10 December 2024
Teresa Cherfas reviews Goodbye to Russia. A Personal Reckoning from the Ruins of War by Sarah Rainsford [hardback, £19.80, 368pp, ISBN-9781526670366, Bloomsbury, London, 2024]
Until August 2021, Sarah Rainsford was the BBC’s Moscow correspondent. Returning from a work trip, she landed at Sheremetevo airport to be told at passport control that she had been designated a threat to national security and was barred entry to the country she thought of as ‘home.’ The last time this had happened was in 1985, at the height of the Cold War, when the BBC’s Tim Sebastian was expelled in a diplomatic tit-for-tat between Britain and the Soviet Union.
Rainsford was given three weeks to pack her bags. This seasoned foreign correspondent, who had reported on stories the length and breadth of the Russian Federation, had become the story herself. I remember watching her not being able to hold back the tears when interviewed about her expulsion by colleagues for BBC news.
Goodbye to Russia is in part an elegy for the Russia that first captured Rainsford’s imagination as a gap year student teaching English in Moscow, just two weeks after the Soviet Union ceased to exist, in January 1992. It is also an impassioned account of the seminal events and stories that shaped public discourse in Putin’s Russia, some of which she reported on directly, others of which are informed by the accounts of Russia experts and fellow journalists whose books line her shelves. Interwoven between these two strands are first-hand observations and encounters from the front line of Russia’s full-scale war on Ukraine. Across the pages of her book, Rainsford arrives at the personal reckoning of her subtitle: a judgement of Putin and his supporters, and of her own infatuation and nostalgia for the Russia that betrayed her.
Early on in her book, Sarah Rainsford admits that it was less a fascination with the politics or history of that vast country, more the language itself, that first enchanted her. Taught by Mr. Criddle, an eccentric teacher at her sixth-form college in Worcester, Rainsford delves into the Cold War origins of Russian language teaching in Britain; the Joint Services School for Linguists (JSSL) programme that was set up in 1951 as an alternative to National Service was to provide Russian linguists as interpreters and intelligence officers. Mr. Criddle was taught Russian in the 1960s by a graduate of the JSSL, so Rainsford can claim direct descent from those seminal Russian language courses. Alumni of the JSSL included Alan Bennett and Michael Frayn, as well as Michael Glenny and Harold Shukman. The latter taught me Russian history and co-authored a history of the JSSL called Secret Classrooms: an Untold Story of the Cold War. Another, less celebrated, alumnus of the JSSL was the Soviet double agent, George Blake, unmasked in 1961 and sentenced to 42 years imprisonment – one for every British agent he betrayed.
After a stint at the BBC Russian Service in Bush House, Rainsford was “plucked from that role and propelled” to Moscow as a news producer in the BBC’s Moscow office. She arrived in Moscow on the day in August 2000 when Russia finally made a public admission that the Kursk nuclear submarine had sunk.
The Kursk was the first big test of Putin’s presidency and it was the story that defined Putin’s Russia to come; a Russia of secrecy, lies and indifference to life.
From BBC producer, Rainsford was soon promoted to BBC correspondent. It was a heady time to be a BBC Moscow correspondent: the Nord-Ost theatre siege of 2003, the Beslan school terror attack of 2004, the second Chechen War, and interviews and meetings with remarkable Russians. When Rainsford interviewed Anna Politkovskaya, she quotes from her own diary entry of 27 March 2002:
Interviewed Anna Politkovskaya from Novaya Gazeta this evening. She’s been to Chechnya forty times to report on the war, even though it’s dangerous and no one else is doing it. The Kremlin has taken control of all information from Chechnya, but she refuses to play their game. She’s been threatened, intimidated. But she keeps going back. Amazing.
At the end of the interview, Politkovskaya informs her curtly that she shouldn’t be interviewing another journalist about what they’d seen in Chechnya, but should be going there herself. You feel that it’s a reproach that Rainsford took to heart.
Politkovskaya paid for her bravery and refusal to play by the Kremlin’s rules with her life. She was gunned down in the entrance to her block of flats in Moscow on 7th October 2006.
Rainsford left Moscow before that happened, in 2005, to take up postings in Istanbul, Madrid and Havana.
After nine years covering other territories, she writes from Cuba in 2014 that she feels a “total fraud” watching “on TV from thousands of miles away as protestors on Kyiv’s Independence Square were shot by riot police.” By the end of the month, she was reporting from Kyiv, then from the Donbas on the “outbreak of open war.” She was back on her home turf, in her dream job, with husband Kes and puppy, Smudge, waiting at home in Moscow.
Rainsford chronicles the peaks and troughs of the Russian opposition to Putin, telling stories of the most prominent – the murder of Boris Nemtsov, the stellar ascent and wiping out of Alexei Navalny, of Vladimir and Evgenia Kara-Murza, particularly close friends. Goodbye to Russia went to press before the prisoner exchange that saw Kara-Murza’s release. She also describes in detail her encounters and prison correspondence with Paul Whelan, the former US marine who was imprisoned on espionage charges. Ilya Yashin, the Russian opposition politician imprisoned for ‘spreading fake news,’ Oleg Orlov of the Russian human rights organisation, Memorial, charged with “repeatedly discrediting the Russian Army” and Evan Gershkovich, the American journalist, charged with espionage, are each given a chapter, even though their arrests and sentencing took place after Rainsford had been refused entry to Russia. All were found guilty in Russian courts and sentenced to prison. All were released in the August 2024 prisoner exchange.
Drawing on her personal “archive of a dark time,” what she describes as “notes from when Nemtsov was murdered, right up until the attempted assassination of Navalny in August 2020,” as well as on letters home and diaries, even text messages and chats, Sarah Rainsford quarries a rich seam of material to tell the stories of Putin’s Russia. They are, for the most part, familiar stories of the Russian opposition, of individual bravery, of suffering wrought by an indifferent regime, but told in revealing detail and with journalistic fluency and personal involvement.
But it’s close to the end of Goodbye to Russia, that Sarah Rainsford’s book really hits home. In a chapter called “Mugs,” she describes in self-analytical detail her shape-shifting relationship with Russia, the country she had first fallen for in Mr. Criddle’s sixth-form Russian class. The mugs in question were from all over Russia: one from Murmansk, another from Nizhny Novgorod, given to her by a friend of the journalist Irina Slavina (Slavina set fire to herself outside the local Interior Ministry building in October 2020; just hours before, she posted on her Facebook page: “Blame the Russian Federation for my death”), and a “substantial selection of Putin’s mugs.” Rainsford writes:
When I got kicked out, people would tell me it was a ‘badge of honour’ and congratulate me for getting under the Kremlin’s skin. At first that niggled, because I still felt the loss. The remnants of my many years in Russia as either student or reporter were all around me in London, as reminders of the enormous time and effort I’d invested. (…) Even squeezing the last drops of shampoo from a bottle marked in Cyrillic script felt stupidly like the end of an era. Six months later, the invasion of Ukraine had killed that nostalgia dead. (…) When I returned from Ukraine in March, I binned all the Putin mugs.
What is it about girls who study Russian? I’m one myself. It’s like a love affair. I remember how I felt after Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022. I felt crushed, inexplicably so. And then I realized what the feeling was. It was like being told by a lover that it was over, that you had no power to influence the decision, that’s it, finished.
And then the hurt turns to anger, and total disenchantment.
For decades, Rainsford, like other Western journalists and political scientists, had searched for clues about what made Mr. Putin tick. In Goodbye to Russia, she abandons the game: “In the end, I think the man can be understood by his deeds. Putin is Mariupol. He is Bucha. He is what he has done to Ukraine.”
There have been several books published recently that fall into the category of a personal journey through Putin’s Russia. Fiona Hill’s There is Nothing For You Here comes to mind. As a former member of the U.S. National Security Council, specialising in Russian and East European affairs, Fiona Hill shares insights from the top table of US-Russian diplomacy, as well as the backstory to her own schoolgirl Russian lessons.
Sarah Rainsford writes with clarity and passion. Goodbye to Russia is a good read, and Rainsford has a good BBC pedigree. But the nature of being a foreign correspondent is that you are inevitably an outsider, and your job is to interpret the stories that travel well to your editor and target audience. Goodbye to Russia will take its place among the best of those endeavours. But if you want access to Russia’s deepest fault lines, perhaps it takes a Russian journalist writing for a Russian readership to penetrate the everyday of life under Putin. Like Sarah Rainsford, Elena Kostyuchenko uses her experience of reporting on Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine as a personal reckoning in her book, I Love Russia. But for her, the Russia she has loved and lost is not a foreign posting, but a visceral scream of pain. Read in tandem, both these titles offer an inside outside deep dive into what Russia has become over the past quarter century of Vladimir Putin’s presidency.
