At 6 a.m. on June 29, 2021, Russian journalist Roman Badanin was startled by a knock on the door of his family’s Moscow apartment. A voice from outside said, “Come quickly, someone has scratched your car in the courtyard.” As he opened the door, masked men stormed in. At the same time, a similar raid occurred at the home of Badanin’s colleague, Mikhail Rubin. The masked men were officers of the FSB, Russia’s primary intelligence and security agency. Badanin and Rubin are co-founders of Proekt, an independent media project known for its investigative journalism. Both had long faced threats, interrogations, and accusations of being traitors or foreign agents. Their offices had been searched, and some of their colleagues had not been as fortunate—several had died in sudden or unexplained incidents. Rubin recalled that the first threats came in 2019 after they published an investigation into the head of Putin’s propaganda operation. A Kremlin official warned him the consequences could be severe. Security agents even visited his parents, pressuring them about their son’s alleged disloyalty to Russia. Following the FSB raid, Rubin found his passport placed neatly on a table. “It was a message,” he explained. “If they’d taken it, I wouldn’t be allowed to leave the country, but they wanted me to leave, so they put it where I would see it.” At the time, he didn’t plan to leave Russia, thinking the threats were just attempts to stop his work. However, less than three weeks later, the Kremlin labeled Proekt an “undesirable” media outlet. Rubin left Moscow the next morning. Badanin, who was on holiday in Morocco at the time, decided it was too dangerous to return. “The choice was prison or exile, and I didn’t want to go to prison,” he said. Their book, The Tsar in Person, published in Russian and French, traces Vladimir Putin’s rise from an unremarkable clerk and KGB agent to the leader of Russia. It offers detailed, firsthand accounts of his power consolidation and the brutal methods used to eliminate opponents. Drawing on their combined 40 years of investigative experience and hundreds of interviews, Badanin and Rubin paint a picture of a leader they describe as a modern-day tsar, devoid of ideology or moral constraints. They detail how rivals and critics have met untimely ends through accidents, poisonings, or mysterious deaths. The authors describe their work as a product of war, repression, and personal loss. They hope the book will help dismantle the conditions that enabled such suffering and challenge Putin’s grip on power. The book is banned in Russia and targets young Russians unfamiliar with the country’s pre-Putin era, as well as international audiences where myths about Putin persist. “Let the facts reveal the truth about him and his system,” Badanin said. “The war in Ukraine has made this clear: this war is not an extension of his ideas, but a means of staying in power.” Despite living thousands of miles from Moscow, Badanin and Rubin remain wary of the threats they describe as “Putin’s death squads.” Last year, FBI agents visited Badanin in California, warning him of potential dangers from foreign intelligence services. “I feel a little bit safer here than in Europe, but not completely safe,” Badanin said.