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.
She also witnessed first-hand the storming of Beslan School No 1, in which hundreds of children and adults died under a hail of government gunfire. She points out that the world really has no call to be surprised at the Russian army’s war crimes in Ukraine: they have done it before, twice, in Chechnya. ‘Even the mass looting was not new. In Chechnya, Russian forces made off with washing machines, fridges and cars.’ The unifying theme, even from the Yeltsin years, is impunity. No reckoning with the crimes of the Soviet period. No consequences, either internally or on the international stage, for ongoing violence and corruption. Only rewards and riches for the criminals.
At the same time we meet the impressive individuals who have stood up to Putin’s regime. Boris Nemtsov, shot outside the Kremlin in 2015. Anna Politkovskaya, killed outside her apartment on Putin’s birthday. Vladimir Kara-Murza, poisoned after being followed by the same FSB team that tracked Navalny, now imprisoned. Kara-Murza speaks about the thousands of Russians who were arrested for protesting after the outbreak of full-scale war in 2022, saying: ‘This is Russia too.’ In 1968, he points out, just seven dissidents protested against the invasion of Czechoslovakia, although they knew their cause was doomed to fail and the consequences would be dire. ‘As we now know, their cause wasn’t so hopeless after all.’
Rainsford, reporting from Ukraine after her expulsion from Russia, is all too aware of the hatred many Ukrainians feel towards all Russians now, unwilling to allow for any good in a society that they see as at best passive and at worst active supporters of Putin’s genocidal imperial ambitions in their country. Amid the tragedy she is staggered, again and again, at the total pointlessness of this war. The letters ‘Z’ and ‘V’ that the Russian army tag their equipment with – what do they even stand for?
Why be surprised by the Russian army’s war crimes in Ukraine? They’ve done it before – twice in Chechnya
Previously, Putin launched waves of repression within Russia in response to a fall in his popularity ratings – petulance raised to the level of a police state. Following the Maidan uprising in 2013, he seemed almost to have taken Ukraine’s move towards the West personally. Perhaps, during the paranoia and isolation of Covid, he actually did begin to believe his Eurasian fantasies – the idea that the Slav brotherhood of nations was naturally suited to autocracy (like a direct plagiarism from Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four). Perhaps there are geopolitical causes. Misha Glenny has commented on East Ukraine’s reserves of rare earth minerals and other resources, although it seems insane for Russia, one of the most resource-rich countries on the planet, to bankrupt itself in the hunt for more.
One aspect that Rainsford is particularly well placed to report on is the erosion of press freedom and the accompanying rise of state-controlled propaganda. She wonders what drives the spokespeople for Putin, with their nightly outpourings of vileness about Ukraine, the West and any other perceived enemies on primetime television. Politkovskaya thought their motive was straightforward: cash. Yet now they have been sanctioned, their Italian villas and yachts have been stolen, and still they spout. ‘I have seen the immense power of propaganda,’ Rainsford comments. Before February 2022, after nine years of anti-Ukraine hate speech, people already associated the country with fascists and thought that Russian-speakers were in danger there. ‘Those had been the TV talking points for years, and people quoted them back at me endlessly.’
Now based in Warsaw, Rainsford says she no longer feels nostalgia for Russia – at least Putin’s Russia. Neither does she feel much optimism for the bright Russian future that Navalny dreamt of – ‘I find it harder than ever to imagine.’ Yet 20 years after those seven dissidents came out onto Red Square in 1968, the whole Soviet system collapsed. That was Russia too.
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