Toward the end of her book Goodbye to Russia, Sarah Rainsford, BBC reporter who was expelled from Russia in 2021 as a "security threat," wrote:
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. My bookshelves were loaded with Russian literature and history. I had crates full of notebooks from reporting trips across the country and a phone full of contacts and friends I'd probably never see. Even squeezing the last drop of shampoo from a bottle marked in Cyrillic script felt stupidly like the end of an era.
Still in our kitchen. Six months later, the invasion of Ukraine killed that nostalgia dead. Reporting from the Donbas at first, and then places like Bucha, I was documenting what Russia was doing instead of being forced to hear its denials and distortions.
When I returned from Ukraine in March, I binned all the Putin mugs. For a long time I couldn't bear to see any of the Russia stuff. I couldn't bear even to continue writing this book.
The two books I'm recommending today both offer intense exposure to the realities of today's Russia. Sarah Rainsford's book hit me more personally: it reminded me of my own experiences in Russia on almost every page. She started studying Russian at the same age I did. Her first experiences in the country were at age 18 (in 1992); mine didn't happen until I was 22 (in 1975). I returned to Russia, often to attend board meetings of a Quaker organization, nearly every year between 1994 and 2007, the year we began our ten-year period of service in Elektrostal under Quaker sponsorship. Rainsford spent twenty years as a BBC reporter in Russia, many of those years overlapping with my visits or with our residency in Elektrostal.
Rainsford's book opens with her personal experience of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. At that moment she was in Kramatorsk, Ukraine, and she vividly describes the buildup of tensions just prior to those first hours of invasion, as well as the opening blows of the invasion itself. Her book is framed by those February events, and how it has influenced her relationship to a country into which she invested much of her life.
Much of the book is a well-organized succession of journalistic experiences accompanied by her candid personal reflections. Many events and tragedies of her years as a BBC reporter and producer in Russia may be familiar to you: the incompetent response to the sinking of the submarine Kursk in 2000; the mass tragedy of September 2004 among the students and parents of Beslan, and the death of Anna Politkovskaya, who had refused to give up her coverage of human rights abuses in Chechnya; later, the assassination of Boris Nemtsov; the poisoning of Vladimir Kara-Murza; the suicide of independent journalist Irina Slavina ("Blame the Russian Federation for my death"); the banning of the Memorial organizations.
Along the way, she introduces us to some of the unforgettable personalities who were caught up by these events—or who sparked them. Among them: opposition activist Anastasia Shevchenko in Rostov-on-Don, in 2019, who was arrested for her links with an "undesirable organization," and consequently unable to be with her daughter Alina, when Alina died in an intensive care ward. This incident of gratuitous cruelty sparked a "March of Mother's Fury" in Moscow, with one participant telling Rainsford that "the case proved you could now be arrested in Russia for nothing at all." Rainsford went on to say, "Russia had dozens of political prisoners by 2019, far too many to tell all their stories or attend all their trials. But for me, Anastasia always stood out." The personal tragedy of mother and daughter was one element, but it was also an example of a new category of political repression in the wake of Ukraine's independence movement: the suspicion of people with links, however tenuous, to "undesirable" foreign organizations.
Rainsford's book encompasses the last years of Alexei Navalny's activism in Russia, his poisoning in 2020, followed by treatment in Germany and his return to Russia and immediate arrest on January 17, 2021, and, eventually his death in prison in February of this year, and his burial in Moscow.
Navalny's own account of his life and activism, Patriot: A Memoir, also touched me at a personal level. I loved Sarah Rainsford's book in part because of something we share: a nearly lifelong interest in Russia, as students and then as visitors and residents. Both of us have had to wrestle with the realization that somehow Russia includes both a capacity for extraordinary humanity and self-sacrifice as well as a capacity for systemic cruelty on a mass scale, fueled by greed and assisted by centuries of dysfunctional relationships between those with power and everyone else.
At least that's what it looks like from the outside. Navalny, on the inside of this reality, seemed to have made a decision not to tolerate this contradiction. If Russia is to flourish, cruelty and arbitrary absolutism must be confronted and defeated. The first two-thirds of his book recounts how he came to this conclusion; the last part shows how he paid the price for his convictions, through his prison diaries and many of his Instagram posts right into this year.
The most attractive aspect of his book is also the most difficult: his own cheeky voice. It just seems so odd and delightful that one of Russia's most prominent opposition politicians could be the very opposite of the wooden-faced political operatives, drawing from a limited list of familiar cliches, who usually dominate the scene. Navalny almost died as a result of the Novichok poisoning in Tomsk, but his account of gradually coming out of his coma is sheer comedic genius. That's the joy and tragedy of this whole book: it's funny and refreshing and often very entertaining, even when he describes the remorseless and sadistic realities of maximum security prison life...
... But we already know how the story ends.
We can tell that he often took pride in his political accomplishments. Among the high points of the book is his account of running for mayor in Moscow in 2013; his use of street-level and door-to-door campaigning was traditional in democracies but unusual in Russia. Navalny attributed some of his campaign initiatives to his love of the American television drama The Wire. "In one season there was a storyline about the hero running for mayor of Baltimore. I explained to our staff responsible for organizing meetings with the public that I wanted the same scenario: a stage, chairs for the elderly, groups of other people standing around. That is probably entirely typical in an American election campaign, but no one had done anything like it before in Russia."
In his attempted campaign for president in 2017, he took mass campaigning of this sort to a national level with thousands of volunteers and dozens of campaign offices. But he also often poked fun at himself, writing (for example) about his difficulties in front of the television camera.
A more caustic brand of humor comes out in his accounts of his trials. The material is very rich: in at least two prominent criminal trials, he is accused of "crimes" that are actually normal business practices. One of the trials ended with Alexei's brother Oleg being sentenced to prison for three and a half years, while Alexei himself was given a suspended sentence. For Alexei, seeing his brother in prison while he remained outside was worse than being in prison himself.
In his final post-Novichok prison years, Navalny occasionally confessed to discouragement, but usually his droll voice quickly returned. For example, he gave four reasons for wanting to complete this book, which he had started before returning to Russia from Germany. First, he simply wanted to. Second, he had promised his agents. And then ...
Reasons three and four for writing this book might sound overly dramatic, and if everything ends badly, this will be the point at which my more emotional readers may shed a tear. (Oh, my God, he could see it all coming; imagine how that must have felt!) On the other hand, if everything works out for the best, this could be the most pathetic part. It could be tidied up with a bit of editing or simply omitted, but I have promised myself that this is to be a very honest book.
Reason three, then, is that if they do finally whack me, the book will be my memorial.
Reason four is that, again, if they whack me, my family will get the advance and royalties that, I hope, there will be. Let's face it, if a murky assassination attempt using a chemical weapon, followed by a demise in prison, can't move a book, it is hard to imagine what would. The book's author has been murdered by a villainous president; what more could the marketing department ask for?
This is Russia, too.... I'm taking the opportunity to re-run a slideshow that I posted here in 2013. It's the pages of a booklet presented to me by one of my former students on the occasion of my 60th birthday. (I added translations, and the second slide to explain the title reference to Shurik.)
Ken White's "Thoughts the Day After." Thanks to Tina for the link.
Jeremy Morris considers decolonizing area studies. Russian version/на русском языке.
Greg Morgan on "Safe Passage" at the end of life.
J.B. Lenoir, "Eisenhower Blues."
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