By Andrei Soldatov, Irina Borogan
It was the year 2000, and a group of journalists met at Izvestia, the Russian daily newspaper. Putin had just been elected president, and the country was in the middle of the Second Chechen War. The group included Sveta Babayeva, a reporter in Putin’s press pool.

Babayeva, a fierce, miniature blonde, was assigned to cover the day-to-day activities of the new Russian president. She adored Putin, and he seemed to like her too — enough for her to have a photo of the two of them standing side by side that helped with the traffic police when she was stopped for speeding, which she frequently was.  

It was about 6:00 pm, Moscow’s rush hour. There weren’t enough chairs in the office of Evgeny Krutikov, Izvestia’s head of politics, so those without sat on the wide windowsill. It was another sunny and warm summer evening, and, as always at this hour, there was a bottle of Bushmills on Krutikov’s desk. Suddenly, a glass window shuddered violently. There was a loud explosion outside. 

We rushed to the windows in the corridor overlooking Pushkin Square. Gray smoke was rising above the exit from an underground passage connected to a metro station next to the famous monument to Alexander Pushkin, about 300 feet from the Izvestia building. 

Krutikov looked at us, but we were already running to the elevators. Our previous job had been covering crime, including terrorist attacks, and we knew where we needed to be. 

The underground station had exits on several corners of the square, and two minutes later, when we approached the closest, men and women were emerging, their clothes bloody, looking shocked and confused. It appeared the explosion had taken place inside the passage. 

We talked to witnesses and rescue workers, trying to figure out what had happened. The square, always busy with people, as it was a popular place for Muscovites to meet up, was filling with police officers. 

Irina’s red jacket was the only reason Andrei didn’t lose sight of her in the hubbub. The underground passage was lined with small shops with glass front showcases. From the look of the wounded, it was clear that this glass, shattered by the explosion, had added to the devastation. 

Many people were bleeding. A tall, thin teenager was wandering in the square. There was blood on his face and arms, but he was not injured. He was naked but for his blue underpants, socks, and shoes. The shock wave, enforced by the closed space of the underground passage, had stripped his clothes off. 

Irina started talking to him. His name was Igor, and he turned out to be a good witness. He remembered the explosion, the panic, and the people around him in vivid detail. As the sun set and it began to get chilly, Irina gave him her red jacket. 

Seven people had died on the spot, and six more died later in hospitals. More than 100 were injured to varying degrees of severity. The masterminds and perpetrators of the attack were never identified. 

The day after the attack, President Putin went to Pushkin Square to lay flowers. Dressed all in black, he looked visibly shocked. Moscow hadn’t seen any terrorist attacks for almost a year, and Putin had built his public image on bringing stability and order, at least to the capital. The return of domestic terrorism suddenly reminded carefree Muscovites that the war in Chechnya was still ongoing. 

It looked as if Putin was doomed to the same fate as his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, tortured by never-ending instability, and all kinds of catastrophes and crises. And the last thing Putin wanted was to become a second Yeltsin.

That day, we learned from our colleagues that a young girl who had died at the square worked as a secretary at Moscow News, a newspaper with offices across the square from Izvestia. 

Her death forced us to consider that any of us could have been walking along that passage at the time of the explosion. We were talking about her unfortunate fate in Krutikov’s office when Babayeva burst in. She was visibly angry. 

“Those fucking policemen!” 

“Sveta, calm down,” Krutikov said. Babayeva was famously short-tempered. 

“They didn’t let me drive to the Izvestia parking lot from Tverskaya yesterday! I showed them my Kremlin pass and it had no effect!” 

It became clear to us that Babayeva was talking about the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attack, complaining that the police hadn’t lifted the cordon for her beloved Suzuki SUV, which she wanted to park just 300 feet from the site of an explosion. 

Babayeva obviously lived in a different world. 

Three days later, Putin met in the Kremlin with his security chiefs. They were discussing the investigation into the attack on Pushkin Square when, roughly 1,300 miles north of Moscow, the nuclear submarine Kursk, after an enormous explosion, sank to the bottom of the Barents Sea. 

Most of the crew were killed instantly, but 23 made it to an undamaged compartment and locked themselves in. They were now sending SOS signals, hoping for salvation. 

The country learned of the explosion two days later, on August 14. By that time, Putin had already left Moscow, but instead of heading north, where the navy was conducting a rescue operation, he went in the opposite direction — to Sochi, his beloved resort on the Black Sea — on vacation. 

It was a planned trip — a holiday combined with meetings with foreign leaders. As always, Babayeva accompanied Putin as part of the president’s press pool. 

In Sochi, Babayeva did her usual job and sent Krutikov her dispatches about Putin’s daily routine. “Under the Sochi sun, the president quickly got tanned and even slightly burned,” she wrote. “For two days, Putin actively mastered new sports: water skiing and a jet ski. He starts off at ‘third speed,’ scaring off the Black Sea fish and forcing the guards to rush after him.” 

Babayeva did add a few words to her dispatch about the Kursk disaster, though: “Every two hours, Putin was briefed about what was happening with the submarine in the Barents Sea. They say that Putin was very worried; he knows (or should we say knew?) the commander of the Kursk personally.” 

To our amazement, Izvestia published her report: when the country was talking of nothing but the dying sailors, the newspaper closest to the Kremlin ran a story of what a good time Putin was having in the Black Sea resort. The image of a tanned Putin being briefed about the sunken sub between swims and waterskiing haunted us for a long time. 

Once Putin’s holiday finally ended, Babayeva returned to Moscow. She dropped by Krutikov’s office and casually mentioned that Putin had gone through a hair transplant procedure in Sochi, and that was why he hadn’t been seen in public for some time. Neither she nor Krutikov thought it worth writing about. Babayeva sounded very protective of the new president, and her bosses at the paper were understanding. 

It astonished us. The president of Russia had taken time off for an elective cosmetic surgery during a national emergency, yet our newspaper found nothing exceptional enough about this to share it with the readers. We began to get the feeling that we were not going to last long at Izvestia. 

Indeed, we left the paper not long after that, as did most of our friends. Our paths diverged — we kept reporting about Russia’s security services, and Babayeva remained close to the Kremlin. 

In the 2000s and 2010s, she had a spectacular career, enjoying support from some of the most powerful people around Putin, including Sergei Ivanov, then the minister of defense. 

And yet despite her proximity to power, Babayeva remained astonishingly open-minded: in 2007, she published a long article about Russian ideology. She claimed that there was an ideological vacuum in mid-2000s Russia, and that this was why “glamor” was flourishing in some classes of society, while motiveless aggression was omnipresent in others. She acknowledged Putin’s focus on traditional values but claimed they were “not enough for an open, global, information society.” Moreover, such a traditional focus would slow down the development of society rather than pushing it forward. Her skepticism extended to the role of the Church. 

The article didn’t hurt her career: she got a stint in London as head of bureau for RIA Novosti, Russia’s propaganda outlet, and then in Washington, DC, from 2008-2012.  

But when she got back to Moscow, it was the aftermath of Moscow’s mass protests against Putin’s return to the Kremlin as president, and the mood in the country had changed considerably. RIA Novosti, the agency she had worked for, had experienced a traumatic purge when the Kremlin demanded it take a more aggressive stance on Ukraine. 

Babayeva moved to lead Gazeta, a big online media outlet. Gazeta enjoyed some limited freedom, and Babayeva’s main backer in the Kremlin, Sergei Ivanov, was head of Putin’s presidential administration. Babayeva got back into the habit of regularly dropping by his office in the Kremlin, seeking his advice, and also his protection.  

And surprisingly perhaps, she didn’t share the widespread enthusiasm about Crimea being absorbed into Russia.

Two months after Crimea’s 2014 annexation, she described Russia’s high emotions about Crimea as a “crazy, energetic exaltation” that could open something in the nation, deep down, adding that from those depths, something terrible could emerge.  

In post-Crimea Moscow, where the test of a writer’s patriotism was obligatory condemnation of the West, her column did not seem especially patriotic.   

Two years later, she was forced to resign from Gazeta when her backer Ivanov lost his position as head of Putin’s presidential administration. It was a huge blow, but Babayeva had spent too much time around the Kremlin to be thrown out completely. As a consolation, she was given a position as adviser to the head of Russia Today, a state propaganda monster that now included the TV channel broadcasting abroad and the former RIA Novosti.  

The media behemoth was now fully engaged in promoting the Kremlin’s increasingly belligerent message about Ukraine and the West. 

But Babayeva was getting desperate. As adviser, she had no real job. She started to look for adventure, turning to sports. She constantly raised the stakes: first, it was horse racing, followed by shooting various weapons types on a range. She began sending her friends photos of posing in military fatigues and participating in drills with special forces soldiers. 

In 2019 she accepted a position as head of the RIA bureau in occupied Crimea at the headquarters in Simferopol — a dusty provincial town in the middle of the peninsula with a population of roughly 300,000 — and moved there. Her new job was to tell Russians how great life had become in the annexed peninsula. 

When the all-out invasion started, Babayeva was living in Crimea. She was about to turn 50, which was difficult to believe, given how fit, tanned, and energetic she seemed. She had bought a flat in Crimea, where she lived with her husband, and her chauffeur drove her to the meetings that she loved to arrange, either in palaces built by Russian aristocrats at the Black Sea coast, or in luxury hotels.

But the mild climate and sunshine of the occupied peninsula couldn’t soften the bitterness of her exclusion from Moscow. 

The adrenaline rush and sense of power Babayeva had once gotten through her closeness to Putin, she now sought in special forces training. She had always been fascinated by the power accompanied by violence emanating from the Kremlin, so she sought out power in the most straightforward place — among special forces instructors. 

She crawled through snow; she shot targets and did martial arts; climbed rocks; and began training in knife fighting with men twice her size. She became a firearms instructor and took part in the selection of special forces soldiers for the crimson beret — awarded to a Russian spetsnaz soldier only after he has gone through a grueling test that includes a brutal 12-minute sparring session with three soldiers. On her Facebook page, Babayeva posted photos of herself wearing camouflage, standing with a gun in the middle of a group of men, alongside the photos of her with Kremlin officials. 

Still, she was in a kind of limbo. It seemed that she had no idea what she was going to do next. Her friends in Moscow heard her talking about starting a new career — leading a private security company, maybe — but then she said she felt too old for that. 

The all-out invasion offered a chance for desperate people. 

Babayeva told her friends she wanted to go to war. She was thinking of becoming a voenkor — a pro-Kremlin correspondent embedded with the troops. To her husband, she admitted she had begun to think about joining the army — as a soldier, with a weapon in her hands.  

In late August 2022, she texted her former editor at Izvestia that she couldn’t find any meaning in her life. In October, when she texted him again, she sounded desperate and asked for advice. “You’re smart . . . Not urgent. Text me (SB).” 

They never had a chance to speak. Ten days later, the news broke Sveta Babayeva was dead, killed in what was described as an accidental shooting at a Crimean range. In May 2024, an arms instructor at the facility admitted to a court that he was guilty of involuntary manslaughter in her death. 

At least she didn’t kill anyone in Ukraine.  

Sveta Babayeva had been a key player in Putin’s propaganda machine, from his advent to power to the start of the war in Ukraine. 

In the end it was Putin’s system, built on reckless violence, that claimed her life.

Our Dear Friends in Moscow, The Inside Story of a Broken Generation by Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov was published in the US on June 3 and June 26 in the UK.

First published as an excerpt in CEPA

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