The Price of a Lost Russia: A Correspondent’s Eulogy

The cold was constant, but the silence felt most profound. On Christmas Day, 1991, I stood in Moscow and watched the red hammer-and-sickle flag slither down the Kremlin flagpole for the last time. The Soviet Union was no more. Reporting for NBC Radio and Mutual News, I was a witness to the end of an empire and, we thought, the birth of a new Russia. The air, thin and sharp with winter, was thick with a dizzying mix of exhilaration and dread.

On the streets, this new era was not one of simple, unified hope. It saw a raw display of societal fracture. Near Red Square, in front of the grand Detsky Mir—the “Children’s World” department store—I saw the human cost of a collapsed system embodied in a single, tragic image: a babushka, her face a mask of quiet desperation, trying to sell a single sock on the frozen pavement. Her life savings had evaporated, and the social safety net had disintegrated, leaving only her last, threadbare possessions. At the same moment, the beneficiaries of this chaos sped past in flashy cars, their newfound wealth—often derived from arbitrage between foreign currency and citizens’ despair—on opulent display as they headed to private restaurants and casinos. This was the messy, brutal dawn of Yeltsin’s Russia: a society of explosive potential and predatory opportunism.

Reading Marc Bennetts’s searing and deeply personal memoir, The Descent, is to be violently confronted with how that chaotic promise curdled into today’s rigid and revanchist nightmare. His book is not merely another correspondent’s chronicle; it is a eulogy for a future that never was, and a raw accounting of the personal cost of investing one’s life in that dream. Bennetts, a former Moscow correspondent for The Times of London, arrived a few years after me, in the mid-1990s. He stayed for a quarter of a century, built a life there, married a Russian woman, and raised a daughter who knew Moscow as her only home.

This is the source of the book’s immense power. Bennetts writes not as a detached observer but as a man with profound equities, a stakeholder whose personal and professional life was inextricably woven into the fabric of modern Russia. His departure in 2022, following Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, was not just the end of a foreign assignment. It was an eviction from his own life.

When I was in Moscow, I was a single man, untethered and unencumbered, which allowed for a certain kind of journalistic mobility. Bennetts, however, writes as a family man. His kitchen-table dilemmas—“Did we really want to bring up our daughter in Putin’s Russia?” a question he asks on the night of former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov’s murder in 2015—are the agonizing calculations of someone trying to build a free and independent life on the shifting sands of an all-seeing, all-knowing, all-propagandizing authoritarian state.

Nemtsov was a popular and positive political figure and organizer who called for mass public demonstration to protest Putin’s 2014 war on Ukraine—the one that absorbed Crimea back into Russia. Hours after that call for protest, both Nemtsov and Russian hopes for a European-style democratic system were gunned down in the heart of Moscow. At the time, while working as a McClatchy foreign affairs columnist, I wrote that “Societies with fragile or fake democratic systems have a more efficient way of dealing with political opposition leaders. Lock them up or kill them.” Bennetts devotes an entire chapter to the Nemtsov killing (“He was killed by the hatred poured into the air”). This was the politically devolving, increasingly hopeless Russia that Bennetts was reporting on—and sending his kid off to school each day in.

Decades after my Moscow posting, my family and I experienced a much less violent, slower-motion version of  democratic decay. We moved to Hungary in 2010 when my wife, Eleni, began her service as U.S. Ambassador, just as Viktor Orbán was cementing his power. Our two sons lived in a society similarly scarred by its communist past and we watched as Orbán’s regime methodically dismantled the institutions of a free society. We saw firsthand how easily the gains of 1989 could be reversed. Hungary’s April 12 elections, however, proved that Hungarian democratic institutions and electoral systems had not been entirely dismantled: The Tisza party’s opposition leader, Péter Magyar, found himself on a victory dais—not in a funeral bier—and Orbán conceded defeat. It was a big score for democratic resilience and resurgence within the European Union. Not so Russia.

Bennetts’s book details Russia’s political devolution on a terrifyingly grander and more violent scale—one with no apparent hope of Putin ever conceding any future election or, for that matter, any power. Bennetts argues compellingly that Putin cultivated a national character of “cynicism and apathy, as well as an acceptance of violence.” But as my own experience in 1991 showed, the soil was already well-tilled. There is a deep-seated cynicism inherent in Russian society, a place that has never experienced stable democracy or truly celebrated the dignity of the individual. The heady, democratically optimistic days following the 1991 failed coup—perpetrated by hardline communists attempting to topple then President Mikhail Gorbachev—were short-lived and fraught with worry, fear, and a popular certainty that change could only bring instability, worsening conditions, and new tyrants. In Bennetts’s reckoning, it also brought insanity.

Russia’s history is a grim succession from a royal Czar to a revolutionary communist Czar, a repeating cycle in which the only consistent losers have been the powerless—the vast majority of Russian, then Soviet, citizens. Putin did not invent this worldview; he masterfully weaponized it.

Early on, Putin brought a smidgen of hope that a post-Yeltsin era would bring “stability” to society, as Bennetts writes. Putin used fresh Russian oil wealth from spiking global energy prices to achieve some progressive changes “including imposing a flat rate of income tax at 13 per cent, slashing red tape for small businesses and introducing civil service reforms.” The trade-off for the Russian people’s long-sought stability, however, was Putin’s installation of harsh societal repression, ubiquitous patriotic propaganda, and the murderous political tools he used to achieve that stability.

This cynical acceptance of power is what makes the Ukraine war so different from the last imperial convulsion I witnessed up close: the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. Reporting on scene as the Red Army prepared its final withdrawal, I saw failure born of hubris. The Kremlin had sought to flex its regional might and push toward a warm-water presence, assuming its military was invincible. Instead, it found a morass. The soldiers called it “the great mincer,” a quagmire that chewed up young men who were lost, hated, and often addicted to drugs. They were victims of a state that threw them into the Afghan grinder.

The most telling sign of that empire’s weakness was not on the battlefield, but on the home front. I stood in a crowd and watched one of the most powerful moments of that era, as the Mothers of Soldiers—a nascent and powerful civic movement—were allowed into the very maw of the beast, the KGB headquarters on Dzerzhinsky Square. They were there to confront the authorities, to cry, and to demand their sons be returned and honored. It was a crack in the monolith, a moment of moral courage born of maternal grief that the state, in its decay, could not suppress.

Contrast that with Putin’s Russia. The invasion of Ukraine is prosecuted with a sterile, nationalist bravado, and any similar display of public dissent is ruthlessly crushed. Bennetts’s neighbor in Moscow, the punk band Pussy Riot’s Maria Alyokhina—who was sentenced to two years in prison for “hooliganism” in 2012 alongside two of her bandmates following their high-profile, anti-Putin protest—continued to speak out against the Ukraine war, knowing that her activism put her in grave danger. She fled Russia in 2022 after it became clear she might again be sentenced to time in a penal colony. Alyokhina “has not been back since,” Bennetts writes. “To do so would mean certain arrest and a long prison sentence. Or worse.” How is it that a virulently instilled Russian patriotism can societally abide both the Ukraine war and the curtailment of civil rights at home?

Bennetts’s book helps explain: The cynicism Putin nurtured has atomized society, replacing the collective grief of the Soviet mothers with an individualized, fearful silence. The state is no longer a decaying behemoth; it is a lean, efficient machine of repression propagating hate for Ukraine and deep-seated disdain for the West.

Reporting on the ground in Ukraine in 2022 following the Russian invasion, and his own forced departure from Moscow, Bennetts is shocked at how once-friendly fraternal nations were now fighting pitched fratricidal battles. “It’s hard for me to imagine that the streets I once walked in Mariupol have been erased by Russian bombs,” he writes.

Bennetts’s personal story ends with a fittingly grotesque encounter at a Moscow airport, where a hungover veterinarian with a bust of Stalin on his desk grants him the exit papers for his cat. “Did Stalin also like animals?” Bennetts asks. “Only fried ones,” the official replies. And with that bleak, absurd punchline, his life in Russia was over. He is now banned from Russia, his visa application “misplaced”—a chillingly bureaucratic end to a quarter-century love affair.

For Washington policymakers harboring illusions about a simple, post-Putin democratic transition, The Descent should be mandatory, sobering reading—especially as Donald Trump still sees Putin’s person and actions as a blueprint of ascent toward an American imperial presidency. For Russia, the damage is not merely institutional; it is cultural and psychological as well. Bennetts fears that “much of Russian society has been hollowed out of the qualities necessary to build a freer and fairer country.” His own story is Exhibit A in that tragic thesis.

He invested his life, his work, and his family in Russia. This passionate, heartbreaking book is the painful dividend—an essential accounting of a nation’s fall and a testament to a personal loss that mirrors the shattered hopes of a generation. The Russia I left in 1992 was chaotic, uncertain. The Russia Bennetts was forced to flee is tragic—a country that had a chance to become an open society. Putin’s iron fist punched that door shut.