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

In 2021, Rainsford, a longtime Moscow correspondent for the BBC, was expelled from Russia, having been “labeled an enemy,” she writes, “by a country I called home.” Over the years, her deep affection for Russia gradually turned to revulsion as she witnessed President Vladimir Putin’s regime clamp down on liberties, repress its opponents, and ultimately invade Ukraine. In the Soviet era, foreign journalists operated under strict restrictions. By the time Rainsford began covering Russia for the BBC, in 2000, foreign reporters in Putin’s Russia were largely unconstrained—until the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. As a result, most of the major events covered in the book—such as the government’s 2001 takeover of Russia’s largest privately owned media company, the 2004 terrorist attack on a school in Beslan, and the assassination of the liberal politician Boris Nemtsov in 2015—have already been extensively documented in Western media and numerous earlier books. Even so, Rainsford’s writing—on the war, on the Kremlin’s indomitable opponents, on the contrasts between Russia’s harsh realities and the warmth of its people—is vivid and compelling.