‘Kept fighting despite the odds': the Russian journalists who risked everything to report the truth

The Guardian

a day ago

In the fall of 2021, the director Julia Loktev traveled from her Brooklyn home to Moscow, with the intent to film some friends under pressure. That summer, the Russian government had cracked down on the remaining independent media in the country, designating outlets and journalists it found irksome as 'foreign agents'. Loktev, who moved to the US from the Soviet Union at age nine, had several journalist friends now required to submit detailed financial reports to the government and affix an all-caps disclaimer to any output, be it an article or an Instagram post of their cat, declaring it the work of a foreign agent.
Loktev began shadowing her friend Anna Nemzer, a host on the country's only remaining independent news channel, TV Rain (Dozhd, in Russian), which was on the growing list of 'foreign agents' meant to chill any press critical of Vladimir Putin's regime. She was particularly interested in Sonya Groysman and Olga Churakova, two female journalists in their 20s who, with youthful gusto, started the podcast Hi, You're a Foreign Agent to document how their new notoriety affected their lives. 'I thought I was making a film about these young journalists who were dealing with this. I thought it was going to be called The Lives of Foreign Agents,' Loktev recalled recently. 'I thought I was making a film about people trying to figure out how you live in a country where you oppose the government. How long can you keep working? How do you keep fighting when you live under a regime you oppose?'
Instead, Loktev's film, My Undesirable Friends: Part One – Last Air in Moscow, became a record of Russian independent media's last gasps under Putin, a time capsule of a world that no longer exists. Loktev tells us so in the opening minutes of this astonishing five-hour film (now playing in theaters, with a break between chapters 1-3 and 4-5): 'The world you are about to see no longer exists,' she says over footage of bright storefronts in Moscow. 'None of us knew what was about to happen.' In February 2022, four months after Loktev started filming, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a shock even to the clear-eyed journalists who had reported on Putin's mobilization of troops in the days and weeks prior. Within a week, much of the country's civil society and independent press fled. The first chapter of My Undesirable Friends, filmed in October 2021, ends with a chilling note: every person you just saw now lives in exile.
Much of My Undesirable Friends thus plays out like a thriller, with characters trying to figure out their next move with what we know to be limited time. On some level, they know it, too, even if they do not yet believe it. 'A year from now, we'll remember October 2021 as Eden,' Groysman tells Loktev in the first chapter. 'In a year, half your characters won't be in Russia, and someone will certainly end up in jail.' Most of the independent journalists Loktev followed are young women just old enough to remember a time when Russian society was freer, and are loth to let it go without a fight. At one point, Groysman shows the camera a bunch of magazines that she kept from 2012, her senior year of high school, that support LGBTQ+ rights or bolster the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny or encourage dissent, all unimaginable a decade later.
Groysman and Churakova form part of a tight core of journalists, across a handful of remaining outlets, who anchor the film with disarming warmth and humor; in one scene, as Loktev films Groysman folding laundry at her unsettled Moscow apartment, the latter jokingly chastises: 'An American journalist is digging through Russian dirty laundry!' The two podcast hosts overlap with Ksenia Mironova, a fellow journalist whose fiance, Ivan Safronov, was indefinitely jailed on trumped-up charges after he investigated Russian defense contracts. (Safronov was sentenced to 22 years in prison in September 2022, a sham verdict meant to threaten journalists.) Mironova calmly recounts how the authorities upended their apartment in the raid that took Safronov away – a terrifying possibility within a dark range of common intimidation tactics. 'Some of our characters have been searched, some of their places were bugged,' said Loktev. 'They were constantly afraid of when they would have to leave, or when they would have to stop working or worse, when they would be arrested.'
Nevertheless, they keep working. Mironova keeps reporting, even as she breaks when sending care packages to Safronov that will almost certainly never reach him. So do Irina Dolinina and Alesya Marokhovskaya, even after their studio is bugged and they lose their rare trial contesting the foreign agents label. So does Elena Kostyuchenko, an exceptionally daring reporter for the storied investigative outlet Novaya Gazeta, even after several of her colleagues have been killed; at the outset of the invasion, she manages to slip into Ukraine. So does Nemzer, the host of a short-lived TV Rain program called Who's Got the Power? on civil society leaders, even as the noose tightens on free speech in the country. Just before going on air with her university thesis adviser to talk about the detention of her parents' friend, an academic also designated a 'foreign agent', Nemzer reflects on the surreality of the collapse in real time: 'It's this constant attempt, on one hand, not to panic or become hysterical – everything is OK, everything is OK. On the other hand, you can't allow yourself to get used to this.'
Again and again, each journalist tries to articulate the strange cognitive dissonance of life going on as the society you knew crumbles. There are several scenes of warm camaraderie – birthday parties, group dinners, New Year's wishes for a better year in 2022 that now feel haunted. Frank conversation of daunting opposition and unbelievable risks are mixed with references to Harry Potter – Putin makes an easy comparison to Voldemort – and Instagram trends. What is an acute crisis to independent journalists seems minor to many other Russians – Michelin-star restaurants open in Moscow, cafes are full. Several have relatives who are not as critical of the regime; Marokhovskaya must hide her girlfriend from her conservative family. As a sociologist tells Groysman: 'This feeling that we're in a state of war, and everyone around us is not, is typical for totalitarian regimes.'
It is hard, as an American writer, not to see reflections in the current US administration, which has made moves strikingly, chillingly similar to Putin. 'When I was making this, it felt like something that happens over there,' said Loktev. 'And just in the last six months, it's startling how many things in the film are being echoed here.' Journalists kicked out of the presidential press pool in favor of uncritical sycophants. Universities cowed and sanctioned. The firing of the Bureau of Labor Statistics chief over unflattering data, the erasure of Trump's impeachments from the Smithsonian, the purging of the Kennedy Center board – all mirror actions taken by the Putin regime.
'We're experiencing something we have not experienced before, and we don't know how to deal with it,' said Loktev of the US. 'We go outside, there's nice cafes, life looks normal. And meanwhile, men in hooded masks are snatching people into unmarked vans.' The dissonance coursing through Loktev's film – so much calm, amid so much catastrophe – is 'how life looks when this happens. That is how life looks under an authoritarian regime. It's just not how we imagine it.'
For Loktev's subjects, life and work are inextricable; both cratered abruptly after the state shut down TV Rain and other outlets, threatening criminal penalties. As captured in the final chapter, most fled that night, hopping on the next available flight – to Istanbul, to Tbilisi, to Mongolia – with whatever they could pack in two hours. Loktev stayed one extra day, to make sure her footage uploaded to the cloud, in case her drives were confiscated. She is at work on Part Two, titled Exile, which picks up two days after the mass exodus, as her subjects continue to work from the US and Europe, trying to report honestly on Russia for Russian audiences.
In the third chapter, in late December 2021, Nemzer acknowledges how futile that task could be, even before the disastrous invasion. In a commemorative year-end video for TV Rain, she recalls a year spent asking human rights activists why they keep working when they're persecuted; asking lawyers why they keep going to court when it's rigged; asking journalists why they keep investigating when exposure changes nothing. The answer, always, was to create a record of truth. 'Sometimes I ask myself, 'God, what am I doing?'' she says. 'I have one answer. If all these people are creating a record, then I'm going to try too.'
My Undesirable Friends stands as its own staggering record, of people 'who kept fighting despite the odds, who were continuing to speak the truth', said Loktev. 'They kept doing this even as they were named foreign agents, even as they risked arrest. They just kept doing it.'
My Undesirable Friends will show at Film Forum in New York City from 15 August with a UK date to be announced
This article was amended on 15 August 2025. A previous version erroneously stated that Ivan Safronov was sentenced to 24 years in prison. He was sentenced to 22 years.