In 2021, BBC journalist Sarah Rainsford set out to write a book about how Russians who dared to think differently to the Putin regime were being labelled as enemies, foreign agents and even traitors. It was to chart Russia’s slide from democracy and warn of where the crushing of liberties could lead.
She had experienced something of that herself when she was expelled from Moscow as a supposed ‘security threat’. Then, in February 2022, Putin began his full-scale invasion of Ukraine, moving faster than her worst fears. This is the story of how Vladmir Putin changed Russia so deeply that he was able to launch the biggest conflict in Europe since the Second World War.
Sarah’s focus is on the extraordinary characters she has encountered, from the Russians such as Boris Nemtsov and Alexei Navalny who paid with their lives for challenging Putin, to the Ukrainians she found burying their dead in Bucha. It is also her own personal reckoning with Russia, where she first lived in the 1990s: a country she saw emerge from decades of authoritarian rule to embrace new freedoms, that has now quashed internal dissent and declared a ruinous war on its neighbour. The culmination of many years of on-the-ground reporting, Goodbye to Russia shines a light on the attacks on freedom that she has witnessed and paints an intimate portrait of the individuals who have tried to resist.
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