James Rodgers has spent almost four decades watching Russia up close, first as a student, then as a journalist, and now as an author. His new book, The Return of Russia: From Yeltsin to Putin, the Story of a Vengeful Kremlin, is what he describes as a concise political history of Russia and its relations with the West, running from the end of the Cold War to the escalation of the war in Ukraine in February 2022.
Early days in the Soviet Union He decided to study Russian at undergraduate level and first travelled to the Soviet Union in 1987, spending time in Leningrad and Moscow as a student. Four years later he was back, working as a producer for Visnews, the television news agency that became Reuters TV that same year. It happened to be the last summer of the Soviet Union. "For somebody of my generation, it was really the biggest possible story to imagine," Rodgers said, recalling a childhood in which the Cold War, and a genuine fear of nuclear war, dominated everything.
BBC’s man in Moscow
He later joined the BBC, working as a producer between 1998 and 2000 before returning as
Moscow correspondent from 2009. That gave him a rare view of the whole transition, from the final months of Soviet rule through to the first decade of Vladimir Putin’s time in power. One memory from that first assignment has stayed with him. In the summer of 1991, Boris Yeltsin was running for president, and Rodgers watched a demonstration in his support move through Moscow on a hot June evening, protesters stopping the rush hour traffic as they marched towards the Kremlin. Moscow, he pointed out, can reach 30 to 35 degrees in summer despite its reputation for cold. “There was a real sense of excitement and euphoria,” he said, describing people who for so long had not had the chance to express themselves politically.
From the Soviet Union to Russia: a fraught transition
That feeling did not last. Yeltsin stood up to Soviet hardliners who tried to reverse his reforms later that year, but disappointment soon followed. Soviet ideology had always warned that capitalism would make a few people rich and leave everyone else poor, and that is roughly what happened when the planned economy collapsed. Rodgers remembers pensioners selling personal possessions on the street at night just to raise cash. There was a sense of freedom, he said, but also a sense of loss, as the old certainties of guaranteed employment, pensions and housing disappeared overnight.
Yeltsin’s great achievement, according to Rodgers, was making sure the spectre of Soviet communism was properly laid to rest. What he failed to do was deliver anything convincing to replace it. Crime rose, prices rose, and people lost their savings twice over, first in 1992 when planned economy prices were freed, then again in 1998 when Russia defaulted on its domestic debt. Putin, Rodgers argues, was seen as a corrective to all that. He understood that people felt humiliated and impoverished, and he built his rise to power around addressing it.
90s: the time of humiliation
Rodgers calls the 1990s “the time of humiliation” in the book, and his central argument is that the West never really grasped how those feelings of humiliation would go on to shape international relations. Putin understood them very well. Despite periods of cordial relations, including Putin being the first world leader to call George W Bush after the September 11 attacks, Rodgers argues that some form of renewed confrontation was already becoming inevitable by the end of the 1990s. What was not yet clear was its shape. It was Putin, he says, who eventually decided that shape would be militaristic.
Ukraine-Russia War
On the war itself, Rodgers is careful with his dates. He insists the conflict began in 2014, with the annexation of Crimea and fighting in the Donbas, and that 2022 marked an escalation rather than a beginning. He notes that American and British intelligence took the unusual step of publishing what they knew in advance, and that Russia had already massed around 100,000 troops on the Ukrainian border the previous April under the guise of exercises. Even so, the scale of what followed caught many people off guard, including inside Russia itself, where Putin appeared to be taking decisions within an increasingly small circle. Rodgers points to Putin’s isolation during the pandemic, and to an essay he published the year before the invasion on the historical unity of Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians. With hindsight, he said, it becomes clear where all of that was leading. At the time, Russian soldiers were reportedly carrying dress uniforms for a victory parade expected in Kyiv within days. Four years later, a victory parade seems a far cry from what’s happening on the ground.
Did journalists miss the clouds of war for the sunshine of peace?
Asked whether journalists share some blame for missing the change in Russia, Rodgers pushed back firmly. He pointed to the murder of investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya, the assassination of opposition politician Boris Nemtsov in 2015, and the death in prison of Alexei Navalny, arguing that these events were closely covered at the time. What nobody quite expected, he said, was the return of a major war to Europe within living memory.
Journalism in Russia
He is less optimistic about the state of Russian journalism itself. Researching the book, he read Russian newspapers from the 1990s and found genuinely first-rate reporting, asking tough questions and investigating without the caution of the Soviet press that preceded it. Since the escalation of the war, new legislation has made it a criminal offence to describe events using anything other than official sources, and technically forbidden even to call the war a war. Many international journalists left as a result, judging independent reporting impossible, though some have stayed and continue to do valuable work under serious restrictions. That squeeze is not unique to Russia.
Foreign correspondents: a vanishing breed?
Rodgers discusses the Washington Post’s decision to cut a large part of its foreign staff as a sign that foreign correspondence, while not finished, is certainly diminished. His deeper worry is a return to something closer to journalism’s earliest days, when wealthy merchants paid for advance letters about commodity prices before ships reached the ports of London. He fears a small, well-paying minority becoming well informed while everyone else falls behind, which is why he believes publicly funded media still matter, even as their funding comes under pressure.
Rahul Joglekar meeting former colleague James Rodgers
He draws historical parallels also. The printing press arrived in England in the late fifteenth
century and was used for propaganda during the civil wars of the seventeenth. Radio, when it emerged, became a tool of wartime propaganda in the twentieth. He sees social media following the same pattern now, with algorithms trapping people in divergent information bubbles rather than the shared set of facts that newspapers once published as the ‘facts’.
Finding reliable information online, he said, is increasingly difficult, buried as it is beneath layers of AI generated summaries. Even so, he takes some comfort from the number of students still choosing to study journalism, describing a profession with a very difficult present but a very important future. Asked whether foreign correspondents still matter when anyone with a phone can broadcast globally, he offered the example of an IT consultant in Abbottabad in Pakistan who tweeted about unusual activity on the night Osama bin Laden was captured, without any idea what he was witnessing. Access to an
audience, Rodgers argued, is not the same as understanding what is happening, which is why someone who lives in a place, speaks its language and understands its culture still has real value in explaining it to those who will never go there.
The road ahead…
Returning to Russia’s future, Rodgers would not commit to anything beyond the possibility of a ceasefire. Speaking in February 2026, he said the obstacles over territory still appeared insurmountable. Putin, now in his seventies, shows no sign of ill health despite tabloid speculation, and Rodgers does not expect any successor to take a substantially different approach. ” I am afraid I remain rather pessimistic about it,” he concluded.
HOTP Long Read
Interview: Rahul Joglekar
Producer: Joseph Mason