Goodbye to Russia: A Personal Reckoning from the Ruins of War
By Sarah Rainsford, published by Bloomsbury 2024, pp.357
7 October 2023 has become a day of remembrance. On the anniversary on that day in a few weeks, some Russians will also remember Anna Politkovskaya – ‘a journalist who did not lie’. She was gunned down as she entered her apartment on 7 October 2006. No one who hired the hit squad, responsible for the killing, has ever been found.
The same is true of Boris Nemtsov, executed on a Moscow bridge in 2015. Once introduced to world leaders as a future leader of Russia, Nemtsov’s Jewish mother scolded him a few days before his death: “When are you going to stop criticising Putin? He will kill you!”. The former prime minister, John Major, was so upset that he flew to Moscow to attend Nemtsov’s funeral.
These events are among those described by the long-term BBC reporter, Sarah Rainsford in her personal history of resistance to Putin. She had arrived in Russia as an 18-year-old, just a fortnight after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Studying Russian while working in an Irish pub in Moscow, Rainsford developed ‘a deep affection for the country, its language and people’. The Kremlin however gradually came to depict her and the BBC as weaving anti-Russian propaganda. Rainsford and her team were therefore periodically intimidated. In Nizhny Novgorod, they were surrounded by threatening thugs, chanting ‘1-9-3-7, the year of the Great Purge in which Stalin murdered millions. In August 2021, Sarah Rainsford was expelled as ‘a threat to national security’.
The BBC then posted her to Ukraine – in time for Putin’s invasion. She describes the murderous rampage of Russian soldiers in Bucha in harrowing detail.
But Rainsford’s book focuses on the plight of journalists in Putin’s Russia. The Wall Street Journal’s Evan Gershkovich, the son of Soviet Jews who had emigrated to the US decades before, was imprisoned for a year before being released in a prisoner exchange last month. The political activist, Vladmiri Kara-Murza, also of Jewish heritage who was serving a 25 year sentence for ’treason’ was released at the same time..
He thanked his supporters by quoting fromSanhedrin in the Talmud: “He who saves one life – it is as if he has saved an entire world’.
Both were lucky. The journalist Ivan Safronov refused to confess to fictitious charges and was sentenced to 22 years in September 2022. The sudden death of Alexei Navalny earlier in the year, meanwhile distressed many but none more so than his Jewish campaign manager, Leonid Volkov who regularly invited Navalny and his wife to a Shabbat meal. Volkov, now in exile, was himself recently subjected to a hammer attack by an unknown assailant.
In contrast, state-sponsored journalists parrot Putin’s latest banality with gusto. Fellow travellers such as Russia Today’s Anton Krasovsky called for Ukrainian children to be drowned or pushed into burning huts. He was later suspended. Compare this to Irina Slava, editor-in-chief of Kaza Press who was so despairing at what had become of her home country that she set fire to herself in protest in October 2020.
Meanwhile genuine Western reporters have left the field to Putin’s fellow travellers from Belarus, North Korea, China and other unsavoury regimes.
IN recent years, Putin’s regime has weaponised antisemitism to justify its brutal foreign policy. In 2022, Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov caused outrage when he said that Hitler was of ‘Jewish blood’ in an attempt to qualify Russia’s intent to ‘de-Nazify’ Ukraine. The Kremlin’s well-paid news spinners subsequently semi-apologised in the story broadcast in Hebrew. It remained in the Russian version to impress Putin’s people.
Rainsford writes that Putin possess ‘an instinctive dishonesty’ and that his task has never been to eradicate crime but to control it. For truth-telling Russian journalists and dissidents, their deligence strikes at Putin’s very being.
As Rainsford says: ‘Journalists in Russia do not die old.’
Jewish Chronicle 13 January 2024