{"id":148910,"date":"2025-08-15T22:15:13","date_gmt":"2025-08-15T22:15:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/148910\/"},"modified":"2025-08-15T22:15:13","modified_gmt":"2025-08-15T22:15:13","slug":"how-close-is-the-u-s-to-authoritarianism-these-russian-journalists-have-an-answer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/148910\/","title":{"rendered":"How close is the U.S. to authoritarianism? These Russian journalists have an answer."},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cI\u2019ve pretty much given up on this country,\u201d a friend texted me last week. The past several months\u2014and it has, unbelievably, been only that long\u2014have played out like the climax of a Roland Emmerich movie, as one American institution after another has crumbled in the face of a previously unimaginable assault. The nation\u2019s top universities and its most powerful law firms, its largest companies and most venerable media giants, have succumbed to the president\u2019s arm-twisting with little more than a whimper\u2014or, in some cases, prostrated themselves without even needing to be asked. Government agencies have been snuffed out overnight, masked law-enforcement officers<\/a> roam the streets, and the welfare state has been slashed to free up money for vast new detention centers. The question can feel less whether it\u2019s time to give up on this country than whether we still have a country to give up on.<\/p>\n

It might not, then, seem like the ideal time to watch a five-and-a-half-hour documentary about the plight of the free press in Vladimir Putin\u2019s Russia. But Julia Loktev\u2019s My Undesirable Friends: Part I\u2014Last Air in Moscow grabs you from its opening frames and, despite its substantial length, never loosens its grip on your soul. Watching the final vestiges of a free society slip away in what almost feels like real time, we can see her characters struggling to come to grips with what their country is becoming, and how best to push back without losing their own freedoms in the process. It\u2019s devastating in its delineation of how brutally a determined and unrestrained state can strip citizens of their essential rights, and exhilarating in the way they draw strength from one another. In other words, it\u2019s about as important and timely as it\u2019s possible for a movie to be.<\/p>\n

Loktev was born in the former Soviet Union, but her family immigrated to Colorado in the 1970s, and though she had been back periodically over the years and still speaks fluent Russian, it \u201cwasn\u2019t a place I spent a whole lot of time,\u201d as she told me in her Brooklyn apartment last week. But when she read an article in the summer of 2021 about young Russian journalists being forced to declare themselves \u201cforeign agents<\/a>\u201d for reporting critically on the Putin regime, she had a feeling that she needed to start filming them as soon as she possibly could. The country was just starting to lift COVID restrictions and readmit foreigners, and by October, she was on the ground, unknowingly capturing what turned out to be the final four months before the invasion of Ukraine, and the effective end of the free press in Russia. As Loktev\u2019s opening narration informs us, \u201cThe world you\u2019re about to see no longer exists.\u201d<\/p>\n

The initial plan was to make a movie about journalists dealing with the absurdity of Russia\u2019s foreign agent law, which requires people or institutions designated as such by the government to preface every public communication, whether it\u2019s a news broadcast or an Instagram post, with a mandatory block of text that Loktev\u2019s characters call \u201cthe fuckery.\u201d The foreign agent designation also requires them to report their income and expenses to the government and bars them from running for public office or teaching in schools. One Russian blogger was even fined for posting the text in too small a font<\/a>. \u201cI remember thinking, What if you could make a film in Germany in 1935, when the Nuremberg Laws were first passed, forcing a part of society to mark themselves as others?\u201d Loktev recalls. And though she wasn\u2019t required to, she periodically breaks up her own movie with the screen-filling block of text, to simulate the disruption Russian viewers would encounter anytime they strayed from state-run media.<\/p>\n

The first of Part I\u2019s five hourlong episodes still bears the title of what she thought would be the entire film: The Lives of Foreign Agents. But as she kept shooting, from October 2021 through the beginning of the war on Ukraine in February 2022, the list of \u201cforeign agents\u201d grew from a few dozen to several hundred, and the restrictions on press freedoms got more and more severe, her subjects\u2019 situations more and more dangerous. As for the threat to her, Loktev says, \u201cI tried not to think about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

When we watch a disaster movie, we savor the experience of knowing what\u2019s about to strike before the characters do, tallying up their fatal missteps while we\u2019re safe in our seats. But the people in My Undesirable Friends aren\u2019t blithely going about their business as a storm gathers in the distance. They\u2019re already in it up to their knees, and they just don\u2019t know how deep the water\u2019s going to get. As the laws tighten and the months pass, the characters, many of whom work for TV Rain, Russia\u2019s last independent news channel, keep wondering out loud whether it\u2019s finally time to leave the country. But it\u2019s difficult to square their own increasingly fraught situations with the stubborn normalcy of the world around them. Even on the night that Russia started bombing Ukraine, Loktev says, she was waiting for one of her subjects at a caf\u00e9 near TV Rain\u2019s offices and realized that the people at the next table were on a Tinder date. \u201cPart of the authoritarian attempt is this sense when you\u2019re living through it that life continues to look normal around you, and you feel slightly schizophrenic,\u201d she says. \u201cYou feel like you\u2019re going crazy\u2014like, Is this really happening? There\u2019s still matcha lattes everywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even the lives of Loktev\u2019s characters can seem disorientingly normal at times. Yes, they\u2019re under constant threat of being fined or shut down or worse. The movie\u2019s youngest subject, 23-year-old Ksenia Mironova, is the fianc\u00e9e of journalist Ivan Safronov, who was jailed for treason in July 2020 and eventually sentenced to 22 years in prison. But they\u2019re also young people who gather for raucous dinners and razz each other\u2019s cooking, who drop offhand references to Gossip Girl and bemoan the fact that they can\u2019t stop hate-watching Emily in Paris. (Russians are also, it turns out, really, really into Harry Potter.) It\u2019s a sobering political document, and a terrifying premonition of what lies ahead, but it\u2019s also a superlative hangout movie.<\/p>\n

Loktev shot My Undesirable Friends on a succession of iPhones, and although that wasn\u2019t her initial plan\u2014you can, if you watch closely, spot the point at which she upgrades to a more recent model\u2014it allowed her an extraordinary degree of intimacy. \u201cI was around other people shooting some of the same events at the same time I was,\u201d she recalls, \u201cand they were like 10 feet farther back than I was, because that\u2019s as close as they could get with their cameras.\u201d Apart from the opening narration and the few sentences of text that end each episode, there\u2019s little in the way of exposition, and she avoids the use of \u201clower third\u201d captions to explain who her subjects, many of them well-known figures, are. We see Anna Nemzer, the host of a TV Rain show called Who\u2019s Got the Power?, posing for a photo shoot in sparkly eveningwear, a tongue-in-cheek riff on the government branding her a secret agent. But instead of the glamorous result<\/a>, the movie focuses on her discomfort, her almost palpable desire to shrug off the fancy dress and get back to work. Loktev\u2019s characters are identified by their diminutive nicknames and not their formal bylines\u2014Nemzer is Anya, Mironova is Ksyusha\u2014and the overall effect is like being welcomed to a bustling dinner party already in progress. You might not catch every name or job description, but hang around long enough, and you start to feel like part of the group.<\/p>\n

\n Among her fellow exiles, Mironova tells me, the standard response to Colbert\u2019s cancellation was \u201cWelcome to Russia in the \u201990s and\u00a02000s.\u201d<\/b>\n<\/p>\n

\u201cEveryone, every character, was a famous journalist,\u201d says Mironova, who now lives in New York. \u201cBut we are famous for a very little circle. We are not rich stars. What I like about this movie a lot is that I can see girls with their dogs or Anya just cooking, because that\u2019s how she deals with her stress, and I understand that completely. I think almost every person can understand.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mironova will be appearing on a panel at New York\u2019s Film Forum, where My Undesirable Friends begins its American theatrical run<\/a>, this weekend, along with Loktev and Nemzer. But she admits she\u2019s never been able to watch the entire movie, which ends with her in tears, choosing to flee a country whose streets are filled with anti-war protesters and the armed troops sent to subdue them. (The second part, which Loktev is still editing, will be subtitled Exile.) Loktev had her subjects check the footage to ensure that there was nothing in the movie that might endanger anyone\u2014some minor characters\u2019 faces are blurred, others kept carefully just outside the frame\u2014but Mironova said she could only bear to watch her scenes at double speed, and even then, she mostly just listened to the dialogue. When the movie premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival, she asked the staff to wait until the end credits started rolling to bring her into the theater, \u201cbecause the last episode ends with me crying and leaving, and I remember what comes after.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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On the day I spoke to Mironova, National Guard troops<\/a> were beginning to arrive in Washington, and news was circulating about CBS\u2019 plan to appoint a \u201cbias monitor<\/a>\u201d to oversee its news coverage, the latest in a series of seeming concessions to a relentlessly partisan Federal Communications Commission that included canceling Stephen Colbert\u2019s top-rated late-night show<\/a>, which frequently took jabs at Trump. Despite the obvious differences between Russia and the U.S., it\u2019s impossible to watch My Undesirable Friends and not feel the tumblers falling into place, the parallels that once seemed unimaginable and now feel unavoidable. Among her fellow exiles, Mironova says, the standard response to Colbert\u2019s cancellation was \u201cWelcome to Russia in the \u201990s and 2000s. This is exactly what was going on in Russia 20 years ago.\u201d That\u2019s not to say the U.S. will end up like Russia. But we can no longer be sure that we won\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Even after 20 years of Putin, Mironova says, it was hard to believe that things would get as bad as they did as fast as they did. \u201cEven when it seemed inevitable,\u201d she recalls, \u201cit still was absolutely impossible.\u201d No one knows more clearly than My Undesirable Friends\u2019 characters how far the rule of law has deteriorated. And yet, up until the moment bombs started falling in Ukraine, many chose to stick it out, fighting battles they knew would be futile because, as Nemzer explains, there still needs to be a record of what happened. \u201cOne of the interesting things for me in the film is this question of: What do you do when you live in a country where your government is doing terrible things, and how do you continue to function as the opposition in that country?\u201d Loktev says. \u201cDo you put on plays? Do you continue to work as a journalist? Do you continue to work as an activist for people with disabilities, for homeless people, people with HIV? Or are you supposed to leave that country and leave it to the dictator?\u201d<\/p>\n

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    In the end, the people in My Undesirable Friends don\u2019t have a choice: It\u2019s either flee and continue their work in exile, or stay and end up in prison. Part I leaves them at a heartbreaking juncture, especially Mironova, who has to be convinced that she can do more to advocate for her fianc\u00e9\u2019s release abroad than she could in a Russian jail. And yet even as she acknowledges that the previous year and a half has been the worst in her life, she says that it\u2019s also been the best. \u201cI saw a lot of light in my colleagues,\u201d she tells me. \u201cAnd I had people around me who fought a lot for our future, even if we lost. Part of my life is still awful. But I had this chance to experience real love, and how people can support each other, and how kind they can be in a very, very dark time.\u201d<\/p>\n

    As a journalist, Mironova doesn\u2019t think much of the American press, or at least the major media companies who have lost touch with the struggles of ordinary people. But she also sees the U.S. as a place where strong communities already exist, and those bonds need to be strengthened, both to fight the rise of authoritarianism and to keep one another sane. \u201cJust be together,\u201d she says. \u201cSpend more time together.\u201d<\/p>\n

    It may not seem as if the crisis is urgent\u2014there are, indeed, still matcha lattes. But it\u2019s been less than a year since My Undesirable Friends first screened in the U.S., and whatever comforting distance there might have been between the people in the movie and the people watching it has all but vanished. \u201cEven between October, when we knew kind of what was coming and hoped it wasn\u2019t, and now, it just feels very different,\u201d Loktev says. \u201cIt still felt like a film about nasty things that happen in nasty faraway places, and now we\u2019ve become the nasty close place.\u201d<\/p>\n

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