Goodbye To Russia by Sarah Rainsford – Review

By Barney Bardsley

The beginning of Sarah Rainsford’s story is not on page one of this book, but on page 43. Here, she writes, “Two weeks after the Soviet Union collapsed, I landed in Moscow with a suitcase full of cheese sauce mix and chocolate, and a guidebook to a country that had ceased to exist.”

This was January 1992, and Rainsford was just 18 years old. She had come to Russia to teach English for five months. She ended up spending the next 30 years enthralled by the place, studying the language at Cambridge University and immersing herself in Russia’s culture and its crazy, chaotic socio-politics, before becoming a BBC correspondent in situ, filing reports from the start of Vladimir Putin’s rule.

All of this came to an abrupt and shocking end in August 2021, when she was summarily expelled from the country as a “threat to national security.” It is rare, even in Putin’s Russia, for a BBC correspondent to be expelled. The Russian leader was clearly baring his teeth — and there was worse, much worse, to come.

Six months later, in February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. So Rainsford’s book, originally intended as a personal account of Russia’s gradual slide from democracy to despotism, became a breathless account of a new and ongoing war, which even she, as an insider witness to the brutality of Putin’s regime, could not have predicted, and which she still finds — like the rest of the reasonable world — to be a bewildering and desperate incursion. “By ordering the full-scale invasion of Ukraine,” she writes, “Putin moved faster than my worst fears.”

“Complex and emotional”

It takes a special kind of person to witness some of the atrocities that Rainsford has, during her long time in Russia — and now, as Eastern Europe correspondent in Ukraine itself — while still retaining a lucid capacity to report, mixed with a deep compassion for the people being attacked, suppressed, and killed. Rainsford is clearly cut from that cloth, and in the course of this book, she relates tale after tale of all the Russian dissidents and politicians she has met through the years — many of them now behind bars, some of them, notably Alexei Navalny, dead — and she spares us none of the details of their suffering, their courage, and their extraordinary determination.

On top of this come the harrowing stories from Ukraine, and the effect this war has had on its people and on her own attitude towards a country — Russia, the aggressor — that she for so long called her “second home.”

Rainsford’s book was finished before the big and unexpected prisoner swap between Russia and the West in August 2024, which saw the likes of U.S. journalist Evan Gershkovich and Russian dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza being released in a big and dubious PR stunt by Putin. But although some of the people whose struggles she relates in the book are now free, many more are still shackled, some forever.

In this complex and emotional memoir, Sarah Rainsford gives a much-needed voice to many of those who have been unjustly silenced, as well as detailing her own deeply personal relationship with a country that meant so much to her, for so long. “Despite all the years I spent there, and all I’ve invested in the place,” she writes, “I no longer feel any nostalgia. I’ve said goodbye to Russia, for now. At least to Putin’s Russia…where there is little left that does not seem tainted.” A sad ending to a long and difficult love affair with a strange, challenging, and increasingly beleaguered country.

‘Goodbye to Russia: A Personal Reckoning from the Ruins of War’ by Sarah Rainsford is published by Bloomsbury