Goodbye to Russia: A Personal Reckoning from the Ruins of War

By Sarah Rainsford

Bloomsbury, £22

​October 7 has become a day of remembrance. On the anniversary of that day in a few weeks, some Russians will also remember the fearless journalist Anna Politkovskaya who was gunned down as she entered her apartment on October 7, 2006. The people who hired the hit squad have ever been found.

The same is true of the politician and Putin critic Boris Nemtsov, executed on a Moscow bridge in 2015. Once introduced to world leaders as a future leader of Russia, Nemtsov was scolded by his Jewish mother a few days before his death: “When are you going to stop criticising Putin? He will kill you!” Former UK prime minister John Major was so upset by his murder that he flew to Moscow to attend the funeral.

These events are among those described by the BBC reporter Sarah Rainsford in her personal history of Putin’s ruthless repression of resistance. She had arrived in Russia as an 18-year-old just a fortnight after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Studying Russian while working in an Irish pub in Moscow, Rainsford developed “a deep affection for the country, its language and people”. The Kremlin, however, gradually came to accuse her and the BBC as weaving anti-Russian propaganda and Rainsford and her team were periodically intimidated.

In Nizhny Novgorod, they were surrounded by threatening thugs chanting “1-9-3-7”, the year of the Great Purge in which Stalin murdered millions. In August 2021, Rainsford was branded “a threat to national security” and expelled. The BBC then posted her to Ukraine – in time for Putin’s invasion. She describes the murderous rampage of Russian soldiers in Bucha in harrowing detail.

But Rainsford’s book mainly focuses on the plight of journalists and activists, several of them of Jewish descent, under Putin. The Wall Street Journal’s Evan Gershkovich, the son of Soviet Jews who had emigrated to the US decades before, was imprisoned for a year before being released in a prisoner exchange last month. The political activist Vladimir Kara-Murza, also of Jewish heritage, who was serving a 25-year sentence for “treason” was released at the same time.

He thanked his supporters by quoting from Sanhedrin in the Talmud: “He who saves one life – it is as if he has saved an entire world.”

Both were lucky. The journalist Ivan Safronov refused to confess to fictitious charges and was sentenced to 22 years in September 2022. The sudden death of Alexei Navalny earlier in the year, meanwhile, distressed many but none more so than his Jewish campaign manager Leonid Volkov, who regularly invited Navalny and his wife to a Shabbat meal. Volkov, now in exile, was himself recently subjected to a hammer attack by an unknown assailant.

In contrast, state-sponsored journalists parrot Putin’s latest banalities with gusto. Fellow travellers such as Russia Today’s Anton Krasovsky have called for Ukrainian children to be drowned or pushed into burning huts: he was later suspended. Compare this to Irina Slavina, editor in chief of Koza Press, who was so despairing at what had become of her home country that she set fire to herself in protest in October 2020. Meanwhile, genuine Western reporters have left the field to Putin’s fellow travellers from Belarus, North Korea, China and other unsavoury regimes.

In recent years Putin’s regime has both weaponised antisemitism to justify its brutal foreign policy. In 2022, the Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov caused outrage when he said Hitler was of “Jewish blood” in an attempt to qualify Russia’s declared intent to “de-Nazify” Ukraine. The Kremlin’s well-paid news spinners subsequently semi-apologised in the version of the story broadcast in Hebrew. It remained in the Russian version to impress Putin’s people.

Rainsford writes that Putin possesses “an instinctive dishonesty” and that his task has never been to eradicate crime but to control it. For truth-telling Russian journalists and dissidents, their diligence strikes at Putin’s very being. As Rainsford says, “journalists in Russia do not die old”.