Our Dear Friends in Moscow or What Happened to Moscow’s Public Intellectuals in Putin’s Russia?

A book discussion with Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan
In their new book, Our Dear Friends in Moscow: The Inside Story of a Broken Generation (2025), investigative journalists Borogan and Soldatov tell the grippling story of a group of young reporters, who came of age in the years leading to the rise of Putin. The book is about the choices that that their friends and colleagues in Moscow ended up making – to resist or to compromise, to go into exile or to stay.
 
Andrej Soldatov
is a Russian investigative journalist in exile, who is co-founder and editor of Agentura.ru, a watchdog that monitors the activities of the Russian secret services. He is co-author, with Irina Borogan, of The New Nobility (2010), The Red Web (2015), and The Compatriots (2019). Soldatov has been on Russia’s wanted list since 2022.

Irina Borogan
is a Russian investigative journalist in exile and co-founder and editor of Agentura.ru. Borogan has chronicled the Kremlin’s campaign to take control of civil society and strengthen the government’s security powers under the pretext of fighting extremism. She is co-author, with Andrei Soldatov, of The New Nobility (2010), The Red Web (2015), and The Compatriots (2019).