The journalist Sarah Rainsford was in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk when Russia launched its full-scale invasion in the early hours of the morning on Feb. 24, 2022, firing a barrage of missiles at targets across the country and sending columns of tanks across the border. As she tried to brush her teeth with shaking hands amid the sound of distant explosions, Rainsford felt a burgeoning sense of shame.
Rainsford’s connection with Russia went beyond the professional. After learning Russian at her high school in the United Kingdom, she lived and worked in Moscow for more than two decades, becoming deeply attached to the country she called home, its language and its people. She made friends, forged a career, amassed a joke collection of mugs featuring the face of Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, and became well-known to the BBC’s audience back in the U.K. as someone reporting on Russia.
But this all changed as the fighting intensified in Ukraine. Bearing witness to the horrors of a war that quickly left tens of thousands of people dead, Rainsford went on to file dispatches about Russian soldiers looting Ukrainian apartments, the torture and rape of civilians and summary executions. Her previous connection with Russia was shattered.
“I used to feel at home in Moscow,” she writes in her memoir, “Goodbye to Russia” (2024). “That changed abruptly.” When she returned to the U.K. after one wartime trip to Ukraine, she threw out the Putin mugs.
“Goodbye to Russia” is one of a growing number of nonfiction books to be published since the start of the war in Ukraine by journalists, diplomats and other experts — Russians and foreigners alike — that seek to document and understand how Russia descended into full-blown authoritarianism; why and how it reached the point where it could launch such a murderous war on its neighbor. They offer tentative answers to questions like: How complicit are ordinary Russians in the horrors experienced by Ukrainians? How has Putin managed to change Russia in his more than three decades as leader? Why does Russian imperialism run so deep? Is there any hope of a brighter future?
In addition to “Goodbye to Russia,” these books include the Russian journalist-turned-historian Mikhail Zygar’s “War and Punishment” (2023), which recounts the storied history of Ukraine-Russia relations; the reporter Elena Kostyuchenko’s searing portrait of her homeland, the provocatively titled “I Love Russia” (2023); and, most recently, the U.S. diplomat John Sullivan’s “Midnight in Moscow” (2024), about his experiences as Washington’s ambassador in Russia during the buildup to war.
These books, particularly those by Rainsford, Kostyuchenko and Zygar, are also reckonings with Russia by people who know the country intimately and feel — or felt — a deep connection to its society, culture and history. They explore some of the anguish and guilt they experienced as they watched the violence unfold in Ukraine.
Before the invasion, Kostyuchenko, who is openly gay, was a reporter at the independent Russian media outlet Novaya Gazeta, traveling all over the country to file detailed articles on topics like rural poverty, homophobia, the plight of sex workers and the suicide epidemic that blights Russia’s Indigenous communities. “Fascism was descending on our country,” she writes, looking back on her work prior to the war. “It was terrifying and disgusting and heartbreaking.”
Like Kostyuchenko, Zygar is also part of Russia’s small independent media community — he was one of the founders of the television channel Dozhd. And in “War and Punishment,” he admits personal culpability for the invasion. “I am guilty for not reading the signs much earlier. I, too, am responsible for Russia’s war against Ukraine,” he writes, adding, “as are my contemporaries and my forebears.” Zygar’s book is his attempt to atone — by demolishing the myths of what he calls Russia’s “nationalist history,” he wants to help destroy both “Russian imperialism” and “Russian fascism.”
None of these four authors can now travel to Russia. Kostyuchenko and Zygar were among those who left as a result of the invasion of Ukraine and Putin’s subsequent crackdown. (In July, Zygar was sentenced in absentia by a Russian court to 8 1/2 years in jail, on charges of spreading false information about the Russian military, while Kostyuchenko was likely poisoned by Russian agents in Europe in 2022.) Russia is also closed to both Rainsford and Sullivan: She was expelled in 2021 as a “national security threat,” while the former ambassador was banned from the country in March as part of Russian sanctions.
The inability to access Russia is the new norm for most of the Russia experts in the West who help to explain and analyze the country. While much can still be gleaned from speaking to sources inside Russia, an enforced distance also fosters distortion and misunderstanding. The situation is unlikely to change anytime soon.
Earlier this year, a viral song by the anti-war Russian pop singer Monetochka unleashed an outpouring of emotion among emigre Russians on social media. Some posted clips of themselves crying to the chorus, which went: “It was in Russia, that means it was long ago / It was in Russia, that means it was a dream.” The reaction, like some of the books, is a measure of the warm memories of home fostered by emigration, as well as how divorced many are from the reality inside Russia today.
Decades of experience mean that the authors of these books largely avoid the temptation to look back with rose-tinted spectacles. In “Goodbye to Russia,” for example, Rainsford is clear-eyed. She points out that while Putin is a brutal political operator his message clearly resonates with ordinary Russians, and that while Russian opposition activists are undoubtedly brave, they can also be naive to the point of delusion. “Despite all the years I spent there, and all I’ve invested in the place, I no longer feel any nostalgia,” she writes.
Nostalgia, however, does feature in Kostyuchenko’s “I Love Russia” (not least in the choice of her title). Like the Monetochka refrain, some of Kostyuchenko’s evocations of prewar Russia are dreamlike, or relayed with a childlike innocence. At one point she writes, “The Kremlin is so red and sweet, you want to lick it.”
But do these books get any further than indulging the past and anguished hand-wringing? Perhaps the question is unfair. After all, Rainsford’s approach is one of carefully balanced observation. Much of “I Love Russia” is made up of articles written before the outbreak of war, while Sullivan’s focus is, inevitably, the back-and-forth of international diplomacy. Nevertheless, the ways the authors structure their narratives offer contrasting ways of thinking about Russia’s development since the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s.
For Rainsford, who first arrived in Russia as a university student shortly after the collapse, the story of Russia under Putin has been one of freedoms that were gained throughout the 1990s being gradually chipped away. “My career as a journalist has charted the path through which those freedoms have been reduced and reduced and reduced,” she says in a radio interview just before she leaves Moscow for the final time. “We wake up every day and hear news of someone else who’s had a police search of their flat; someone else who’s in court; someone else who’s left the country.”
The country in Rainsford’s book is a Russia of courageous dissidents, independent journalists and campaigners for historical truth. And the violence inflicted by Putin on Ukraine during the invasion was visible — to anyone who was watching — decades earlier, in events like the 2004 Beslan siege when Islamic militants took over a school and clashed with Russian security services, killing over 300 people, or the brutality with which Russia waged war in the North Caucasus in the 2000s, especially in its campaign to snuff out Chechnya’s bid for independence.
Unlike Kostyuchenko and Zygar, however, Rainsford chooses not to use the term “fascism” to describe Russia. The furthest she goes when it comes to more charged language is calling Putin a “liar” on air when reporting from Ukraine, and arguing that journalistic balance does not require giving airtime to easily debunked Russian claims and distortions.
Despite her nostalgia, it’s perhaps Kostyuchenko who offers the clearest explanation of the origins of Russian violence in Ukraine. You do not have to witness atrocities like that of Beslan, or look at the history of Russia-Ukraine relations, she seems to say — just take a trip outside Moscow, where deprived rural communities have long been marked by poverty, alcoholism and official indifference. It is places like these that have generated most of the hundreds of thousands of volunteer soldiers the Kremlin has dispatched to fight in Ukraine. “When I would come back from the field, the Muscovites asked, ‘So what is it like out there, beyond the ring road? Is it scary?’” Kostyuchenko writes. “It really was scary out there, beyond the ring road. Life was threadbare. A lot of violence.”
In “War and Punishment,” Zygar makes the case that Russian imperialism is the primary reason for the invasion of Ukraine. While Zygar’s history focuses on powerful men and women (rather than economic forces or social developments), he is persuasive in drawing out the common threads in Moscow’s attitude toward Ukraine. Zygar describes how, when taking the decisions that led to the disastrous man-made famine in Ukraine in the 1930s, the Holodomor, Josef Stalin believed he had to act immediately or risk “losing Ukraine.” Putin expressed the same rationale for launching his invasion two years ago, claiming Ukraine was on the brink of becoming an outpost of NATO.
Sullivan, the American diplomat, would likely agree with much of Zygar’s diagnosis. In one section, Sullivan makes a lengthy comparison between the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and Hitler’s 1939 invasion of Poland. Sullivan contends that Putin’s view of the world was shaped by being on the losing side in the Cold War, just like Hitler’s beliefs were colored by Germany’s defeat in World War I. Ever since, Putin has been driven, Sullivan argues, by wanting to reverse the Soviet collapse, and “at a minimum,” retake control of several of the former republics of the Soviet Union.
Sullivan, who was appointed U.S. ambassador by then-President Donald Trump, is a fierce cheerleader for the Cold War scholar-diplomat George Kennan, whom he describes as his “Russia muse,” and he updates many of Kennan’s arguments for the late Putin era. Just as Kennan believed the Soviet Union would continue to expand until it was contained by the U.S., Sullivan suggests modern Russia acts in much the same way. “The Russians, like their Soviet predecessors, were relentless in pursuing their interests and in using any means available to do so — facts, law, and morals were never obstacles for them,” he writes.
It is difficult to find a shred of optimism in these books, or even a path that Russia could follow that would take it away from authoritarianism and violent adventures abroad any time soon. Fully erasing the Russian imperialism described by Zygar is a task that will take generations. And the legacy of the violence and deprivation described by Kostyuchenko is likely to be even more deep-seated. Sullivan believes Putin’s Russia is now determined to pursue nothing less than a “clash of civilizations” with the West.
Only Rainsford seems able to entertain the distant possibility of a brighter future, in part because of courageous dissidents and independent journalists like Kostyuchenko and Zygar. “I do hope there will be another Russia one day,” she writes. “A country that is comfortable enough in its own skin to leave others in peace.”
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