Cross Word

From Kremlin Access to Exile: Surviving Putin's Media Purge

• Michele McAloon • Season 4 • Episode 139

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Contact Michele at her website https://www.bookclues.com

Andrei Soldatov shares his firsthand account of Russia's transformation under Putin, explaining how the free press was systematically dismantled and the country became increasingly isolated from the West. His powerful narrative weaves personal stories of journalists who either resisted or succumbed to the system, providing crucial context for understanding Russia's invasion of Ukraine and its hostile stance toward America.

Check out Andrei Soldatov's and Irina Borogan's website 

https://agentura.ru


Michele McAloon:

Hello, you're listening to Crossword, where cultural clues lead to the truth of the word, and my name is Michele Mcaloon, your host. I have a really good book, really interesting and, I would say, a very timely book. It is Our Dear Friends in Moscow. It is Our Dear Friends in Moscow the Inside Story of a Broken Generation. It is written by Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogon. It is a great encapsulation of what has happened in Russia under Putin, from the free press, from the liberal media, from what's happened to the intelligentsia in Moscow, in St Petersburg, and very much explains what is happening today and their attitudes about the Ukrainian war, about their relationship with the West. So it is a fascinating interview told and we get a chance to speak to Andre Saldadov. I really encourage you to listen to the interview, buy this book, read the book, because it reads well and it is well worth your time. If you want to find out more about me, contact me through my website at bookcluescom, and I can be found on x michelemcaloon1. All right, happy listening. God bless, guys.

Michele McAloon:

We have a really interesting book today. It is called Our Dear Friends in Moscow the Inside Story of a Broken Generation and it is written by two authors, andrei Soldatov and Irina Baragon, published with Public Affairs, which is part of the Hatchet Book Group, which Basic Books comes from Hatchet Book Group, so we really like the Hatchet Book Group here. But it is an incredible story of how, basically, the crushing of the liberal media in Russia and Andre was a he was part of the story. He was a witness to what has happened, to the closing down and the isolation of Russia, and this has happened to him personally and he is here to talk to us and to tell us his story. Andre, welcome, thank you for having me, Michelle.

Michele McAloon:

Andre, it is, I tell you we're talking to at kind of a precipitous point of history, especially today is August 14th. I believe it's tomorrow that Putin and Trump are supposed to meet in Alaska. We don't know where that is going to go. We've seen now the Ukrainian war for almost three and a half years. It's not going well for the Ukrainians, it's not going well for the Russians, but it's going just a little bit better for the Russians, a little bit worse for the Ukrainians. We're anxious to see what has happened, but this has actually been. To where we are now has actually, from what I gather in your book, has been a long road that actually started in 2011, 2012. But there's backstory to that that begins in the 1990s. You are a journalist. Tell us a little bit about yourself and how you became a journalist in Russia and what a journalist in Russia meant when you were learning how to become a journalist.

Andrei Soldatov :

Well, I think the crucial moment for me personally was obviously perestroika. I was like 12, 13 years old when Gorbachev started perestroika. I was like 12, 13 years old when Gorbachev started perestroika and immediately you understood that journalists would play a really crucial role in Russian society, because part of Gorbachev's message was that we start talking about everything. We just reveal everything about Soviet past. We are ready to be very open with our people and with the world. And it had a special name, as you probably remember Glossiness, which means openness. And as a very young person, I remember what it was like when all of a sudden you got Chernobyl, a huge catastrophe on a nuclear plant in Ukraine, and how, all of a sudden, all the people around me started talking about it openly. And that was probably the very first time in, say, post-war Soviet history when you can actually talk about such sensitive problems. And then you got lots of things going on and again journalists were there writing and broadcasting about what was going on in the country and it was absolutely fascinating for me. Personally. To be honest, I cannot say that immediately.

Andrei Soldatov :

I got this idea to become a journalist because I was under well pressure from my parents and so my mother, who's a doctor, wanted me to become a doctor and my father a nuclear physicist. He wanted me to become a nuclear physicist. I felt both of them and at some point in the early 1990s I found myself standing in front of a relatively new university and checking the list of exams I could possibly pass, and that was there the Faculty of Journalism. So to be honest, for me it was almost well a pure chance, maybe a coincidence of several things. But very soon I thought no, it's probably what I wanted to do. And very soon, when I was still at my university, a friend of mine, he, brought me to this fantastic newspaper which was called Сегодня, which you can translate as Today, and it was modeled after the New York Times and the desire of the newspaper. The language they write these stories well imitated the style of the New York Times, which was absolutely fantastic for me because it was so different from the way Soviet newspapers wrote their stories and it was very factual, ironic and just really, really great. And I was so happy to become part of this team. So after that I never thought of leaving journalism.

Andrei Soldatov :

My only big challenge was what are you going to do? And initially it was about some very fancy stuff. I was assigned to write about computer technologies and that was great for a time, because in the mid-1990s imagine, it was a time of these big American corporations coming to Moscow, opening their offices and they were throwing parties, inviting journalists to some really fancy locations. I remember once I was brought to Texas, to Houston of all other places by Hewlett-Packard just to witness some unveiling of some new computer, and all the salary was great, but at some point I understood that it was actually quite boring. You just write about this stuff, about these new computers. Yes, you travel a lot and you put in a very, very like luxury hotels, but it's not really interesting.

Andrei Soldatov :

What was interesting was that the country was going through a period of big political upheaval, the Second Chechen War just started and the country went through a really horrible economic crisis of 1998. And then we got this guy, vladimir Putin, who was chosen as a successor to Yeltsin initially as prime minister, and Irina, my partner, and Makov and I. We at some point just decided that probably the topic of the Russian security services would be something which could be really, really important, which could be really, really important. We never thought, of course, that it would be that important as it is now, but, yes, around 1999, 2000,. We decided to move to cover specifically this topic to write about Russian spies.

Michele McAloon:

Okay, let me go back to a few things here with you. During the Soviet times, what was journalism? Was it basically just a mouthpiece for the government?

Andrei Soldatov :

It was two things. It was propaganda, obviously, and everybody understood that. But precisely because it was propaganda and it was sanctioned by the Kremlin, it was also extremely powerful, because if you have something written in a Soviet newspaper, for instance, if some official was attacked by a newspaper like Izvestia or Pravda, that basically means that you can forget about this guy. It would be the end of his career. And that is why there was, I would say, a big respect in Soviet society of journalists, not because they were real journalists, but because they represented power.

Andrei Soldatov :

And at some point it changed during perestroika years, because the same journalists who just yesterday were writing because they were asked by a political or party committees all of a sudden they felt that it was time for them to become independent and they developed this independent voice. But there was still this respect in Soviet society of journalists. Unfortunately, in the early 1990s the picture changed almost completely because many of these journalists who we held very high esteem, they became quite corrupt and they accepted money and it was really visible. And by the end of the decade of the 1990s it was very clear that, unfortunately, russian journalism was in a state of a really deep crisis they're not going to go back to the Soviet past, that there's going to be open journalism.

Michele McAloon:

Is that correct? Or he said something to that effect that he was going to allow for independent journalism?

Andrei Soldatov :

Yes, that was his message, but actually he was a bit more sophisticated than that. Yes, he said all the right things about support for liberal democracy and freedom of the media, but at the same time, we still had the Second Chechen War going on, and the way Putin was selling this war to the Russian population was a very nasty one. He basically what he did. He was telling the Russians that my war would be very different from the war Yeltsin conducted just five years before me, the first Chechen war. Because Yeltsin's war was lost because of journalists. So basically, putin's idea was to blame journalists in the fail-off of the Russian army in Chechnya. And Putin said look, this time it would be absolutely different. I would not allow these guys attacks in Moscow and across Russia. All of a sudden, many Russians decided that it was a good thing actually to restrain freedom of press, because journalists were helping terrorists, and Putin's ideas about censorship and restrictions actually was met with a lot of approval among the ordinary Russian people.

Michele McAloon:

Your story shows an arc of the newspapers that you move through. And these newspapers it's not so much about the newspapers, it's how these newspapers are funded through these oligarchs, through different sources of money. And as these oligarchs sort of go down or they become under Russian pressure, the newspapers begin to change or they fold. It's not just a story of journalism, it's also a story of as Putin is clamping down on oligarchs in Russia. Is that correct?

Andrei Soldatov :

Yes, that's correct, but again, maybe the real story was a bit more complicated. Because, of course, these oligarchs, they supported and funded these newspapers, not because they were paragons of free media. They wanted to have some tools at their disposal to fight among themselves and with the Kremlin. Because that was a time of privatization in Russia and we had so many struggles over who would control and own huge enterprises and like oil companies, metallurgical factories, this kind of stuff, and the oligarchs believed that they can use journalists basically as soldiers. And that was very clear not only to, say, the Kremlin, but also to the Russians. And that is why Putin was really smart when he decided to use that against journalists. Basically, his message was look, we need to do something about these journalists and about these media, because they are all of them corrupt, they do not serve any public, they just serve their masters. For them, it's better to serve the Kremlin, because it is a state, than to serve some oligarch who has had some ideas or some ambitions.

Andrei Soldatov :

That is why we need to put everything under control and again, unfortunately, it was met with some approval, not only from, say, the general public, but also some journalists weren't quite ecstatic about this idea, because we wanted to have some sort of stability in the country and back then, russian economy was not doing extremely well. The country was still recovering from a huge economic crisis, and in society and also, what is important, among intelligentsia and liberal intellectuals there was a huge demand for a strong leader. All of a sudden, pinochet, a former Italian dictator, became really, really popular in Moscow All of a sudden. It was such a huge surprise to me why, all of a sudden, all my friends are talking about Chile, why we are talking about Pinochet, this guy he killed so many people in his country why we are praising him now. And it was quite genuine, because people really wanted to find someone who would make their country great again and fix it, and they found out that Putin might be that guy.

Michele McAloon:

Well, so Putin was really kind of born of a certain populism, almost.

Andrei Soldatov :

Yes, absolutely, and I blame the way the Russian government dealt with this huge economic crisis of 1998. That was a moment when lots of people, especially in Moscow and St Petersburg, thought look, you told us, you, the West, you told us what we need to change everything in our life, that we need to learn English, change the way we do business, open all these enterprises, start living by different standards. And we did, but you cheated. We did all of that and yet we lost all our money, all our investments, because of this crisis.

Andrei Soldatov :

Something is wrong in this picture and probably it is you, because you've been always against us and it was a feeling of grievance and you can feel it in society. Next year we got this a big geopolitical crisis with the bombings NATO bombings of Belgrade, in Serbia, and all of a sudden a liberal Moscow guy started talking about Serbians and that NATO was horrible and we need to support Serbians, and it was never such a big issue before 1998, 1999. And it was very clear that people are channeling their anger and grievance against the West this way, talking about Serbian nature. So I think it was just a matter of maybe months that the Kremlin would find someone like Putin to be that guy who would be seen by the Russians as someone who can stand up against the West.

Michele McAloon:

Kind of a savior figure. That's so interesting. You just threw out two terms that I think really need to help us define for a European and an American audience, because, especially, I'm going to speak for Americans because I am an American but Russia is so foreign to us. It really is. We just don't understand a lot of the terminology. When you talk about a liberal intelligentsia in Moscow at this time, what was that? Explain that to us, I mean, because we can say liberal in the United States and we know what that is, but what was that in Moscow?

Andrei Soldatov :

In the 1990s, liberal intelligence mostly consisted of journalists, of IT entrepreneurs, of basically of intellectuals who decided to forget about their Soviet legacy and to accept the Western way of doing things, which sometimes was quite ridiculous. For instance, that was a moment when we got so many English words in Russian language, just because there were not a lot of words for the new terminology brought from the West to the country. And this liberal intelligentsia was so eager to become westernized that they just started using English words for almost everything. It was a moment when you like walk Moscow streets and you see that a lot of things are written in English, because people just wanted to westernize the city as soon as possible. And that was one thing.

Andrei Soldatov :

And there was a big deal of imitation, like, for instance, our newspaper imitated the New York Times, while people in, for instance, we got public relations industry all of a sudden, and these guys again they tried to imitate specifically Americans the way they talked. Again they tried to imitate specifically Americans the way they talked, the way they presented things. It was all about the West. It was not about liberalism per se, it was about imitating the West, and New York was the most I don't know. People got really crazy about New York, and that was very palpable. You can feel it especially in Moscow how people were keen to get at least something which would make it closer to New York. Of course, sometimes it was just a pure imitation, with no idea what actually does it mean, but nevertheless there was this big drive to make everything at least look like it was in the West.

Michele McAloon:

Interesting. I'm from Alabama. We try not to look like New York, so that's a little United States regionalism. Okay, you started off with a group of friends and this is actually one of the most interesting parts of your story, one of the most interesting parts of your story and it was five or six friends that you kind of began your journalism career with after you'd worked at Savonia and then I think, you went on to Zvestia and those are two Russian newspapers, and you would gather and we would talk. You were young, you guys were drinking, having fun, and they took very, very different paths. Even in those, paths that they diverged on are still paths that they have diverged on to include today. So we're talking over a 25-year span. Tell us a little bit about some of those personalities, because they're very emblematic, I think, of Russia.

Andrei Soldatov :

Yes, I very much hope so. That's why we chose these people. So first of all I need to explain why we moved from Svobodnaya to Izvestia. As I already mentioned, we wanted to write about Russian security services. But to write about these guys, you cannot just start writing about these guys. You need to find a way to get access and to get contacts inside, and if you are not from a family of a KGB general, it's a tough task. What we did? We understood that we need to locate a newspaper which will have that kind of access.

Andrei Soldatov :

Izvestia was that kind of paper. It's a very old Soviet brand but in the 1990s it found a way how to survive. They got two pro-Kremlin oligarchs and these two oligarchs they founded this newspaper and at the same time the newspaper enjoyed really close access to the Kremlin and it was very different from what we experienced in Svobodnaya. Svobodnaya was really independent in terms of the Kremlin. There was some access, but not this kind of access. So eventually we landed at the political department of Izvistia and the people who worked there. Again, they were very different from the kind of people we saw and worked with in Svojnye. In Svojnye it was mostly about some guys who actually didn't really do well in the Soviet times. They were all some sort of mavericks and they got their careers in journalism only because things changed and the Soviet Union collapsed.

Andrei Soldatov :

In Izvestia we are talking about people who were very proud of their Soviet families. Many of them actually were seers of very prominent Soviet families, for instance, my editor, evgeny Krutikov, who was extremely proud of being a grandson to Deputy Prime Minister under Stalin. He immediately told me this story. Even the fact that his father was sent to prison and spent a lot of years in Soviet prison didn't change his attitude that actually it's very important to belong to Soviet elite. He wanted to belong to the new Russian elite and you can say that for many of our friends in Izvestia and again, it was not only about this feeling of belonging but it was also about a big deal of nostalgia, because if you belong to something so important as a family of a former deputy prime minister under Stalin, you feel understandably quite nostalgic for the Soviet Union, because it wasn't the Soviet Union when your family enjoyed such a high position in society and of course under Yeltsin that changed.

Andrei Soldatov :

So all these guys struck us as being extremely ambitious. They also most of them they got education in history and at some point I understood that. The reason why they studied history because they wanted to have a role in Russian history. They were that ambitious, interesting, okay, and I think that's what made it so interesting for us to trace their history, what happened to them over these 25 years.

Andrei Soldatov :

All of them wanted to become part of, and to play quite a big role in Russian history. Some of them succeeded, as we know, and, for instance, one of our protagonists now is the Minister of Culture, so the other guy, he's in charge of Russian soft power operations in Belgrade, in Serbia, and so on and so forth. But again, the thing which united them was a sense of nostalgia for the Soviet Union, not because it was communism and all that, no, because the country was powerful and important and their families were powerful and important, and I think that's probably what makes it so interesting. But at the same time, it was what made them different from us, because Irina and I, our families, were not that prominent in the Soviet Union and we both understood that we couldn't become journalists in the Soviet Union, that we couldn't become journalists in the Soviet Union. So for us it does make sense to be honest, to be and to feel very nostalgic about the Soviet Union.

Michele McAloon:

Yeah, this group of people so in the beginning, so they didn't really change that much. Although they had some liberal views in the beginning, they really were kind of tried and true Soviets and they've pretty much lived out their lives that way, I think to some extent, because there is one story which fascinates me, although it is a horrible story.

Andrei Soldatov :

So one of the protagonists and one of the members of this group, her name was Svetlana Bobaeva, and she actually enjoyed the closest access to Putin himself. Right, right, yeah, part of the presidential pool, as we call it, means a group of journalists assigned to be with Putin, to accompany him in his travels across the country but also well over the world. And she was there right from the beginning and at some point she got so charmed by Putin, by this access and closeness, that she took herself not as a journalist but someone, some sort of advisor to Putin. So she advised him on several things, like on the way he needs to wear his suit, for instance, or on his tie. And you think suit, for instance, or his tie, and you think, well, probably it's not a job for a journalist, your job is to write stories. But she took it very personal that she needs to be that close to Putin and I think the journey she went through was maybe very it's the most tragic one, but at the same time, for me it's maybe the best reflection of what actually happened to our generation.

Andrei Soldatov :

As I said, she started as a journalist, being very close to Putin, washington DC, as the head of the Bureau of the Rio Novosti, which is a main Russian news agency under control of the government. These days it's part of the Russia Today network, but back then it was just a really huge state institution right in the center of Washington DC. And, thanks to her connections in the Kremlin, she was put in touch with very important people, like Donald Rumsfeld, for instance, and they were on first-name basis with him. After that, she had a position in London and again, she enjoyed this position. She loved London. And when she got back, given all these connections, all this access, all these privileges, all of a sudden she understood that well, the country was changing and not in the way she liked, and she started writing about that. For instance, right at the time when Putin decided to attack Crimea in 2014, she wrote several articles and these articles were not extremely enthusiastic about the annexation of Crimea. That these articles were not extremely enthusiastic about the annexation of Crimea, which was a big surprise to me and she attacked Russian aggression. She said that I see that in Russian society, we see an unprecedented level of aggression towards everyone, not only against Ukrainians, but also it's about the Russians ourselves.

Andrei Soldatov :

It looks like these two assignments in the US and in the UK changed her way of how she understood the way the Russian society worked, and she was supported by the Minister of Defense at the moment. He lost his position. She was also downgraded and she was sent to Crimea and, of course, it was not a very good move for her career. Just think about it. You enjoyed your life in Washington DC and London. You moved to Simferopol, which is a very tiny town in Crimea where nothing is going on, this tiny town in Crimea where nothing is going on, and you are put in charge of brainwashing the Ukrainians in Crimea, telling them that it's actually good to be part of Russia, it's not extremely interesting and you are very far from the Kremlin.

Andrei Soldatov :

And she got at some point. She got so depressed because she lost that access to the Kremlin, but she got almost insane and she wanted to find a new source of energy and of adrenaline which she lost because she lost her access to the Kremlin that she started training with special forces A woman, a very sophisticated woman, fluent in English and with really good well, not really good, but at least high-placed journalist, with a career of like 30 years, all of a sudden, training with Russian soldiers, and she trained with them for many, many years and it was getting more and more and more crazy, to be honest, and at some point, when Putin started his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, she decided to go to the war not as a journalist, but as a soldier.

Michele McAloon:

Yeah, insane, absolutely insane, absolutely insane.

Andrei Soldatov :

And when she was going through her final training, she got killed by friendly fire by a Russian soldier on a shooting range. And you think, well, fortunately she didn't have a chance to kill anyone and that was, of course, system created by Putin that first you enjoy this access to the Kremlin and then you see that the system is getting more and more brutal and aggressive. And you understand that, and she understood that, and nevertheless, you think that there is no other way but to comply and to remain in the system. And you are getting mad and you are getting more brutal and finally, the system claims your life. That's exactly what happened to her.

Michele McAloon:

Wow, so this started, I mean. So she basically started off as an idealistic reporter, a true journalist, and you just saw kind of her arc that went through the system. Yeah, absolutely fascinating. You have another guy that I think is really worth talking about just because he's so colorful. Is this Baranova? Zhenya Baranov? I think it was Baranov.

Andrei Soldatov :

Yes, so our guy Zhenya Baranov. He was always a journalist and he was a very good journalist, actually extremely brave. For instance, when he covered the Second Chechen War, his TV channel never had enough money to give him to. For instance, when he covered the Second Chechen War, his TV channel never had enough money to give him to, for instance, to get security or to get a fixer, so he was doing everything by himself, which means that you put yourself in a huge risk and it's very dangerous. But he did that and we met because he was part of this group of friends. But very soon we found ourselves together in some really difficult places, like the places of huge terrorist attacks in Russia, when, for instance, in Moscow, terrorists took hostage the entire theater. And two years later we found ourselves in Beslan where the school was taken hostage and lots of kids died. But what was absolutely fascinating about Baranov? That it was very visible how he was moving from being a very good war reporter to something very opposite to that. Already, in 2004, when we were together in Beslan and I believe we were on the same page about what was going on, because it was a huge tragedy and it was clear that, well, kids died because just burned to death because of the way the Kremlin was trying to handle the situation, and it was just absolutely horrible. And all of a sudden, baranov told me that he just heard Putin speaking and that reminded him of Stalin's speech in the first week after the Second World War for Russia started in 1941, and that he was absolutely moved by this speech. And I was Zhenya are you really serious? This guy, I mean Putin, he was not there. He just tried to avoid responsibility for this crisis for all these horrible days and only when it was over he decided to reappear and to give this horrible speech, basically blaming the West in a terrorist attack in his country which had nothing to do with reality. And you think it's fine? And you're comparing him with Stalin, who was also really, really horrible. So cannot be actually a good example of anything. What kind of reality you are living? But that's what's at the beginning of a big transformation and at some point it was getting more and more religious. And again I think it reflects what we've seen with Russian society. And now we all know that Russian Orthodox Church plays a really huge role in Russian society and it's very aggressive and fully supportive of the war in Ukraine. And again, baran Afos was an early indication of that, of a change At some point.

Andrei Soldatov :

I remember when we were assigned to go to Lebanon and to Israel to cover the war of 2006. And I asked him about, well, for his contacts in Israel, and he said, of course, I'm happy to help you, I can give you the addresses and contact details of all the priests in Israel. And I was like, well, zhenya, I'm not about the priests, it's not about the priests, it's about the war. I need contacts in the military, I need some. Maybe you have some contacts among the Palestinians. That's kind of stuff we are doing as journalists, but I'm not really interested in your priests. And he looked at me equally surprised because in his world already, the priests and monasteries were much more important than anything else. Even well, even the war was not that important.

Andrei Soldatov :

And at some point he just started making horrible documentaries, attacking, for instance, the president of Georgia, mikhail Tarkin. And he and Baranov ended as someone who invented a new propaganda language for the Russian television, which we've seen since 2014. It's a combination of aggressive of a very chaotic coverage. You don't see any logic in what you are told by a reporter, because they just throw everything at you Accusations, suspicions, some revelations and you can't make sense out of it because it's so quick and it's so dramatic. But at the end of the story you understand that the West is against you and that is the main message. And Baranov is one of the guys who invented this kind of language for the Russian TV.

Michele McAloon:

Wow, wow. All right, let's talk about your website, that Agentura. It's still up and running today. I was just on it this morning. You do have some English language translation on it and I actually machine translated a couple of it and they were good. The articles are good, but this kind of got you into some hot water, didn't it?

Andrei Soldatov :

Yes, because the idea of this website, when we launched it back in 2000, was to create some sort of watchdog of Russian security services. And the idea was that look, because now we have the Internet and it was of course we are talking about 2000, when the Internet was a very new thing maybe we can use these new means to collect information about the Russian security services. Because maybe it's come to you as a big surprise, but FSB is not only about Moscow. They have a really huge regional empire and every town and city in Russia has a local department of the FSB and it is important because these guys, they play a really key role in local politics, but also the generals who run these departments, they get promoted and at some point they might end up taking a very key position in Moscow, and that is why it's actually it is very important to understand what is going on inside and, of course, the FSB is a very secretive organization. It actually very important to understand what is going on inside and, of course, fsb is a very secretive organization. It's very difficult to understand what is going on inside. What kind of regional tribes are there, what is the power play? And we thought that if we had the internet and if we can use the internet to collect open source and also to talk to local journalists and Russian provinces and to get the information they have in one space, that would help us to create some sort of picture maybe, well, a cohesive picture of what is going on inside. And that's what we've been doing ever since.

Andrei Soldatov :

And, of course, the FSB was not extremely happy with such sort of activity. But, to be honest, because the very first time we went into some problems with the FSB was already in 2002, when the very first time the FSB opened an investigation into me and they interrogated Rina and me many times or to a prison and it was quite nasty. So because it lasts for so long, they believed that maybe it could last forever, which was obviously a huge mistake. But in 2020, things changed dramatically for two reasons. One is that in 2020, the FSB decided to charge a journalist of high treason, which was the very first time. So usually the way it worked in Russia, you could be, as a journalist, accused of disclosing state secrets, but you cannot be really accused of high treason, first of all, because you do not have security clearance, so you cannot divulge any secrets, because you are not private of these secrets You're not supposed to be. But the FSB found a way how to overcome this problem and they charged a journalist and they sent him to jail. That was a really horrible shock for the entire journalistic community in Russia and, secondly, because the Russian authorities weren't very personal about me.

Andrei Soldatov :

So, the way it works in Russia, if you have a media or you have a website, you need to have a license. This license is given by the Russian Internet Censorship Agency and they have the list of all the licenses ever issued by this agency on the website of this agency, and usually it's not a big deal. Even if you lose this license, you can try to get it back. It's mostly about bureaucracy.

Andrei Soldatov :

At some point in spring, early summer of 2020, I was told by some people that, andrey, you need to check what's going on with your license, and when I checked, I found out that the license was canceled. But the reason was really strange. As I said, usually the reasons are some bureaucracy problem, but in this case, the reason listed was the death of the editor. And I'm the editor and I looked around myself and I thought, well, I think I'm still alive. Why you actually claim that I'm already dead and I asked lots of people around some contacts inside and at some point we were just thought look guys, you have two weeks to pack and leave and we did Wow.

Michele McAloon:

Wow, wow. And I tell you, folks, when you read this book, you just you look at it and it just kind of blows your imagination, because Andre's father was one of the first in the internet to give out, you know, to give out internet addresses and IP addresses. So it's just, it's just incredible. Okay, here's a million dollar question I have for you now, and this I think this is a really important question. It's a very simple question, but it's an important question because I think there's a lot of confusion in Americans with Americans. We just don't know what are Russians thinking these days when they look at what's happening with Ukraine, when they look how the press is folded, when they see their journalists have left after Navalny, after Poloskaya, after you know, you don't want to stand next to a window if you're a Russian oligarch, because chances are you're going to go head first out of it. What is the Russian intelligentsia Now, the educated Russian in Moscow, in St Petersburg? What is their impression of all this?

Andrei Soldatov :

Well, I think, on the one hand, there is a big deal of fear, because these days, you can end up in jail for things which are absolutely innocent. For instance, at the beginning of the war in 2022, we got kids attacked by the police for having a green ribbon, because at some point, someone decided that having a green ribbon means a sign of peace. And probably probably nobody knows for sure, but that was the thinking of the Kremlin that if you have this kind of ribbon, you demonstrate against the war, and you cannot do that. So we got kids attacked in school and approached on the streets by police, and then their parents were summoned to the police stations and told that you need to talk to your kids, that you need to stop, and it was quite horrible. Now we have people who are denounced, for instance, in public transport, because they just happened to check some messages on their phones and someone standing next to them noticed that they were checking some news about Ukraine, and Zelensky was there, for instance.

Andrei Soldatov :

These days, there is a big sentiment of fear. It's not only about the usual suspects, not only about activists. We all understand that these days, anyone can be attacked. For instance, we have lots of people attacked in the government by repression because Putin at some point he understood that actually it's a good tactic just to harass everyone and that would keep them in line, even if they behave Still, it's good to give them well, to teach them a lesson that something could happen to you, even if you remain loyal. So nobody knows. Actually, where is this line now, and that is a big difference from what we had before 2022.

Andrei Soldatov :

On the other hand, unfortunately, there is a big sentiment of again grievance against the West, which is quite surprising. But the problem is that when you live in a country where your mentality is defined by the idea of uniqueness of your country and Russia is that kind of country yes, we have this feeling that the Russian civilization is unique because we have our Orthodox Church and we are different. We are so big and we are not really part of Europe, but still we are part of Europe. So it's very difficult for the Russians to understand where they are. So that's why we think we are so unique, and it also means it's coupled with the idea that Russia has been always under attack from the West. It might sound really weird for the Americans, but it is the way we are taught in our school and I remember that. And it started not with Putin, it started long before that, it started probably in the 19th century and the idea is that the Russian Empire was the only empire which was built by peaceful means, because everyone wanted to join in and that's exactly what we have in our school books, like Ukraine wanted to join in, georgia wanted to join because we provided protection. So it's a very kind of strange message and it's still there.

Andrei Soldatov :

And the other thing that we have all these stories about wars which, in the Kremlin narrative, russia never started. The idea was, russia has been always invaded by Mongols, by the Germans, by the Swedes, by the French, by the Germans again. And now we have another war and the West is against us again. And that is why people might be feeling quite unhappy with the restrictions and problems, and again fear plays a role. But at the same time they're quite angry at the West because they know that there are so many restrictions against ordinary Russians. For instance, it's very difficult to get your visa and if you move out of the country, it's very difficult for a Russian emigre to get a bank account and all of that.

Andrei Soldatov :

So all of these stories now are creating this narrative that the West actually has been always against us, no matter what we do.

Andrei Soldatov :

And, of course, immediately if you talk to someone in Moscow or St Petersburg at some point, they would say look, the Americans invaded Iraq, they were never sanctioned. They invaded Afghanistan, they were never sanctioned. Why it's only about us, why it's not about the Americans, why it's not about the British, about the French, blah, blah, blah. So they are always trying to talk about other countries and because there's no clear answer to these questions in their point of view, they think they felt betrayed. And again and that helps Putin to basically to tell them look, guys, maybe I'm not perfect, but I'm the only one who sort of uh, care about you, and you would always live in a very hostile environment where the west would be always against you. That is why we need to make our country stronger. So in a way, this sense of grievances helps Putin to strengthen his position in Russian society. So even if people feel very angry at him, they still are quite supportive of him.

Michele McAloon:

Unfortunately, Andrei, that's probably the most articulate and best explanation I've heard yet, especially because it's coming from you as a Russian. You're not an ethnic of any ethnicity, you are Russian. I'm looking at a Russian when I look at you. Yes, that's really interesting because in the United States and you know what, and I know Russia says they're at war with the West. The code word is US, it's the United States. They're not at war with France, they're at war with the United States at this point, or they're conceiving that, and the US just doesn't understand it. I mean, you want to talk about two ships just completely missing each other, and we don't understand that. You see that in our politics, you see that in our newspapers, our popular art, our culture. We don't understand that either, because we also have kind of a love me mentality. You know how can you hate the United States? You know? I mean so every nation has its own thing and that's our thing. So anyway, this has been a fascinating conversation and I really appreciate you taking so much time to talk to us about this.

Michele McAloon:

To my readers out there, I cannot recommend this book enough, especially right now. It's really important for us to understand the trajectory, the arc of Putin, how he has isolated Russia, how he has destroyed the free press and what Russians actually think. You know what. We cannot be ignorant of this. We cannot live in blissful, idiotic ignorance. If we're going to understand our place, our position in the world, our politics, what our politics need to do, I encourage you to get educated and to talk to your representatives. That's who we are as Americans. If you don't like what you see, write your representative and tell him that you support Ukraine, because we support Ukraine here. Andre, love to check back with you in the future on the state of things. Please tell Irina we said hello and really, really enjoyed your book.

Andrei Soldatov :

Thank you very much, Michel e. Yeah, thank you.