The blurb made me think this would be a fascinating book, one that explained how intellectual Russians can survive and find their place in today's Russian society, how they can close their eyes to the war in Ukraine or even embrace it. That was a book I definitely wanted to read.

That was not this book, however. This is mostly a personal account of two journalists' professional life and friendships in Moscow during Putin's two decades in power, combined with a summary of the most important political developments of the time.

It takes well over half of the book to get to the Georgian war of 2008, the occupation of Crimea occurs 75% into the book, and the large scale invasion of Ukraine starts at 82%. The epilogue with a couple of mentions of discussions with old friends remaining on the other side of the barricade is just a few pages.

This is probably an interesting book for somebody who doesn't know very much about Russian political developments during the last 20 years, but it was not the book I had hoped it would be.