‘Russians are fleeing their country in droves’. That’s how Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, partners in life and journalism, sum up in seven words one of the many tragedies of Russia, from which they too have fled – further than most, to Britain. Had they stayed, Soldatov at least would be in jail, charged with spreading ‘fake news’ – or, as he puts it, ‘contradicting the state narrative’. An arrest warrant was issued against him in April, and in May, he was put on an international wanted list. A trial – in absentia – is expected in October.

Soldatov and Borogan are part of an exodus larger than any since the Bolshevik Revolution. This week, Putin’s nuke-rattling and troop-mobilisation announcement triggered a massive spike in searches for one-way flights out of the motherland. Yet already, since the beginning of the war, former Soviet states with more or less welcoming governments have been flooded: 25,000 to Georgia in the first two weeks of the Russian invasion on 24 February, 6000 a day to Armenia and by the end of March, 60,000 to Kazakhstan.

These refugees, Soldatov and Borogan wrote in the journal Foreign Affairs, had for the most part ‘three things in common: they have a high level of education, are from the bigger cities and have a liberal outlook…for those left behind, the hollowing out of civil society means they may be stuck with a country that is culturally impoverished, paranoid and hard line.’ Not quite the match of the fate of millions of Ukrainians striving to halt an attempt at annihilation; yet worse in one respect: Russia, whenever and however the war ends, will be riven, its politics wholly unpredictable, clamped into a dictatorship, a danger not just to its neighbours but to the world.

As the regime’s despotism increased, and the few oppositionist news centres – TV Dozhd (Rain), Radio Moskvy, Novaya Gazeta (the New Newspaper) – were closed, Russia’s main liberal commentators have felt the intensity of the Kremlin’s hatred of their independence and intellectual capacity.

Increasingly, with despair in their hearts, they too have returned the hatred, seeing in Putin’s Kremlin only further ruination of their country and its citizens. They write or broadcast for foreign journals and websites. Their commentary is infused with contempt for their government, fear for Russia’s future, desperation that their fellow countrymen and women have tended to support the hated president, in what Andrei Kolesnikov called ‘a version of the Stockholm syndrome, sympathising more with their own captor (Putin) than with his other victim’.

Kolesnikov had been a senior member in the Moscow office of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace until it was ordered closed in April: in that same month, he noted that 81 per cent of those polled by the independent Levada Centre approved of the ‘special operation’ (invasion) in Ukraine, and 83 per cent approved of Putin. In the bitterest of passages, he wrote that ‘in the eyes of Ukrainians — and much of the rest of the world — Russians themselves are now behaving like fascists…they are making themselves in the very image of the Germans in the wake of World War II. This is what Putin has done: Russia is no longer on the winning side of the Great Patriotic War; it is no longer on the right side of history.’

In London, another Russian, Arkady Ostrovsky, Russian Editor of the Economist, expanded on the fascism charge, arguing that the old designation of a ‘mafia state’ had given way to a form of fascism with its necessary attendants, humiliation, frustration and jealousy, whose source is ‘not defeat by foreign powers, but abuse suffered by the people at the hands of their own rulers. Deprived of agency and fearful of the authorities, they seek compensation in an imaginary revenge against enemies appointed by the state.’

Kirill Rogov a political scientist turned columnist, sees a ‘deepening and more radical isolation from the West, launched on the basis of patriotic mobilization (which)…led to a further weakening of those elites who have one foot in the West’. The Yeltsin period had introduced a ‘system of competitive oligarchy’, where the suddenly very rich men of the first wave of oligarchs ‘were quick to accumulate property and capital, and buy up media, politicians and bureaucrats, thereby capturing the state’.

Putin, from the beginning of his presidency in 2000, threatened the oligarchs with dispossession and worse if they continued to mess with politics (all, apart from Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who served ten years in prison camps for his defiance, obeyed), then proceeded to build what he called a ‘power vertical’, a ‘classic, personalist authoritarianism’. Putin had succeeded in creating a system in which the wealthy and the pro-Kremlin elite are more insulated from their society than in any liberal-capitalist democracy – and much more determined to keep their power and money.

Maxim Trudolyubov, with two decades of combative journalism behind him, is the most sombre and deterministic of all, writing of his fellow Russians – ‘we live in a closet stuffed with skeletons’. He means that the tortured and torturing past of the country had never been adequately confronted; old ruling class habits didn’t die hard, they didn’t die at all, and thus the manner and pitilessness of the use of power continued – ‘the past is now being reproduced in Ukraine. The Russian state’s historical crimes have never been put on trial and the perpetrators have never faced a day in court. (The war) has been made possible by the impunity of the Russian leadership.’ Elsewhere, he wrote of Putin that ‘it seemed that he seriously believed he had psychological and moral superiority over contemporary Ukraine — over the entire free world… He poisoned himself with his own lies.’

Soldatov and Borogan differ from other leading Russian commentators in this: they decided in the late 1990s that they should do something which no other Russian journalists were attempting, bold then and impossible to do today by anyone living in Russia.

‘We wanted’, Soldatov told me, ‘to paint a proper picture of the security services’. Where other commentators typically take a broad sweep over society, politics and the economy, they focus on what they believe is, if not the beating heart, then the snarling guardian of the Russian people – on duty, in some form, since Ivan the Terrible in the 16th century

The names tell much of the story. The KGB, or Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezapasnosti, the Committee for State Security, had an ideology, and a master: state communism. The KGB was a committee, under the control of the communist party and run for 15 years, from 1967 to 1982, by Yuri Andropov, with a history of savage repression of the Hungarian uprising of 1956; a less bloody but as complete a crushing of the Czech uprising of 1968; and the development of psychiatric hospitals for dissidents, classifying opposition as mental derangement.

The FSB – the Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezapasnosti or Federal Security Service – had no overriding ideology, no ideal which it could, however cynically, invoke. The FSB, which Putin briefly led (1998-9) and partly purged, was conceived in the Boris Yeltsin presidency as a service under the law, on the model of western secret services. In the Putin era, though it had lost the ideal of socialism, it found a new mission. Soldatov says that ‘the most important thing about the KGB was that it was under party control. The FSB and other security agencies now answer to Putin, and to his decisions.’ Soon after he took the presidency, Putin, at a gathering of senior KGB officers, addressed the gathering and ‘joked’ that they had successfully completed their mission. They were in control of the state.

The couple met first in the late 1990s when both were reporters for the newspaper Sevodnya (Today). Borogan was covering IT, Soldatov business, ‘writing about the new printer coming on the market soon became quite boring’.

Agreeing that the secret services needed forensic reporting, they launched a website, Agentura.ru, and began looking for leads and to construct charts of power – who was in charge of the many FSB divisions, were they growing in power or losing it, to what were they most primed to respond, and repress.

In 2011 when their book The New Nobility – that is, the leading members of the secret services and thus of the state – came out, mass protests were triggered by well-grounded suspicions that the legislative elections, which returned Putin’s party, United Russia, were deeply flawed. They continued over 2012, and died away in 2013 – but the fear of a revolt from below, the flight of Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovich, Moscow’s man in Kyiv, after mass uprisings in 2014, the long-simmering resentment that the West had allowed Nato to come up to Russian borders meant, no more Mr Nice Guy: the West was an enemy, with West-influenced enemies – ‘foreign agents’ – within.

On their website, in interviews and articles, in later books as The Red Web, (2015) on the growing expertise of the Kremlin and its supporters to hack and distort foreign communications; and in 2019, The Compatriots, a 19th and 20th century history of Russians in exile, and the harassment many faced, the two became what they have remained – the first port of call for deeply researched judgments on the state of the agencies.

The couple do not confine themselves to pointing out the repressiveness of the agencies, they also criticise their ineffectiveness.

Soldatov and Borogan believe that, even if strongly backed by a president who was a KGB officer, the FSB has been failing in the most important areas – in seeing the coloured revolutions of the 2000s coming, in foreseeing or dealing with acts of terrorism and, of course, in understanding Ukrainian politics and society.

The two continue to use their sources and contacts to chart the movements within the Russian administration, and the agencies. More and more of the FSB divisions are now being drawn into the Ukrainian war; the service is becoming more militarised, with soldiers now able to join; a campaign against western drugs has begun, with doctors who prescribe them investigated and threatened with imprisonment – a move that prompts the memory of Stalin’s campaign against Jewish doctors before his death in 1953 (now they don’t have to be Jewish). Lawyers who defend dissidents are harassed — and, like many other professionals, leave when they can find another place to live.

When Soldatov and Borogan set out to understand better the 21st century versions of organisations which had been at the centre of Russian power, both under the Tsars and the Communist Party, for centuries, they had to have some nerve, even in times when dissent in the media was grudgingly tolerated. They had to make a kind of working assumption, common to all opposition figures and organisations, that they were living in a country which had the capacity to be ‘normal’, with robust representative institutions, diverse and active media, and a civil society.

The risks are immense. Think of Boris Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister in the early Yeltsin period, strong-willed, swashbuckling, loud in his distaste for Putin’s regime, hyperactive in organising opposition – murdered in February 2015 within a stone’s throw of the Kremlin walls. Or Alexei Navalny, also with no obvious fear in organising protests, exposing the ‘nobility’s’ vast corruption, proposing himself as an alternative leader – nearly fatally poisoned by the FSB, sentenced in March to nine years in a hard labour camp.

Though in the UK, they know they are not invulnerable. Soldatov says ‘of course, I need to think more about security measures’. Yet they are more concerned for the safety and security of their sources, now that the hounds of the FSB have been loosed.