Reporting for NBC Radio and Mutual News, I was a witness to the end of an empire and, we thought, the birth of a new Russia. The air, thin and sharp with winter, was thick with a dizzying mix of exhilaration and dread. On the streets, this new era was not one of simple, unified hope.

It saw a raw display of societal fracture. Near Red Square, in front of the grand Detsky Mir—the “Children’s World” department store—I saw the human cost of a collapsed system embodied in a single, tragic image: a babushka, her face a mask of quiet desperation, trying to sell a single sock on the frozen pavement. Her life savings had evaporated, and the social safety net had disintegrated, leaving only her last, threadbare possessions.

At the same moment, the beneficiaries of this chaos sped past in flashy cars, their newfound wealth—often derived from arbitrage between foreign currency and citizens’ despair—on opulent display as they headed to private restaurants and casinos. This was the messy, brutal dawn of Yeltsin’s Russia: a society of explosive potential and predatory opportunism. The Descent: Witnessing Russia’s Spiral into Madness Under Putinby Marc Bennetts, Bloomsbury, 272 pp.

Reading Marc Bennetts’s searing and deeply personal memoir, The Descent, is to be violently confronted with how that chaotic promise curdled into today’s rigid and revanchist nightmare. His book is not merely another correspondent’s chronicle; it is a eulogy for a future that never was, and a raw accounting of the personal cost of investing one’s life in that dream. Bennetts, a former Moscow correspondent for The Times of London, arrived a few years after me, in the mid-1990s.

He stayed for a quarter of a century, built a life there, married a Russian woman, and raised a daughter who knew Moscow as her only home. This is the source of the book’s immense power. Bennetts writes not as a detached observer but as a man with profound equities, a stakeholder whose personal and professional life was inextricably woven into the fabric of modern Russia.

His departure in 2022, following Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, was not just the end of a foreign assignment. It was an eviction from his own life. When I was in Moscow, I was a single man, untethered and unencumbered, which allowed for a certain kind of journalistic mobility.

Bennetts, however, writes as a family man. His kitchen-table dilemmas—“Did we really want to bring up our daughter in Putin’s Russia?” a question he asks on the night of former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov’s murder in 2015—are the agonizing calculations of someone trying to build a free and independent life on the shifting sands of an all-seeing, all-knowing, all-propagandizing authoritarian state. Nemtsov was a popular and positive political figure and organizer who called for mass public demonstration to protest Putin’s 2014 war on Ukraine—the one that absorbed Crimea back into Russia.

Hours after that call for protest, both Nemtsov and Russian hopes for a European-style democratic system were gunned down in the heart of Moscow. At the time, while working as a McClatchy foreign affairs columnist, I wrote that “Societies with fragile or fake democratic systems have a more efficient way of dealing with political opposition leaders. Lock them up or kill them.” Bennetts devotes an entire chapter to the Nemtsov killing (“He was killed by the hatred poured into the air”).

This was the politically devolving, increasingly hopeless Russia that Bennetts was reporting on—and sending his kid off to school each day in. Decades after my Moscow posting, my family and I experienced a much less violent, slower-motion version of democratic decay. We moved to Hungary in 2010 when my wife, Eleni, began her service as U.S.

Ambassador, just as Viktor Orbán was cementing his power. Our two sons lived in a society similarly scarred by its communist past and we watched as Orbán’s regime methodically dismantled the institutions of a free society. We saw firsthand how easily the gains of 1989 could be reversed.

Hungary’s April 12 elections, however, proved that Hungarian democratic institutions and electoral systems had not been entirely dismantled: The Tisza party’s opposition leader, Péter Magyar, found himself on a victory dais—not in a funeral bier—and Orbán conceded defeat. It was a big score for democratic resilience and resurgence within the European Union. Not so Russia.

Bennetts’s book details Russia’s political devolution on a terrifyingly grander and more violent scale—one with no apparent hope of Putin ever conceding any future election or, for that matter, any power. Bennetts argues compellingly that Putin cultivated a national character of “cynicism and apathy, as well as an acceptance of violen