Russia

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In “Our Dear Friends in Moscow. The Inside Story of a Broken Generation,” journalists Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov set out to understand how some of their fellow journalists in Russia came to accept wholeheartedly the actions of Vladimir Putin’s government.

Their friends are not uneducated Russians with no access to anything but official Russian government information. They are a group of highly educated, multilingual, well-traveled journalists who have spent their professional lives punching holes in governmental falsehoods. “What happened?” they ask. “How could we have ended up on such violently opposed sides?”

The book begins in first years of Vladimir Putin’s presidency when the two journalists are working at the newspaper Segodnya (Today), once the most popular newspaper in Russia. It ends when they are living in exile in the U.K. with Soldatov on Russia’s “most wanted” list.

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Over the years and during the country’s aggression in Georgia and Crimea; street protests; the murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya; the arrest, poisoning and murder of Alexei Navalny; Ukraine’s “Maidan” movement; and Russia’s war in Ukraine, [Russian journalists] Baranov, Akopov and Krutikov not only become more aligned with Putin’s positions, they break all the rules of journalism to promote them.

Meanwhile, their women friends are not entirely uncritical of the government, but thanks to protection in high places they have storied careers: Lyubimova rises through the ranks to become Minister of Culture; Babayeva is assigned to the enviable postings as head of RIA Novosti in London and Washington. Before finishing the book Soldatov and Borogan contact their friends and ask them to speak about their views. Some won’t or can’t respond; some are unrepentant.

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crosspostato da: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/35284114

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Army recruiters in Moscow are tricking Russians into signing military contracts with fake job listings that promise no front-line combat, the exiled news outlet Vyorstka reported Friday.

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Dozens of ads seeking “drivers, security guards and construction workers in the rear” have reportedly appeared on platforms like Avito since at least March. But according to sources in the Moscow Mayor’s Office, these listings are part of a Defense Ministry contractor campaign to inflate recruitment numbers and secure bonus payouts.

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Sources said the contractors behind the fake job listings don’t have the authority to assign recruits to non-combat roles. “It’s a lure to attract more people,” one recruiter, whose number appeared in an ad, told Vyorstka. An official called it “the most obvious 100% scam.”

Once recruits arrive at a military enlistment center on Yablochkova Street in northern Moscow, they rarely turn down the contract.

One man from Krasnodar said he was promised a 12-month contract and given a free flight to Moscow — only to discover upon arrival that the terms were indefinite. He signed anyway.

“The typical portrait of someone who has been deceived is provincial, naive, willfully ignorant, and one who has not previously served,” said a Moscow official.

After the collapse of the USSR, the archives of the security services were never opened. Society never learned the names of the KGB’s secret informants, whose numbers likely reached into the hundreds of thousands. Some of these agents continued to assist the security services, now under a new guise. Proekt investigates the grim legacy of the Leningrad KGB’s informant network-a story that began in close proximity to Russia’s current ruler, Vladimir Putin, and continues to this day. In this account, politics, intelligence agencies, sex, violence, and death intersect.

Key figures in Russia’s publishing industry, including a director of one of Russia’s leading publishers, have been detained following a series of targeted raids by law enforcement. They are facing extremism charges, though the specific nature of these charges has not yet been disclosed. Among those arrested is Anatoly Norovyatkin, the longtime distribution director at Eksmo, as well as people associated with publishing houses acquired by Eksmo in 2023: Popcorn Books, known for its focus on queer young adult fiction, and Individuum, a non-fiction publishing imprint.