Sarah Rainsford joins the long list of foreign correspondents banned from Russia

Goodbye to Russia is an elegy for a lost country – the warm, chaotic Russia of unlimited possibility that welcomed the 18-year-old Sarah Rainsford in 1992. She stayed on, studied, worked in an Irish bar in St Petersburg, joined the BBC in 2000 and, after spells in other parts of the world, returned to Moscow as a Russian correspondent from 2014. Her memoir’s 30-year period covers an entire cycle in Russian politics – as Anna Akhmatova might have put it, from vegetarian to carnivore.

In August 2021, Rainsford was stopped at the Russian border and refused entry as a ‘threat to national security’. A few weeks later, she was expelled with no right of return, one in a rollcall of foreign journalists banned from Russia. Who knows what the trigger was – perhaps a too-sharp question to Aleksandr Lukashenko – but what’s very clear is that Putin’s Russia, these days, sees no need to explain itself to the West. It’s now more than two years since Russia invaded Ukraine. Alexei Navalny is dead. Rainsford comments: ‘No one cares about appearances anymore.’

Structured as a patchwork of scenes from her experiences, personal and professional, the book is suffused with affection and self-deprecating humour as well as the pain of this final rejection. In places this can feel confusing; but, as the narrative builds, so does its undoubted emotional power. Rainsford describes reporting on ‘early lessons in Putinism’ from the Kursk submarine disaster in August 2000: 118 crew members slowly suffocated while Putin holidayed in Sochi, followed by a press conference in which a furious family member collapsed on screen, stabbed in the back by a nurse with a syringeful of sedative.