Welcome to Izvestia -- The apartment on Gogolevsky Boulevard -- Right of spies -- That's the St. Petersburg way -- Cast out -- Languishing in limbo -- Playing with the spies -- When the Cold War was over -- New beginnings -- Comrades in arms -- Beslan -- Old flame -- Baranov on the edge -- The arrangement -- To the streets -- The game of succession -- Return of the empire -- The urinals in Ostankino -- Losing one's soul -- The end of old times -- Dreams of Russia -- Ukraine -- Farewell party -- Foreboding -- The war

"Our Dear Friends in Moscow tells the story of a group of young Russians, part of an idealistic generation who came of age in Moscow at the end of the twentieth century, just as the communist era imploded and a future full of potential, and uncertainty, stood in front of them. Initially, the group seized and enjoyed the freedoms of the new era, but quickly the notion that Russia was destined to join the West, and Europe, in a new partnership began to fade. At home the economy crashed, civil war stalked Chechnya, and terrorism came to Moscow. More discreetly, the new Russian government, getting angrier at the West and collecting a list of grievances, began to pull inward. By the time of Vladimir Putin's second and apparently endless term as president, the country had embraced a kind of ethnonationalism and was heading for war at home and abroad. The group is torn apart by the shift in Russia. Some flee; others become sinister agents of the ever more aggressive state. The center cannot hold."-- Provided by publisher