Q&A: Two Exiled Russian Journalists Explain How Their Former Friends Ended Up Working for the Kremlin

In a new book, Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov write about their Moscow milieu which collapsed as Putin launched wars at home and abroad

Authors Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov. (Credit: Konstantin Zavrazhin)

Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov are investigative journalists reporting on Russian security services living in exile in London. They are authors of a new book, Our Dear Friends in Moscow: The Inside Story of a Broken Generation. In the book, Borogan and Soldatov tell the story of a group of young Russians who began their careers as Vladimir Putin was coming to power, and ultimately ended up cooperating with the Russian state. Meanwhile, Borogan and Soldatov found that their reporting on the Russian security services--both for a series of independent outlets and their own website, agentura.ru--became increasingly perilous, and they left Russia in 2020. Since 2022, Soldatov has been one of several journalists placed on Russia's "most wanted" list. Soldatov and Borogan previously co-wrote three books on Russian politics, including The New Nobility: The Restoration of Russia’s Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB. I spoke with Borogan and Soldatov last week over Zoom. Our conversation follows, condensed and edited for clarity.

Luke Johnson: Why did you decide to write the book?

Irina Borogan: In 2022, we were living in exile in London. When the war started, we were shocked and outraged. We were discussing what happened and how it could have happened. Many people in Russian society supported the full-scale invasion, and this level of support was shockingly sad for us. We wanted to find answers to why the best and brightest of Russian society supported the war. We turned to the people who used to be our friends, and sided with the Kremlin. We decided to trace their careers from the early 2000s, and ask them why they sided with the Kremlin.

LJ: Can you talk about one of these people who you used to be friends with, Petya Aropov?

Andrei Soldatov: He was a very charming Moscow intellectual when we met him 25 years ago. We became friends very quickly, and his apartment turned into a meeting place. He was fond of weird things like North Korean stamps; he also had a huge library of books devoted to China and North Korea. Back then, we believed that it was a bit strange, but he was also a historian by his training and this was his area of interest. 

We covered the terrorist attacks which took place in Moscow in the early 2000s, and we were always very critical of the way Russian security services responded. He was supportive of us. When we couldn't publish a big investigation about what went wrong with the FSB (Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation), he was the editor-in-chief of a big magazine and he published our investigation. 

But gradually things were changing, and by the time of the big Moscow protests against Putin in 2011-2012, he became much more aggressive to a level we never expected. He attacked Alexei Navalny, the protesters, and then he attacked us. He put us on a list of so-called public enemies. But the most shocking development was when he openly called for the assassination of Alexei Navalny in 2012. We couldn't comprehend it; we talked much less. 

When the full-scale invasion started, he wrote a horrible op-ed calling for a "final solution" to the Ukrainian question, which echoed the language used by Nazi Germany against Jews. Irina reached out to him and spoke with him.

LJ: What was he like?

IB: It was psychological torture. My father came from Ukraine. He grew up in Odesa Oblast, and a lot of relatives still live in the region. I'm in contact with them every night because it's usually when the bombardment happens. He was very friendly, charmingly friendly. He asked me, "Why did you disappear 10 years ago? What happened?" It's clear what happened. We spent hours and hours talking about our views about everything.

I felt charmed by him, and I felt like I was listening to the person I knew 20 years ago, until the last interview, when I asked about Ukraine. I told him that my relatives in Ukraine are suffering a lot under bombardment, and asked what he had to say about it. He said, "I'm so sorry about that. It's a tragedy. But we have to go further, and we won't stop."

LJ: That's chilling.

IB: That was the moment when I just could not talk. For several hours after, I couldn't do anything. It was so, so hard.

LJ: None of the characters you write about are ignorant. They live in London and Washington. They have all of the information available about Putin's regime, yet they chose to cooperate in one way or another with the Russian state. What do you think were their reasons for doing so?

AS: They are not brainwashed by propaganda, because they are the people who define the way that Russian propaganda works. I think there are several reasons why they decided to side with Putin. First of all, they are all a bit older than us; they were already in their 20s when the Soviet Union collapsed. It makes a difference, because some of these people are still very proud of the Soviet Union. Some of them came from elite Soviet families. They believe that Putin has given them back this lost superpower status, and also the status their families enjoyed in Russian society. 

All of them share a very dark vision of Russia. They believe that Russia cannot be ruled by democratic powers, and the only way the country might work is under a dictator. When you live under a dictator, you have two choices. Either you work for the dictator, and you can achieve things, or you are on the losing side, the outside. They are extremely ambitious; they want influence. For them, it's quite natural: the only way to do that is to work for the dictator. 

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The Russian Internet censorship agency said the editor was dead. The editor is me. It was not a very subtle message, but we checked with several sources, and decided to leave in two weeks.

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LJ: I want to talk about your own careers. In 2000, what were you doing? Where did you think Russia was going?

IB: We worked for a newspaper called Izvestia. It was close to the Kremlin, but still independent. When Putin came to power, we had little illusions about who he was, and we definitely accepted it as a very bad event for Russia. We never wrote a good word about him and his power. But we thought that he wouldn't be forever: we thought that his rule could last for 4-8 years. We were 24-25 years old, so we were mistaken.

In 2000, we set up our website agentura.ru to cover the Russian security services. Many people now say that we were extremely brave when we did this, but it was relatively free time, and we were not afraid of the Kremlin then. Our idea was to set up a website about the security services, because Putin brought many people from the security services into the Kremlin. This [site] would give us more sources in the Kremlin and in the security services. The idea was to compete with other journalists, who could just open doors in the Kremlin and could call ministers or even the prime minister.

LJ: You are working for magazines and newspapers in the 2000s. In your jobs, you are pushing editors to publish stories; they make decisions about whether to publish or not. Sometimes you quit; sometimes you are fired. Were there any turning points in this cycle of editorial self-censorship and repression?

AS: Yes, and to be honest, it happened very quickly, almost immediately after Putin came to power. At Izvestia, we lasted only for several months, because Putin started changing things very quickly. Stories which were okay to publish just a few months before became absolutely impossible to write. In the community of journalists, people talked about what would happen to the profession.

What happened was that we needed to find a new place to work. The problem was that we realized that we could only survive in a new newspaper for a few years, and unfortunately it became a new routine: you find a new place, you work there, and then something happens to your newspaper. Either the editor gets fired or the newspaper is closed. And at some point, you realize that it's about two things. First, it became very, very risky for the newspapers to have investigative journalists like us in the editorial office, because we would just make trouble for the newspaper. At the same time, the newspapers were harassed by the Kremlin more and more aggressively.  The last time we had a proper job in Moscow as staff reporters was 2009. Many of our colleagues who wrote about wars, terrorist attacks, and the security services left our profession because there was no room.

LJ: Have you had any fears about publishing articles on your own website, agentura.ru?

IB: The first time we were interrogated by the security services was in 2002 after the Moscow theater hostage crisis. Most of the 131 people who died there were killed by poisonous gas pumped in by the FSB; only six people were killed by the terrorists [who took the theater hostage]. We started investigating what happened and who was in charge of the decision to pump up gas into the theater. We published some articles, and the FSB launched an investigation against us. They came into our editorial office, grabbed some computers, and interrogated us. Many of our sources in law enforcement agencies and security services stopped talking to us because we were definitely under surveillance. This lasted about six months, and they ceased the investigation and gave our computers back. We've also been interrogated by the prosecutor's office and by the military prosecutor's office. It goes on.

LJ: When did you decide to leave Russia?

AS: We wanted to stay in the country as long as possible, and even after we lost our jobs as staff reporters in 2009 we wanted to stay in the country. We found a way to keep going by writing books. We started writing and publishing books in English in the United States, and then a Russian publisher would license and translate it. It sounds crazy to translate a book into your native language to reach your audience, but it avoids responsibility for the Russian publisher as a primary source. We published three books this way. Yes, we had problems: the FSB tried to harass our Russian publisher, but we found a way to deal with that until 2020.

In September 2020, it became clear to us that we needed to leave. In Russia, you need to have a media license if you have a website. In 2020 somebody told us that our media license got canceled. We initially thought it was not a big deal, but when we checked the reason, the reason provided by the Russian Internet censorship agency was that the editor was dead. The editor is me. It was not a very subtle message, but we checked with several sources, and decided to leave in two weeks.

LJ: Ukraine launched this surprise attack last weekend using drones that caused a lot of damage to Russian airplanes. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that the drones were hidden next to a Russian FSB office. As reporters who cover the security services, how do you think that this attack, which was 18 months in the making, could have gone undetected?

AS: The FSB is very good at prosecuting people. It's extremely brutal; it's very repressive. It's quite skillful at investigating something which already happened. If you look at the list of the sabotage operations conducted by the Ukrainian security services, in most cases, as the FSB was able to identify those who were responsible, and now they are mostly in jail.

But there are big problems in the Russian bureaucracy because it's a totalitarian state. The FSB tends to fail as an information prevention service, because it means that if you get some information on the ground which might not sound very good for your superiors, you will think about your career first, not the information. 

This was a big problem for Putin when the full-scale invasion started, because he didn't want to hear anything about problems his army might face in Ukraine. The only thing he wanted to hear was that the Ukrainian state was dysfunctional, weak and ready to collapse. The FSB agents who knew the real situation understood that it was not a really good career move to report this up the chain.

LJ: Andrei, I want to ask about your father. He is a former Deputy Minister of Communication. He was jailed in July 2024 for a two-year sentence. He is in his early 70s and quite ill. How is he doing now?

AS: He's still in jail. He is in the penal colony in the Ryazan Oblast. I'm thankful it's not Siberia; It's in Central Russia, so it's not that bad. He is in the hospital in the penal colony. He doesn't feel really great. All of our attempts to try to get him out, unfortunately have failed. And so he remains in jail.

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