesson with relevance outside Russia.
    • Andrei Soldatov: “My biggest fear, that some public intellectuals who now think it’s okay to support very questionable things...because they would have this access...they actually might be in the wrong. At least that is what our example of Putin’s Russia tells us.” ([48:12])

7. Exile and the Personal Cost of Truth

• Choosing to Leave Russia ([52:10])
  • Despite years of intimidation, interrogations, and surveillance, they persisted in their journalism until a chilling bureaucratic threat in 2020—a notice stating the editor (Soldatov) was officially “dead”—forced them to flee within two weeks.
    • Irina Borogan: “I got it right. I said, we have to go, we have to go away, we have to run.” ([54:41])
• Family Sacrifices ([55:32])
  • Soldatov’s father, once celebrated as a pioneer of the Russian internet and former Deputy Minister of Communications, was later imprisoned as part of the regime’s escalation against those connected to independent networks.
    • Andrei Soldatov: “At some point he was forced to spend the night on the floor in a cell with 40 other people...but he was released in August, so now he feels okay.” ([55:32])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “It was like a blow. We expected that something could happen, but when it happened, it was such a tragedy. It's like the whole world just collapsed.”
  — Irina Borogan ([03:26])

• “How had he become so bloodthirsty?”
  — Erica Monahan, quoting the book’s reflection on Petya ([06:42])

• “We decided to launch the website, which would be a collection of information you can find online and you can collect across the country by talking to other journalists and create some sort of watchdog of the Russian security services.”
  — Andrei Soldatov ([08:05])

• “To be honest, it was also ... a happy moment for us because for us, it was a time when we could, well, actually become journalists. But of course, for many, many people in the country, it was a terrible time because people lost their savings, they lost their jobs, they lost their identity, and they didn't know what to do about their lives.”
  — Andrei Soldatov ([48:12])

• “You have to oppose the authorities when you want to, because that's media power. That's power of journalism. And all of them understood this. But of course, these people, they. They were nostalgic for the Soviet Union. ...They loved the Soviet Union as a Russian empire. They loved the superpower status of this empire.”
  — Irina Borogan ([36:41])

• “We had only two weeks to pack and leave and we left in ... September 2020.”
  — Andrei Soldatov ([55:18])

• “It is chilling to contemplate the sacrifices and the costs that so many in Russia have had to pay for trying to, you know, for proceeding according to conscience or for, in your case, doing independent journalism.”
  — Erica Monahan ([58:56])

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Suggested Timestamps for Key Sections

• [03:26] — The emotional impact of the Ukraine invasion; catalyst for writing the book
• [08:05] — Launching Agentura.ru; early internet activism
• [17:39] — Putin takes power; signals of media crackdown
• [20:07] — “The Arrangement”: why Russian society acquiesced
• [25:55] — Investigating beliefs and conspiracy theories in Russian security
• [33:18] — Yevgeny Krutykov: example of career drift and political transformation
• [37:59] — Krutykov’s shift from editor to intelligence operative
• [41:26] — Petya Akopov: character profile of a radical nationalist
• [48:12] — Reflections on institutional decay and warnings for the West
• [52:10] — Decision to flee to exile
• [55:32] — The fate of Soldatov’s father and personal consequences

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Tone and Language

Throughout the episode, Borogan and Soldatov speak with clarity, urgency, and honesty—blunt about the costs, emotionally evocative regarding their lost friendships and shattered ideals, and grimly sardonic about the “arrangement” so many in Russia accepted for security and material prosperity. Their language is reflective, sometimes pained, often insightful, and deeply personal. Host Erica Monahan maintains a tone of empathy, thoughtfulness, and academic curiosity, weaving in her own stories to elucidate the stakes for listeners both inside and outside Russia.

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Final Recommendation

Anyone interested in Russia, authoritarianism, the dangers of unchecked power, or the lived costs of speaking the truth under repression should read Our Dear Friends in Moscow. The episode provides not only an account of a generation’s broken dreams but also a wider warning against complacency, complicity, and the fragility of democratic institutions worldwide.

Transcript

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[Marshall Poe]

Hello everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network and if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.

[Erica Monahan]

Welcome all. My name is Erica Monahan and I am very privileged and delighted to do this interview for the New Books Network today with authors Irina Borgon and Andrei Saldatov. Today we are talking about their book Our Dear Friends in the Inside Story of a Broken Generation. Our Dear Friends in Moscow was published in 2025 and it's come out by Public affairs of the Hatchet Book Group and it is a riveting read. First, a word about our co authors. Irina Borgon and Andrei Saldotev are the authors of four books. This is their fourth book and they wrote the Red the Struggle Between Russia's Digital Dictators and the New Online Revolution details the history of the Internet in Russia. 1 they are intimately involved with as we'll talk about. They are also authors of the New Nobility, the Restoration of Russia's Secrets of Russia's Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the kgb. They've also written the the Brutal and Chaotic History of Russia's Exiles, Emigres and Agents Abroad. And this their fourth book, Our Dear Friends in the Inside Story of a Broken Generation. So I want to thank our authors for talking with us today and with that we'll jump in and I want to very standard New Books network. First question is I want to ask you why did you write this book?

[Irina Borogan]

Hi Erika, thank you very much for having us here. Why did we decide to write this book? When the war started, I mean the full scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. We as many, many Russians couldn't believe back then as well as now in London in exile. And we could not stop talking about what happened. It was like a blow. We expected that something could happen, but when it happened, it was such a tragedy. It's like the whole world just collapsed. And the relationships between Russia and Ukraine is so, so close that when I was a child I had an impression that many my classmates traveling, traveling to Ukraine to their grandma and granddads for summer vacation and I am another example of that because my father came from Odessa. All his family still live in Odessa or Odessa region. So they are under bombardment on the Russian bombardment on daily basis. And I have feedback from them every night. So when it happened, we could not stop talking about that. We could not stop thinking about that. We could not sleep, we could not eat. I mean as many, many normal Russians. And a couple of days passed and we read the article written by our dear friends in Moscow with one, one, one friend, one of our dear friends in Moscow, his name Peter Akopov, with whom we split like 10 at that moment, like around 10 years ago, but. But still has some, I mean good feelings about him. And he wrote an article calling for the final solution of the Ukrainian question which reminds of, which reminds us of Hitler's language in Nazi Germany. And I was so, I was shocked. I was, I was literally just, I was speechless when I wrote, when I read that. And as well as Andrei ever could not stop thinking about him. What happen, why he, my relatives, our friends, a lot of innocent Ukrainians are suffering. Before Putin, Putin started. Before Putin moved his army into Ukraine. It was just, I mean he lived in peaceful life. Odessa lived peaceful life. How you can support this? That was peace I mean, of course, there was some. There was conflict and war in Donbass, but it was kind of frozen. So it was. It hit me, his article hit me so, so hard that we decided to write the book about that and understand what is he thinking? And not only only petty, but all many of our friends in Moscow, why they're talking about the full invasion of Ukraine, why they support this, why they sided with Putin in this terrible war.

[Erica Monahan]

Thank you. Yes. As, as you write in the book on page 275, you write, you know, about Petya. How could that have happened? He had grown up in an intelligent family in a friendly environment, had gotten a good education and had married a woman he loved. His family was blessed with two daughters. How had he become so bloodthirsty? And, and this book is kind of your tracing of your journalistic career with your dear friends in Moscow with whom you've ended up on different borders, if I neglected to mention it. You are Russian investigative journalists in exile now, and you have been for five years in London, but your career started very much on the same page in the same places and have ended up in such different places. And this story, kind of, you walk through these stories, these, the trajectories of these friends, and I want to ask you about them. But let me, if I could, I want to even start out kind of grounding us in your experience as journalists. And maybe what I would ask you to begin is, you know, tell us about what was Agontura.

[Andrei Saldatov]

Eigentura is the website we launched in 2000. That was a very pivotal moment in Russian history because there was another war in Russia, and that war was the second Chechen war. And Putin actually made his reputation as a tough man because he launched the second war in Chechnya, and he was a new Russian leader, new president, before that prime minister. He was chosen by Yeltsin. And everybody knew back then in 2000, that because Putin came from the security services, from the KGB and the fsb, which is the main successor to the kgb, it was absolutely clear that we're going to see an increasing presence of people with the similar background from the security services and specifically from the KGB and the Russian government and in many, many key positions in Russian society. And because we were very young back then, 24 years old, 25 years old, we thought, okay, how we can. What we could do about it? How are we gonna write about these people? The problem is that, of course, it's a very secretive world, and you need to have access to this world. And, well, usually how it works is you should have some relatives, like you need to have a father, a general and someone else, or you need to be a veteran of these services. And it's really difficult to find a way in. So we, being extremely ambitious, thought maybe we can use new technologies. And back then new technologies was the Internet. So we decided to launch the website, which would be a collection of information you can find online and you can collect across the country by talking to other journalists and create some sort of watchdog of the Russian security services. We, of course, we. It was not like we came up with an idea which nobody ever thought about. There was a similar, to some extent, a similar website, but not in Russia, but in the United States. There was a project, it's called the Federation of American Scientists Secrecy Project, run by many, many years by a guy, his name is Stephen Aftergrew. And I was in touch with him since the late 1990s. And I was absolutely fascinated by what he was doing because he was collecting lots of declassified documents about American intelligence age community. And I was thinking maybe, just maybe we can do something similar. Of course, well, the reality, the reality was very different because things which exist in the United States, like Freedom of Information act requests and that you have agencies which declassified things for real, they never really happen in, in. Happened in, in Russia. So we needed to make it much more investigative and journalistic than the project which existed in the United States. But there was an opportunity there. And because my father was, I would say, the Russian Internet pioneer, he actually brought the Internet into the country when it was still the Soviet Union. And he launched the very first Internet service provider. We approached him and he said, okay, I can help you. I can give you technical support for your website. And we launched this website in 2000. And that was a very year when we also met all dear friends we mentioned in this book because it was also the year we worked for a very prominent Russian newspaper called Zvestia, which is a very old Soviet brand. It was actually launched immediately after the Russian Revolution. And it has had always a really great access to the Kremlin. And that is why we joined this newspaper, the political department of his newspaper, to again to get access to people in the security services. And that's where in the political department of his newspaper we met most of these friends who became the main protagonist of this story. So we are talking about six people. And the whole idea of this book is to trace what happened to six people and why we ended up where we ended up. So we ended up in Exile. They sided with Putin, became very prominent in the Kremlin propaganda machine. One of them is the Minister of Culture. Another is a very prominent journalist. The first one was a war correspondent now, so he runs Kremlin soft power operations from Belgrade in Serbia. And unfortunately, we also have. One of the protagonists is now dead. She was an extremely prominent political journalist, very close to Putin. But when she was expelled from the circle of very close associates to Putin, she became so desperate. So she started training with Special Forces. And think about it, she was a woman of 50 years old, but she got so desperate because she was deprived of his access to the Kremlin. So she was training and training. And finally, when the war started, the big war in 2022, she apparently wanted to go to the war not as a journalist, but as a soldier. So there was a moment she was at a shooting range with other special forces, and she was killed by friendly fire. So that is how dramatic the story is. And that's why we decided to focus on these people, to tell the story of why the best and brightest in Russian society, so to speak, decided to start and work for Putin.

[Erica Monahan]

Thank you.

[Irina Borogan]

Yes.

[Erica Monahan]

And that's Svetlana Babaeva. Was the. The friend of yours that was killed by friendly fire, preparing to support Russia's mission of denazifying Ukraine?

[Irina Borogan]

The.

[Erica Monahan]

The. The. Okay, a little bit more context setting or so. You start working at this prominent newspaper in Moscow, Izvestia, in 2000, that is going to very much help further this, you know, kind of independent side project that you have of creating a space for information about the secret Services. How does that go in 2000, the same year that Putin comes to power, at what point did you start to get the inkling that things are. That kind of free and independent journalism is not going to be so easy to accomplish? And if I could, I want to even share one small anecdote. I worked from 1997 to 2000 for a company in Moscow, you know, an American expat that was part of the shock troops of capitalism. And in August 1998, when Russia defaulted on its foreign debt, I was in Moscow and flagged a cab. And I was, you know, as many people do, not official cabs, just someone that will stop and pull over and pick you up. And I had a conversation with this cab driver where I distinctly remembered. I mean, remember, it was in the midst of these heady days, there's bank runs on banks. No one really knows what's going to happen. Plus, some people are asking, is there going to be war? What war? Who will people fight with? And I remember this independent cab driver kind of gesturing as we're driving through some Moscow boulevard at night with all neon signs of multi corporations and the consumerist culture that's coming to Russia. And he says, see all this? It's going to be gone. They're going to take it back. And I say, you know, who's they? And he says, the kgb. And I just thought, you know, these silly, ignorant cab drivers that just have no sense of how, you know, the inexorable march of capitalism which goes hand in hand in democracy and oh, the ignorant little remnants of a past, a past that is very much past that one can encounter even in cosmopolitan Moscow these days. And it turns out how wrong I was and how right he was. So I just wanted to kind of share that little anecdote. But so tell us about when you, you know, when do you have inklings that all is not on the going in the direction you would ideally imagine?

[Irina Borogan]

I, I would say that when Putin came to power literally in the mid, at the midnight of new millennia, that was the moment when they understood that things went wrong because they didn't have any illusions about the guy who came from the kgb. And he already started his attack against Gusinski's media. Gusinsky was a Russian oligarch, but he has an empire of kind of independent media who gave a great picture of what's going on in Russia. And very often this media, including the TV channel and however, given a picture from, from the other side, like during the, the first Chechen war, from the Chechen side or just there were a lot of alternative opinions on in this media. So Putin didn't like that. And because Gusinsky was his political opponent and he supported the opposition to Putin. So Putin started offensive against Gusinski, Putin started an attack against Buzinski's media. And that was the moment that was media we worked for back then. So that was a moment. So we understood that that might be very difficult times ahead. So we have never been supportive of Putin and we had a clear picture who he was and what he was going to do. The thing we didn't know that it would be last for so long because we were absolutely, absolutely young back then. We thought that his authority would last maybe for four years. That was our idea at the beginning. So we were not afraid of him, of his power a lot, as many people did back then. It was quite, quite, quite, quite good times. People were not afraid. They just understood that this guy, he's from kgb, but they didn't believe that he can be such terrifying as he now is.

[Erica Monahan]

And you have this chapter, the arrangement where you kind of, well, describe what. How you understood the arrangement of people making peace.

[Andrei Saldatov]

Well, the thing was that when Gusinski's media were crushed and put under control of the Kremlin, we didn't see a lot of resistance from, say, Russian society or the community of Russian journalists for several reasons. One was that, well, as you Precisely mentioned, after 1998, when Russia defaulted, there was a sense in Russian society that things went completely wrong, that the country needed order, needed to get fixed, and they actually wanted to get someone like Putin a strong man. It was a time when all of a sudden, Pinochet, former dictator in Chile, but extremely popular in Russia, lots of people, at least in Moscow, were talking about Pinochet, how good he was and all of that, completely disregarding his human rights record. And that is why the attack on. On the media were, if not celebrated, but accepted, but mainly in Russian society. But it was also a point that Putin was telling the Russian people that the first Chechen war was lost precisely because of journalists. That was his main argument, that it was the media journalist, foreign and Russian, who undermined the Russian war effort. And this time he would insist, this time it would be different. And lots of people accepted that because they wanted to see the order, stability, and, of course, prosperity. And Putin was delivering on his premises. He got his stability to some extent to the people, but only to certain extent, because just in two years, we got a horrible terrorist attack in Moscow when the theater was taken hostage on Dubka and lots of people died. Two years later, we got even more horrible attack in the city of Beslan when a school with kids was taken hostage and more people, more kids died. But lots of people felt that Putin was trying to get stability and an order to the country. And there was a sense that if that means that you need to give up your public freedoms, that's okay, because you would be safe and you would be given an opportunity to make money. Because that was the moment when the Russian economy was going just really, really well. Like, oil prices were skyrocketing. And you can actually feel it, especially in big cities, how prosperous Moscow was getting and how quickly it was. It was. It was happening. Well, things were changing every few months, and that is why people just supported that and felt okay. And a very small community of activists and journalists felt really worried, to be honest. Even the first big attack, a physical attack on an independent journalist, when Yuri Shikhachikhin was poisoned in 2003, that went almost completely unnoticed by Russian society. We got absolutely horrified because that was the first public poisoning. And we all knew what it was. And we saw that many of our colleagues, they felt, but maybe it's time to move to another profession because it's getting really, really, really dangerous. But for society at large, the bank almost absolutely are not even given the.

[Irina Borogan]

Fact that he was a famous parliamentarian and even a deputy chief of a committee in. In the Russian parliament. And he was extremely famous journalist. And in the late 80s and 90s, people. People knew who he was.

[Erica Monahan]

Well, that's right. And you write that he had been investigating and pushing on this notion that the fsb, the secret security services, had been involved in these series of his horrific bombings on the outskirts of Moscow in 1999, and that he had been pushing this, this investigation. I actually think this is that period when I was moving from I had been in working for Russian, and I was done with Russian business, but was interested in studying Russian history. And I applied to go to graduate school. And I visited this school and had an interview with a professor I would like to work with. And I remember. So this is in 2000, saying, you know, and some people say. Some people say that maybe these apartment bombings were an inside job. And that professor somewhat smugly maybe looked at me and said, ugh, Russians have a conspiracy theory for why the sun rises.

[Irina Borogan]

Ha ha ha.

[Erica Monahan]

And at the moment, that version was. Was very much just crazy, but now it seems to be more accepted without having anything definitive. But, Andre, in the book you talk about, you did a story about conspiracy. Tell us about that story. What motivated you to do that story and how it played out, please.

[Andrei Saldatov]

Yes, at some point, because we tried to be very strategic at exposing and investigating Russian security services. So part of the job, we believed, was to understand the mentality and the mindset of these people. We try to understand and. And explore what these people really believed in. And the thing is that Russian security services, it's not a small community of people, it's a very large organization, because these people, they serve not only in Moscow, St. Petersburg, they're everywhere. You have regional departments across the country, including in Siberia. And all of these people have some beliefs, and some of these beliefs are extremely strong. So the story I was working really long and hard was to understand what we believe in. And apparently only some of them believed in, say, a Soviet idea of the state of history. They wanted to get the KGB back. But in the regions, lots of people in the security services believed in very Weird conspir. Conspiratorial and conspiracy theories. For instance, one particular conspiracy theory became extremely popular. It was the story was that because we have the. We need to find an explanation why Russia has been always attacked. That was the question asked by the authors of this theory. Like the Mongols tried to invade Russia, the French tried to invade the Tiets before, obviously the Nazis. Russia has been always under attack. There should be a reason for that. And the reason the authors of this theory came up with was that under the mountains of Ural there were hidden treasures of a lost civilization of Hyperboreans. And that is why everyone was after Russia and Russian spiritual treasure. This theory somehow was connected to another theory which was extremely popular among the FSB Frank and File. And it was called the Dead Water Theory. The idea was that there was a plot, a conspiracy by Jewish Christian civilization to undermine and put under control the Slavic peoples living in Russia. And they used, and this theory used very strange terminology. For instance, they used something they called a satanic predictor. And they called this a center where all the decisions were made about Russia. And that's actually where you have the center of decision making obviously outside Russia. But all things are decided about what is going on in the country. And that has been like that for centuries, if not thousands of years. The interesting thing was that of course it sounded absolutely crazy. Some satanic predictors, the language, I believe, betrayed itself. But nevertheless, the supporters of his theories were not only say, secretly preaching this theory inside of the fsb, they were also in the Russian parliament. And some very prominent members of the Russian parliament confirm confirmed me that there were also in some places there. They, for instance, there was a very special government ministry and they were drafting plans for the Russian future in the next 20 years. And they included the point about the satanic predictor in this report. And that was absolutely astonishing. The most astonishing thing happened when I tried to publish this story because. And we knew of course that from the day one the owners of this media holding had really strong connections with. With the fsb. And but we never thought to what extent it would be. It would be so they would be so close to the fsb. So when I submitted my article, I got a call from the founder and the owner of the media organization. And she called me into her office and she started shouting at me. And I understood that she herself believed antis furious. And she felt very insulted and offended by my ironic description of these ideas and these conspiracy theories. And that actually prompted our first, well, I would say firing. And we lost Our jobs because of course we couldn't. I mean, she, she banned the publication of this story. And of course I spent so much time working on this story, I couldn't let it go. So we just moved to. We left this newspaper and we got it published somewhere. But it was very, I would say, instructive.

[Erica Monahan]

Wow. So kind of an early encounter of dealing with leadership that has a view of reality that just seems to not be traceable to kind of empirically, objectively agreed upon evidence. A type of thing that, you know, smug Americans might say, those poor Russians, look what they have to deal with in that dysfunctional country. But belief, let's. I'd like. So let's get at this business of belief. You know, why, what did your friends believe? Why did they change? And if, I mean, I can't, I encourage everyone to read the book for all of these stories. But it does seem to me that there's this mix of maybe career ambition and settling scores is at some point a motivation maybe for your friend Evgeny Krutykov. And then you have this friend Baranov, and also another colleague Olga, for whom religion may seem to be a real motivator. And then this friend Petya Akopov, who, you know, has ideas about Russia's place. And so I kind of want to ask you about, let's see, about these individuals and what so drives them. And also being a historian, right. I was so struck by so many of these people. Their educations are grounded in history and much of it seems to be ideas about history. So yeah, maybe in this mix of. Tell us about, tell us who was Yevgeny Kutakov? If you were to give us a short biopic of him and what really.

[Irina Borogan]

Drove him, this guy, he was still a little bit older than us, so we were 25, 24 years old. He was in his early 30s. He was our boss in newspaper Izvesti. He was a chief of political section there. And he came from Soviet nomenclature family. His granddad was a deputy prime minister under Stalin. Under Stalin. So this kind of family. After that family went through repressions. His father was sent to prison, then released. But after he was released, the family never could not, were not able to get back all the power they had before. And it was, it, it was like a huge trauma for the whole family. And Evgeny Zhenya Krutikov, he always talked about that a lot. It was just his personal trauma. And he was young, blonde, blue eyed guy with mild features, facial features and kind of, kind of pleasant character. And he was very, very intelligent. He knew history, he knew literature. He was brilliant in foreign languages, including some very exotic like Ossetian language or Albanian or Albanian language. And he cooperated. When he graduated from university, he cooperated with the Russian military intelligence because he had, he had. I mean, to me, he did this out of, out of his, out of Romantism and because his family was, to his ancestors, was too close to the Stalin system, that he did nothing wrong with copyrighting with the security services, which was kind of unusual in the 90s because, I mean, that was new times. People wanted to participate in new capitalism. Liberal democracy was very popular, this kind of thing. So he was different from us, but at the same time, when we worked for him in this newspaper, he allowed us doing what we wanted to do. So when Dusinski, who was, who was a media mogul back then, when he was put to prison by Putin, arrested, I wrote an article in favor of him, defending him. And this article, this column says that you can't put in prison person who's your political opponent for being just your political opponent. Krutikov was on the other side of the political spectrum. He didn't like Gusinski, he didn't like his media, but he published this article. It went through him. He did not make any corrections. So he was this kind of person, civilians. I mean, I, I would say he was, he was liberal. How we can characterize him back then? So he wasn't, he didn't. He was not a censor. He did not use censorship. He follows the principle of free press.

[Andrei Saldatov]

Well, at least in his, in his work and his.

[Irina Borogan]

And his. And he's being our boss.

[Andrei Saldatov]

Yes, yes.

[Irina Borogan]

Yeah, but so these people, they were not terrible. They, I mean, back then we had different ideas. We were on different pages politically, but we understood each other. We understood the freedom of expression is important, that you have to oppose the authorities when you want to, because that's media power. That's power of journalism. And all of them understood this. But of course, these people, they. They were nostalgic for the Soviet Union. We have never been. We. We understood clearly that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a very happy moment for us and that provide us with opportunities to travel, with opportunities to became journalists, because before then, all journalists in the Soviet Union, they were. They were propagandists, and it gave us a lot of opportunities so that. But our friends in Moscow, they were not. They not love the Soviet Union as a communist Bolshevik state. Never. They love the Soviet Union as a Russian empire. They love the superpower status of this empire.

[Erica Monahan]

And what happened to Kruchikov? In what direction? What's his job now? And what. What did he. What does he do now?

[Andrei Saldatov]

He was always. He had this ambition when he was extremely young. So before we knew him, he had this ambition to become an intelligence officer. So he always had this soft spot for Russian intelligence agencies. When we already worked together, we saw him moving to this dark side. And actually he helped the Russian security services, fsb, in at least one disinformation campaign. So he published something he was given by the security services, and he knew that it was not true, but he participated in this campaign willingly because he believed it was okay to work for and cooperate with the Russian intelligence and security services by 2004. So just four years after we met, we were in.

[Irina Borogan]

We.

[Andrei Saldatov]

There was a time in September of 2004 when a big terrorist attack took place, and the city of Beslan in North Ossetia, when the school was taken hostage. So we flew to this town and literally one of the first people we met on the street was Kruchikov. But he was then not as a journalist. He went from South Ossetia, a breakout region of Georgia, and in this region, he was already not a journalist, but an advisor to the intelligence agency of this small republic. So by that moment, by 2004, it was absolutely clear that he moved to the other side. So he left journalism and he started working directly for intelligence agencies. And we all know that this region, this small region of South Ossetia, was always not just supported and founded, but controlled by Russia. So if you say that you work for the intelligence agency of South Ossetia, it basically means that you work for the Russian intelligence agency. Ever since, he's been doing things for Russian intelligence, and these days he actually cooperates very closely. We have Russian military intelligence, and he writes what they asked him to write about the war in Ukraine and also about Russian operations in Africa. So he's fully sort of employed by. And he works for the spies. So to some extent, we might say that he achieved what he wanted to do in his life, to work for the intelligence agencies. He didn't achieve what he wanted in terms of his career. So he didn't become a big chief of the Russian intelligence, but he. He's doing what they ask him to do.

[Erica Monahan]

And come back. Irina started talking about the. The experience of Petya Apkopov, who writes this op ed for the Russian government news agency website, calling for the solution of the Ukrainian question, which just smacks of genocide. That was you know, the shocking catalyst that kind of maybe set you on the path to this book. Tell us about Petya. Who was he? What motivated him?

[Irina Borogan]

When I saw him for the first time, he. I saw a very, very intelligent, thin, shy guy. He was wearing huge glasses back then and. His hair was black and his skin was kind of brown. He looked like a Russian intelligent, but he was 80%, as he explained me, he was 75% of Armenian, Italian, Caucasian. So he has asked, he explained to me he has only 25% of Russian blood in his body. And he was kind of an extreme personality, which we loved in Russia. And once he told me that he is a Russian fascist, which was very strange to hear from a political correspondent of very respectful newspaper called IS vista. And what he mean, I think that he has some extreme views and he's not afraid to demonstrate them. It didn't, it didn't. It didn't bother. It didn't, didn't prevent him from working for liberal media. And because, I mean, he just. He told me that he's in internal exile, so he works for liberal media, but he doesn't support these ideas. And so he looked like a very interesting, very honest, very sincere, eccentric guy to me. And I loved him a lot. We spent a lot of times. His flat, which was in the center of Moscow, became a center, like a club for us. We gathered there, we drank a lot of vodka, we ate, smoked all the nights and listening to music, discussing, I mean, doing all the things that people in their youth do. And it was, I. I would say it was beautiful. It was a pleasure to spend time with him and his, his wife and his friends.

[Andrei Saldatov]

If I can jump in. He was also a bit. Well, he has interesting ideas. For instance, he was really fond of the stamps of North Korea and China, which was a very strange thing to collect. So he had like thousands and thousands of stamps of these two countries. He also collected books about China and North Korea. And he was very proud that he memorized all the members of the politburos of these two countries, which was a very unusual thing to do in, in the early 2000s when everybody just forgot about communism and was such a strange idea. And the communist states of North Korea and China was, was. Was something of the past. But, but what was the feeling back when in Moscow nobody thought seriously about North Korea?

[Irina Borogan]

Including. Including. Not a lot of people understood this thing back then, including his wife, who loved a lot France, Italy, mostly France. And they traveled together to France and they organized a kind of photo session on the Paris Streets wearing the costumes of the owner of the early 20th of 20th century. So they were normal people. And he traveled a lot to the West. He traveled to London, to the United States, many countries. And he was happy with that.

[Erica Monahan]

Yeah, about him, you know, as I read about him and think about, you know, what history informs him, do you understand him to be, you know, someone inspired by Lev Gumilev's, Gumilev's version of Eurasianism or, you know, a sort of Slavophilism? I think, you know, I think of Dostoevsky's famous remark, you know, in Europe we were hangers on. In Asia, we were masters with this sort of fascination with eastward things or what history, if any, kind of informs his perspective.

[Irina Borogan]

I would say that all theories that underlines the Russian exceptionalism was adored by Peter Akopov, many of them. I said it was a mix of. He translated, he always translated a mix of series praising the Russian exception and that Russians have a special place in the world, is a country that you could not understand with your brain because it's a huge soul. It's a sacred place for the world. And we have to go on our.

[Erica Monahan]

Own path so much there. I want to turn. I know I can't keep too much of your time, so I want to, you know, as an American in 2025, watching what's happening in our own country with, you know, from threats on media outlets to cultural vibes, I was so struck by this one remark you have that you, you know, you leave Russia in exile, you're. And you make the decision to get back in touch with these people who you haven't had contact with in years. And in talking to them, you know, you, you ask Petya about his change and, and he says to you, the 90s I spent under liberal censorship and it. And it. And I couldn't help but think, you know, from my American perspective, how you. I, I worry that some people, for the. For the sake of, you know, excesses of hyper identity politics in what is deemed under the DEI programs, what the right would call white wokeness, you have people willing to just smash the whole rule of law system. And, and so I guess I wanted to ask you, as, you know, journalists in exile in the west, having experienced this in Russia and watching what's happening in the west, what do you see happening? What similarities, what dissimilarities?

[Andrei Saldatov]

Of course, things are not the same. Uh, and it's difficult, difficult to compare the situation in the United States and Russia, just because in Russia we never had a proper democratic Tradition. Uh, we had probably 10, 15 years of relative freedoms after 1991. And to be honest, it was also, well, it, it was a happy moment for us because for us, it was a time when we could, well, actually become journalists. But of course, for many, many people in the country, it was a terrible time because people lost their savings, they lost their jobs, they lost their identity, and they didn't know what to do about their lives. And it was a very traumatic period. But of course, and that is why it's very difficult to compare it with what is going on in the United States. But several things struck us as very familiar. For instance, the idea that institutions don't really matter anymore, that you have, say, bunch of intellectuals who believe that if they can be close to power, they could support this attack on institutions because they can have this access to power. The problem is that it's delusional. And we had this experience in our country, lots and lots of public intellectuals, very smart people, supported Putin in 2000, 2001, 2003, out of belief that they could be his. His people, his advisors, and they can actually, if not control things, but sort of have a say and, and how the country is developing. And they, at the same time, they supported this systematic destruction of the Russian already quite weak institutions like the media, the parliament, trade unions, opposition political parties. They just laughed that because they had this access, but eventually they lost this access. And I had a conversation, maybe my very last conversation with Krutykov, when he was also talking about liberal media and censorship and all that, and I asked him, evgenia, at the end of the day, don't you think that not only, say, liberal journalists lost the access to the Kremlin and couldn't do our job, but you pro Kremlin journalists, you also lost this access because at the end of the day, the Kremlin doesn't need any journalists, Iran, because they're absolutely happy with propagandists. And he agreed. He said yes. And here again, he blames the liberals, which was funny because we, I mean, for 20 plus years, we had no say in what the Kremlin was doing. But at the end of the day, all of us, pro Kremlin journalists, anti Kremlin journalists, independent journalists, we all lost because we lost with access, and we lost to say we couldn't actually influence things in the country. And my biggest fear, that some public intellectuals who now think it's okay to support very questionable things proposed by the administration because they would have his access and they would have an opportunity to influence they actually might be in the wrong. At least that is what our example of Putin's Russia tells us.

[Erica Monahan]

Thank you. You know, I don't want to. I want to ask you as well, before maybe, if I could, if you'd allow me two more questions or three. Tell us about. Tell us about your decision to leave. Why, when? What was the catalyst for you to leave?

[Irina Borogan]

We have been to the moment we decided to leave the country. We had been writing about the Russian security services for 20 years, and for this period there were many times when we were in danger. We were interrogated by the security services, we were pursued by the security services, we were prosecuted. And many times we just feel that we are in physical danger because the Russian security services are very brutal. That's not only they can put you in prison, but they also can use you, can physically hit you. But always we decided to stay in Russia because it was a risky game, but we thought that we could get out.

[Andrei Saldatov]

And we did get away with it.

[Irina Borogan]

Get away with that. So I'll say it again, it always been risky and it was tricky, but we thought that we can get away with that. And we always did. Until the moment when Andre got her.

[Andrei Saldatov]

Ah, you mean this story?

[Irina Borogan]

Until the moment Andre gets this letter.

[Andrei Saldatov]

Yeah. It was spring, summer of 2020, when all of a sudden we got an announcement from the Russian agency which is in charge of his young as a media licenses in Russia, you need to have a license if you are a media, even if it's just a website. And we got our license back in 2002 probably and long forgot about it. So you had this license and it cost you nothing, you just have it. All of a sudden, in 2020 we got this message that the license of our website Argentur RU was cancelled by this federal agency. And out of curiosity, we decided to check the reasons. And usually the reasons provided by the government is something is wrong with your paperwork or whatever. But in this case, the reason for canceling the license was the death of the editor. The thing is that the editor is me. And I felt a bit confused because I felt very much alive. And I didn't get any. Really didn't get either. What actually did it mean?

[Irina Borogan]

I got it right. I said, we have to go, we have to go away, we have to run.

[Andrei Saldatov]

Yes. And we all.

[Irina Borogan]

That's really dangerous.

[Andrei Saldatov]

Yes. And I felt really, really nervous. So we decided to ask our sources and contacts inside of the agencies and to understand actually what does it mean. And we were told, yes, that Irina's feeling was right. And at the end of the day, we had only two weeks to pack and leave and we left in. Yes, in September 2020.

[Erica Monahan]

Oh, and what has your father's path been? Who helped you launch or. Or you know, supported Alentura Ru?

[Andrei Saldatov]

Well, as I said, he started his career as a. He was a nuclear physicist, physic by. By training. But his. His physicists, excuse me, he was a nuclear physicist by training in the 1970s and 1980s. And at some point he was sent to D. To Copenhagen, where he very first time he saw background local networks. And he got really fascinated by the opportunities the computer networks could give you. So he went back to the Soviet Union and lobbied really hard to open the very first line of communication between back then the Soviet Union and the West. And that's how the Russian Internet started. So he started as the first Internet service provider, and he was very prominent in this field. At some point he was named as the father of the Russian Internet. And probably you remember that there was a moment, a very short moment when we had another president, not Putin was Mitry Medvedev. And Dmitry Medvedev, as we all remember, was very fond of the Internet. To support that, he went to the Silicon Valley and he launched his own Twitter account and all of that. So he believed, I mean Medved Medvedev, that it would be good to have someone like my father in his government to support this image of Medvedev's government as an Internet savvy government. So my father became deputy Minister of Communications for several years. But already by 2009, it was clear that Russia was heading into a very strange direction. There was this strange idea of digital sovereignty, that everything we use on daily life on the Internet should be made in Russia. My father was not a big fan of that. So he left the government. Several years went by, and after the annexation of Crimea, the Kremlin approached him and asked to do several things. He said no. Then he was approached again. And at that point the government got really serious about nationalization of the Internet infrastructure of the country. And because my father, as I said, had started it, so he controlled several important parts and elements of the national Internet infrastructure, again, he said no, foolishly. So the criminal investigation was launched against him in 2019, a year before we left. And last year, all of a sudden, he was sent to prison. So he spent a year in prison in very difficult conditions. And he was already 73 years old. @ some point he was forced to spend the night on the floor in a cell with 40 other people because there were no beds available. And it was really difficult for all of us. But the good thing is out of his horrible story, but he was released in August, so now he feels okay. Now he's free and he's okay.

[Erica Monahan]

It is chilling to contemplate the sacrifices and the costs that so many in Russia have had to pay for trying to, you know, for proceeding according to conscience or for, in your case, doing independent journalism. So I think I'll wrap up there and I want to. I want to encourage the listening audience to get yourselves a copy of Our Dear Friends in Moscow and just to read this riveting portrait of, you know, the last two decades from the perspective of both media and people that have portraits of people that have drifted towards the state line and away from it. It's deeply fascinating and I want to thank you both for your courage and your work. And continuing to report it is you set an inspiring example.

[Andrei Saldatov]

Thank you very much.

[Irina Borogan]

Thank you very much, Erica. It's very kind of you.