Russian radio host Alexei Venediktov: ‘We didn’t hear the sound of army boots marching’

Lately, prominent Russians keep ending up on lists: the Kremlin’s lists of dangerous “foreign agents”; lists drawn up by those same “foreign agents” of the Kremlin’s stooges.

Alexei Venediktov is in the rare position of having ended up on both. With his lion’s mane of gravity-defying white hair, the 67-year-old radio host has come to be at once respected and treated with suspicion by both sides.

He’s also one of the only well-known independent journalists still in Russia. “I’m just an unemployed pensioner now,” he says with something of a grin, as we meet in a Tuscan restaurant in central Moscow beloved by the city’s elite; he calls it his “dacha”, a home away from home.

Echo of Moscow, the radio station he ran for decades, was shut down by the Kremlin soon after the invasion of Ukraine began, along with many other outlets. Venediktov, however, quickly switched to broadcasting online, his language unchanged but much of his team now based abroad.

I continued to speak with, to be friends with, to drink with and meet with and talk with everyone. And I continue to do so without batting an eye

Cantinetta Antinori could feel like a sanctuary from this turbulence. The lights are dimmed, the tablecloths heavy and perfectly white. European wine bottles line the walls. But talking about war in the lap of luxury, fine dining in the capital of a country accused of war crimes — every step in invasion-era Moscow is steeped in moral anxiety.

Venediktov revels in the ambiguity. He remains on friendly terms with many members of Vladimir Putin’s circle, the very elite accused of launching and enabling this war. He also excoriates the invasion live on air. Some are repulsed by his proximity to power, but for Venediktov, it is just how he defines his job.

“My position was pretty unique even before the start of all this, because I spoke with everyone,” he says. “Despite growing conflict within the country, despite invective from both sides, I continued to speak with, to be friends with, to drink with and meet with and talk with everyone . . . And I continue to do so without batting an eye.”

Sitting in a Moscow radio studio on the first morning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, facing a microphone that would broadcast his words to millions, Venediktov had a single message to share: Russia had made a colossal mistake.

“I went on air and said: we have already lost it. We have already lost the war,” he recalls. “No matter how it ends, even if a Russian flag flies over Kyiv, the consequences for Russia, for my generation, for my son’s, will be catastrophic.”

A few days later, the station was closed. “I’m told Putin flew into a rage,” he says, as we are seated in the restaurant’s “winter garden”, a closed-off patio where we are the only guests. In the paranoid atmosphere of wartime Moscow, the privacy is a relief. Only waiters come by to take our order — a mortadella focaccia and tomato salad, both to share.

But the station’s closure was also inevitable, Venediktov continues. Echo was a go-to for urban and educated Russians, its airtime filled with critical voices. Venediktov, the eternal editor, stood at its heart. The station’s regular parties were attended by both opposition leaders and their jailers, by propagandists and Pussy Riot, by mayors, ministers, Mikhail Gorbachev and everyone in between.

This, coupled with the fact that it was part of the state-owned Gazprom Media empire (Venediktov had a minority stake), is perhaps what kept Echo on air, and its hosts speaking freely, even as the screws tightened over the years. Until the war.

“In wartime, propaganda must be total,” Venediktov recalls being told at a meeting with ministers and generals in March, as they pulled the plug on his station. “They said, ‘You would have sown confusion in the minds of the decision makers’.” 

But he also refers to that meeting as a “big friendly gathering” — and I wonder if he’s joking, or if it’s yet another reminder that nothing in his world is black and white. On April 22, the Kremlin branded him a foreign agent. “On Lenin’s birthday!” he laughs. Some of his government contacts quickly shut him down. “They told me straight up, ‘I’m sorry, you’re toxic now’.”

Many others, however, kept in touch. He name-drops some people he texted with that morning, government members, some ardently pro-war. You can’t miss a note of pride.

As the first wave of people fled Russia and its new military censorship laws last spring, Venediktov watched his beloved team disperse. With most of his friends and colleagues gone, “everything turned grey”, he says. Hundreds of journalists from other media, protesters and academics left too. Some were jailed. A pig’s head was left outside Venediktov’s front door. No longer at Echo, he ran out of money to pay his security guards, and let them go. Still, he dug in.

“I’m useful here,” he says. Hundreds of thousands of listeners, two-thirds of them in Russia, now follow his broadcasts on YouTube, the only major western platform that has not been blocked. There, he doesn’t flinch from using the now banned word “war”. Listeners expect insights, he says, and so he has to stay.

Many Russian journalists, I point out, would have also loved to stay. Some clung on as long as they could, accumulating notices from the police until it became impossible to do so any longer. Is Venediktov really in the same boat? His well-known friendship with Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov comes to mind, as do his cosy selfies from before the war with RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan and foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova.

“Maybe they’ll blink, and maybe they won’t,” Venediktov says. “I’m not brave, I’m a coward. If I’m told, ‘That’s it’, then I’ll think about next steps. If I don’t get a warning, and just get grabbed, then someone else will be deciding my next steps for me anyway.” 

This month, one of the most violent men in Russian politics, Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the Wagner private army fighting in Ukraine, issued a statement branding Venediktov “an enemy” for Echo’s critical broadcasting over the years.

As we wait for our food to arrive, staff pop by one by one to say hello to their regular customer. They give him quick, quiet updates about how the war has affected their families and lives. “If I ever have to emigrate, and it might happen, I will lose this,” Venediktov says.

Vendiktov calls them the “cannibals” — those in Moscow with whom he will not speak. It’s a common term among the opposition, and it refers to the believers: those who not only support the war but preach death and destruction for Ukraine.

“It’s hard to speak with cannibals, they always want a bit more human flesh,” he says. A heraldic lion roars at me from his bright red shirt. It’s the logo of the Machiavellian House of Lannister from Game of Thrones.

Venediktov grew up in Moscow in the 1970s, and describes himself as a “law-abiding member of the Komsomol”, the communist youth movement, who gradually became a critic of the Soviet system. But it’s to the 20 years he spent as a history schoolteacher that he attributes his approach to journalism. He peppers our conversation with parables from this past life, while Cantinetta’s chef comes by to take another order: a plate of ricotta tortellini, off the menu, once again to share.

Nowadays, across the Russian political landscape, Venediktov spots the same character types he knew and saw in class. “I had little Putins too,” he says. As a teacher, he also learnt to speak to people in their language, he adds, whether high school pupils or government officials. Now, the people he wants to address are the Russians who neither truly support the war, nor particularly oppose it, the “indifferently loyal” who make up, he believes, around two-thirds of the population.

“Speaking with people who already share your point of view, I don’t need that, I’m sorry,” Venediktov says.

You think I’m actually this calm? I’m in a state of madness and rage

Many among his interlocutors in the elite were shocked by the outbreak of war but over time, he’s watched them adapt. Some of those he recalls seeing in tears now air pro-war positions on TV. Some have developed a sense of professional excitement, revved up by the challenge, say, of how to keep a state bank afloat in the face of western sanctions.

His favourite response, he says: “OK, but maybe the price tag is too high?” Then he names the number of children killed or injured in Ukraine.

“That’s usually when the screaming starts, calling me a manipulator and so on,” he says. “But people scream when they’re in pain. It’s important to understand that.” Understanding someone does not mean approving of them, he adds.

But the line between the two feels blurred when he begins to offer defences for some officials’ choices during the war. A Kremlin spokesman is just doing his job. The elite had no choice but to rally around Putin, since sanctions cut them off from the world.

As our main dish arrives, I tell Venediktov that it’s my first trip back to Moscow since the start of the war, and that I have found some of my conversations deeply disturbing, and some of my acquaintances transformed. That I feel a little shell-shocked.

“You think I’m actually this calm? I’m in a state of madness and rage,” he says. “But to sit down with my friends and tell them what bastards they all are, and how I am guilt-free in my spotless white coat — OK, that will take seven seconds. What happens after that? . . . What’s the result?”

On several occasions over our lunch, Venediktov describes his interactions with Putin. In his telling, Putin sometimes calls him by the familiar diminutive of his first name — not just Alexei, but “Lyosha”. In one tale, just after the 2008 Russia-Georgia war, Venediktov is called in for a meeting and sits with Putin for two hours, drinking white wine and discussing the war.

“Then [Putin] says, ‘Listen, you were a history teacher. What will they write about me in the school textbooks?’” Venediktov recalls. The editor stumbles out an answer about events during Putin’s first two terms in office. Putin is not pleased. “‘That’s all?’”

Six years later, in 2014, Venediktov finds himself in the Kremlin for a meeting with Putin together with other editors. Putin greets each one, and upon reaching Venediktov, says: “‘What about now?’” The journalist was stumped. “I didn’t know what he meant, I didn’t make the link,” he recalls. “‘The textbooks’,” Putin says. He had just annexed the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine.

In subsequent years, as protests against Putin picked up, Venediktov participated in government structures. The Moscow mayor’s office put him forward for its “civic chamber”, a forum for bringing public issues to officials, but one that many saw as a smokescreen. Outside, protests were picking up, and real civil society was being crushed. He also agreed to be the face of the government’s drive to introduce electronic voting, a system that many in the opposition now believe was used to steal the vote.

I was standing so close to it all, I could’ve seen it. We bloody blew it, as they say

It’s a charge that Venediktov dismisses — but in October, his name was added by the team of jailed dissident leader Alexei Navalny to a list of people they believe should be sanctioned by the west, for helping Putin commit election fraud. Venediktov says he won’t dispute it right now, as doing so is ineffective — both he and Navalny’s people are against this war. The editor has also faced an accusation of two inappropriate encounters with women, which he denies.

I recalled a Moscow summer before the war, when a widely admired investigative journalist was arrested, falsely accused of dealing drugs. Thousands protested, calling for his release, and many were detained, including some journalists. The same week, Venediktov was photographed at an elite conference, sharing a table with government officials and propagandists. 

It was a frustrating contrast for some. But others would later recognise Venediktov as one of the people that pulled strings and got the charges dropped. The journalist walked free.

“That’s what I spent my reputation on, my resource. And do you think I regret it?” Venediktov says. “I am a person of compromise and I continue to be a person of compromise.”

“Under Ivan the Terrible, under Stalin, we always live within the confines of the system,” Venediktov says.

Nowadays, however, his “resource” is depleted. “The head of the Moscow police doesn’t pick up the phone anymore. I can’t get anybody out,” he says. “But I can still speak.”

Instead, he’s passed the baton. “Roman continues.” Roman Abramovich, the sanctioned oligarch who has, in the shadows, been involved in prisoner exchanges and other negotiations during this war. “I told him: ‘don’t stop, no matter what anybody says’,” says Venediktov. “‘Those people, they’ll put in a word for you on Judgment Day.’”

Outside, snowflakes shimmer. Moscow bustles. Shop shelves are filled with foreign foods.

But bus stop billboards now carry portraits of soldiers killed or fighting in Ukraine. It’s like an atomic bomb went off, Venediktov says, but the shockwaves have not yet reached the city. “And though the radiation has, we do not see it or feel it. It has no smell.” 

Instead, it pervades people’s private lives, splitting families along political lines, and leaving the city dotted with the empty desks of the tens of thousands that have left.

Venediktov’s son was in the army when the war began, halfway through his mandatory military service. Conscripts were not supposed to be sent then to Ukraine (although some were, and were killed), so he spent the spring posted to a military hospital near Moscow instead. “Washing bandages! It’s the 21st century, and they were short on bandages,” Venediktov exclaims.

Our meal was good, but I barely noticed what we ate. I feel like I’ve still not pinned him down. Never interview an interviewer, I make a mental note. Coffees and jellies arrive.

What, if anything, I ask, does he feel guilty for? “We didn’t hear the sound of army boots marching,” Venediktov responds.

For years, he says, he thought that the main vice of the country’s rulers was corruption. “Why would they want war? For what? They want palaces! Yachts! Sicily! Sardinia! . . . It turned out to be a veil,” he says. A veil obscuring a deep militarism and revanchism.

The last time he spoke with Putin was in the spring of 2021. He asked him about political prisoners, but not a question about war — even though already then, troops were massing on Ukraine’s borders.

“We could’ve started talking about it already after the Georgia war,” Venediktov explains, referring to the conflict in 2008. “He didn’t lie. Putin didn’t try to trick us. We could’ve seen it all already back then.” 

“I was standing so close to it all, I could’ve seen it,” Venediktov says. “We bloody blew it, as they say.”

Polina Ivanova is a foreign correspondent for the FT covering Russia, Ukraine and Central Asia

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