‘The choice was prison or exile’: journalists who fled Russia publish grim portrait of Putin

At 6am on 29 June 2021, the Russian journalist Roman Badanin was woken by a knock on the door of his family’s Moscow apartment. “Come quickly, someone has scratched your car in the courtyard,” a voice shouted from outside. As he opened the door, masked men pushed their way in.

Across the city, a similar raid was happening at the home of Badanin’s colleague Mikhail Rubin. The masked men were officers of the FSB, the Russian intelligence service, instruments of the “climate of fear and violence” that the journalists say Vladimir Putin has imposed on Russia in their forensically detailed biography of the Russian president.

The Tsar in Person is almost 800 pages and has won the Grand Prix Strasbourg, a French literary award, whose jury said it read like a “spy novel” and praised the “courage and commitment” of the authors during decades of investigating reporting.

For Badanin and Rubin, the dawn raids were a warning. As founders of the independent media project Proekt, specialising in investigative journalism, both men had been threatened, interrogated, labelled traitors and foreign agents, banned from news events and had offices searched. Other colleagues had not been so lucky: several had died suddenly or in unexplained accidents or seemingly random attacks.

Rubin told the Guardian: “The first time we were threatened was in 2019 when we published an investigation into the chief of Putin’s propaganda operation. A Kremlin official warned me the consequences might be scary. Security agents visited my parents and asked them why I, their son, was selling out his country, betraying Russia.”

After the FSB agents’ dawn raid, Rubin discovered his passport placed carefully on a table. “It was a message. If they’d taken it, I wouldn’t be allowed to leave the country, but they wanted me to leave so they put it where I would see it,” he said. “At the time I didn’t plan on leaving. I didn’t want to overthink the danger because I thought they were just trying to stop me working.”

Less than three weeks later, the Kremlin declared Proekt an “undesirable” media outlet. “I left Moscow the next morning,” Rubin said.

Badanin, who was on holiday with his family in Morocco, decided it was too dangerous for him to return. “The choice was prison or exile and I didn’t want to go to prison.”

Their book, so far published only in Russian and French, charts the rise of Putin from an unremarkable clerk and undercover KGB agent at St Petersburg city hall to the Kremlin, where he has clung to power since 2000.

It is not the first biography to portray the president and his circle of cronies as cruel and corrupt, but the devil is in the encyclopaedic detail. Badanin and Rubin, both former Kremlin-accredited “pool” journalists, have 40 years of investigative journalism between them and have conducted hundreds of interviews to produce a grim portrait of Putin.

They depict him as a modern-day tsar, without ideology or convictions, a dictator capable of “limitless cruelty” who sees himself as above morality and laws. Rivals and opponent, or simply those who have become inconvenient, meet unexpected ends in accidents, crashes and falls, or are poisoned with toxins and radioactive particles causing agonising deaths.

“These pages are the result of war and repression, of exile and the death of some of those close to us, the suffering of friends thrown in prison,” the pair write. “We hope it will contribute to destroying the circumstances that have made all this misfortune possible and defeat the person who did this with his own hands.”

It is also the story of Russia from the end of the Soviet Union to today. Badanin says the book is aimed at young Russians who have no idea what their country was like before Putin took power. Unsurprisingly, it is banned by the Kremlin.

Badanin told Le Monde: “We’re also targeting audiences abroad, where many myths about Putin are circulating. There’s no need to invent myths about Putin. Let the facts reveal the truth about him and his system.

“The Kremlin leader has no ideology. The war in Ukraine has made this clear: this war is not an extension of his ideas, it is merely a means of staying in power.”

Today, even thousands of miles from Moscow, neither journalist feels entirely safe from what they call “Putin’s death squads” dispatched to murder dissident Russians abroad to demonstrate the Kremlin’s long arms.

Last year, FBI agents turned up at Badanin’s California home to warn him they had information that he was at risk of an attack “by foreign special services”.

“I feel a little bit safer here than in Europe, but not completely safe,” Badanin said.