by Sarah Rainsford
When an 18-year-old Sarah Rainsford first visited Russia in 1992, she encountered a "warm, chaotic" country that struck her as having "unlimited possibility", said Charlotte Hobson in The Spectator. "She stayed on, studied, worked in an Irish bar in St Petersburg, joined the BBC in 2000 and, after spells in other parts of the world, returned to Moscow as a Russian correspondent from 2014."
But in 2021, her sojourn came to an end: like many other foreign journalists, she was expelled, with no right of return. Now based in Warsaw (she's the BBC's eastern Europe correspondent), Rainsford has written a powerful account of her 30-year relationship with Russia. "Structured as a patchwork of scenes from her experiences, personal and professional, the book is suffused with affection and self-deprecating humour". And it builds to a climax of "undoubted emotional power", as the invasion of Ukraine confirms how far Russia has travelled from the country Rainsford fell in love with.
I read this "excellent memoir" with a "wry smile", said Luke Harding in The Guardian. For, in 2011, I was "expelled in similar circumstances". In both cases, our expulsions were preceded by visits from "FSB goons", who left "f**k you" calling cards in our apartments: a sex manual in mine, and "a large unflushed deposit in each toilet" in Rainsford's. What her book captures so well is Russia's "dysfunctional slide into mass murder". Mid-1990s Russia may have been a "gangster's paradise", but for Rainsford, as for so many others, it seemed to have a "bright future". No longer. "There is little left," she notes, "that does not seem tainted."
"Looming over the book is the personality of Vladimir Putin, whose career, like Rainsford's, stretches from the rackety St Petersburg of the 1990s to imperial Moscow and its devastating war machine," said Edward Lucas in The Times. From the start, she writes, Putin wanted to "remake the Russian state as a fearsome instrument of power". But for a long time, there was "enough normality" for his objective to remain obscure. Unlike many foreign correspondents, Rainsford is "not a swaggerer". Her "drawn-out expulsion" from Russia became an international incident, but she describes it as "stupidly unimportant". In fact, she is a bit too "self-effacing": at times, "readers may wish to know a bit more about the person making the sharp-eyed, empathetic observations". Nonetheless, her book is an important account of Russia's transformation, from a place that "bewitched outsiders" into the "nightmare" of today. |