Goodbye to Russia

Sarah Rainsford, the BBC's former Moscow correspondent who was expelled from Russia, reveals how Putin so transformed the country she once called home, that he was able to order the horrific invasion of Ukraine

A unique, personal insight into Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the devastating impact his rule has had on his own people and those of neighbouring Ukraine. In 2021, 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 began as the story of Russia’s slide from democracy and a warning of where the crushing of liberties could lead. She had experienced something of that herself when she was expelled from Russia as a supposed ‘security threat’. Then in February 2022 Putin began his full-scale invasion of Ukraine. This is the story of how 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: a country she saw emerge from decades of authoritarian rule to embrace new freedoms in the 1990s 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, bringing a human perspective to a story that is often faceless.