Our dear friends in Moscow

Two of Russia's most prominent investigative journalists tell a "gripping" (Foreign Policy) story of how the hopes of their generation of optimistic Russians in the 1990s were replaced by tyranny, fear and betrayal. Dear Friends in Moscow tells the story of a group of young Russians, part of an idealistic generation coming of age in Moscow at the end of the twentieth century, with the collapse of the communist era and a future full of possibility and uncertainty. At first, the group enjoyed the freedoms of the new era, but the idea of ​​Russia joining the West and Europe in a new partnership soon began to fade. At home, the economy collapsed, civil war raged in Chechnya, and terrorism reached Moscow. More discreetly, the new Russian government, growing increasingly angry with the West and amassing a catalog of grievances, began to turn inward. With Vladimir Putin's seemingly endless second term as president, the country has embraced a kind of ethnic nationalism and headed toward internal and external war. This bloc was torn apart by Russia's transformation. Some fled, while others became malicious agents of an increasingly aggressive state. The status quo can no longer be maintained.