Throughout what is essentially an autobiography, spanning a third of her life, Rainsford displays a deep affection for Russia itself. The book is rich with descriptions of everyday life as well as the brutalities of Putin’s dictatorship. She displays considerable personal courage, in a country where the media is totally dominated by the state and the state is totally dominated by the president.
Since Vladimir Putin came to power in Russia at the turn of this century – alternating as president and prime minister – the nature of his rule has become more and more dictatorial and power-crazed. He followed on from Boris Yeltsin and the tumultuous years of wild-west style appropriation of state banks and enterprises by well-placed high-ups in the state apparatus and the so-called Communist Party.
During the early 1990s, when Vladimir Putin was working for the KGB in Leningrad/St Petersburg, Sarah Rainsford was visiting and living in the same city. Diary entries included in her book cover what was for her a relatively carefree period in the country’s ‘Northen capital’. Anyone who lived there at that time, as I did, working on behalf of the Committee for a Workers’ International, will find her descriptions of the highs and lows of life there familiar.
In spite of a somewhat ‘freer’ atmosphere in that city, this was a period of extreme shortages and deprivation for the mass of the population across the vast USSR. Mikhael Gorbachev’s zig-zagging ‘reforms’ – of ‘perestroika’ and ‘glasnost’ – had been failing to revive the ailing state-owned planned economy. The ‘Chicago Boys’ – young proponents of ‘shock therapy’ privatisation and the rapidest possible ‘transition to the market’ – provided a cover for the mass looting and wrecking of a once-mighty state-owned planned economy.
In Rainsford’s book there are only passing references to what followed the attempted coup in 1991 – Gorbachev’s rapid demise, the break-up of the USSR, and the early Yeltsin years. The author concentrates on the 21st century and Putin’s rise to absolute power.
Like most journalists, Rainsford draws direct parallels between what became the dictatorship of Putin and that of Stalin, ignoring the completely different class basis of these dictatorships. Stalin persecuted millions of political opponents and innocent citizens, but brooked no elements of capitalism. His rule, and that of his successors, was based on a vast, bureaucratically-run state-owned economy, right up until 1991 – the year the Soviet Union collapsed.
Rainsford seems to have believed that genuine democracy in Russia would accompany the re-establishment of private ownership of banks, industry and land under the first elected Russian president, Boris Yeltsin. In spite of all his earlier promises, nothing of the sort happened. This great ‘democrat’ had indeed, in earlier times, travelled round Moscow on buses instead of in the limousines of the party bureaucrats. In August 1991, after the defeat of the ‘old guard’ and their attempted coup, he had stood on a tank at Moscow’s White House trumpeting the merits of democracy. But after just two years as Russia’s president, he was sending tanks against that same building and ousting Moscow’s elected regional government.
It is clear from the author’s own accounts that Putin’s main pre-occupation has always been accumulating the maximum possible wealth and power in his own hands. To give an idea of his luxurious living, she quotes from the anti-corruption campaign material of the ill-fated oppositionist, Alexei Navalny. It details Putin’s vast holiday complex in Crimea – his villa with a cinema, theatre, luxury pool and bars.
Sarah Rainsford herself had been thrown out of Russia before the horrific death in a prison camp of Alexei Navalny. He was, indeed, a principled politician prepared to put his life on the line to cleanse the new Russian capitalism of oligarchy and dictatorship. But, as Marxists continually explain, there is no such thing as clean or democratic capitalism.
Putin has long been intent on maintaining oligarchic capitalism in Russia as well as accumulating vast personal wealth. He is the richest of the gang and has made himself president for life. Only occasionally feigning democracy at election time, he has ferociously clamped down on all opposition within Russia. Since the invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, he has also demonstrated his intention of extending Russian rule – firstly to what he labels ‘fascist’ Ukraine, and then, maybe, to other former republics of the USSR.
Sarah Rainsford was also no longer in Russia when Putin’s ‘Special Military Operation’ began. She has, in fact, filed reports from Ukraine of its gruesome results – for civilians and soldiers alike. Before being thrown out of Russia, on the orders of Putin, she had certainly lost any illusions she might have had in his democratic credentials.
During her time in Russia, as well as afterwards in Ukraine, Rainsford shows considerable personal courage and a determination to report the ugly truth of many gruesome events. In September 2004, she was at the scene of the Beslan school massacre, where hundreds of children and adults were slaughtered by Chechen ‘militants’. At the time of bloody confrontations on the streets of Belarus, she travelled to the country to confront Viktor Lukashenko over his patently false claim to have won the presidential election. She challenged Chechnya’s boss and friend of Putin – Ramzan Kadyrov – in a one-to-one interview.
Rainsford had taken considerable risks befriending the courageous Russian journalist, Anna Politkovskaya. It had been this brave journalist who had urged her to travel, as she herself frequently did, to war-torn Chechnya and witness the daily atrocities being carried out there by Russian troops. In 2006, Politkovskaya was shot dead in the lift of her apartment block.
The book describes in some detail the murder in February 2015 of another vocal critic of Putin, Boris Nemtsov. She explains how he had been promoted by Boris Yeltsin in the democracy wave of the early 1990s and appointed governor of the formerly closed city of Nizhny Novgorod. As Yeltsin waged war on Chechnya, and turned towards Putin to become his successor, Nemtsov had fallen out of favour. He then became a familiar face at the head of demonstrations against Putin demanding democratic rights and against his early military activities in Ukraine, including the annexation in 2014 of Crimea.
Boris Nemtsov was accustomed to spending time in custody. One stint Rainsford mentions in the book was for participating in the massive Bolotnaya protests of 2011 against Putin’s ‘re-election’. Prominent amongst the placards were slogans like ‘Down with the rule of criminals and robbers!’.
It was ten years after this that Rainsford was expelled from Russia as a ‘security threat’. By then, many other foreign journalists had been forced to leave, and she was seeing many Russians, including Alexei Navalny and Vladimir Kara Murza, sentenced to longer and longer periods in Putin’s jails and prison colonies.
Mass protests in Putin’s Russia dwindled and a movement of workers against war and capitalism seemed off the agenda. In this kind of situation there are sometimes misguided but extraordinary acts of desperation and personal bravery carried out by individuals against despotic rulers. Rainsford describes in detail one horrific incident that took place in Nizhni Novgorod. It was in the very city where Boris Nemtsov had been the popular mayor, in those days of big illusions in a brighter future under capitalism.
A local woman journalist, Irina, who had long been campaigning against the daily injustices of Putin’s rule and whose family was constantly being harassed by the security police, set light to herself and burned to death outside the city’s interior ministry building. Supporters were pleading with her not to go ahead but failed to stop her. It is possible that, in desperation, Irina had thought her action could spark a wave of anti-government protest like that in Tunisia in 2011. Instead, she became just another lone victim of a brutal dictatorship leaving behind a bereft family.
Sarah Rainsford wrote an email to her editor saying how much this story bothered her: “everyone in opposition had been harassed, persecuted. So she was not only objecting to what they did to her, specifically, but to the system that does that to people. What’s so shit about it”, Rainsford continues, “is that it will change nothing”.
There is one fundamental flaw in the approach of even the most radical of journalists who work for establishment media like the BBC or the capitalist press. It is their belief that in today’s crisis-ridden world, capitalism – a system where one property-owning class dominates the rest of society – can be essentially democratic. Rainsford talks about a “slide from democracy”, but under Putin – as well as Yeltsin and his successors – there had only ever been a figment of democracy.
The author managed to broadcast in some detail the truth about unresolved problems of everyday life in Putin’s Russia and the discontents of its people. When covering referendums or even ‘elections’, she made a point of visiting poverty-stricken communities in isolated Russian villages. She knew well that these contrasted starkly with the pampered lives of the oligarchs in their vast city mansions and luxury ‘dachas’ in the countryside.
She remembers the referendum of 2011: “A giant act of theatre. We’d filmed people voting in mobile polling stations, lured there by questions about same-sex marriage and protecting pensions… They (the questions) were a distraction from the only issue the Kremlin really cared about, which was keeping Putin in power… the people’s choice. A true democrat”.
But again, however personally brave and even outspoken journalists like Rainsford can be, they hang on relentlessly to the idea that ‘normal’ capitalism is democratic. This is an illusion not only in relation to Russia and other dictatorships, but wherever industry, land and the banks are owned by just a few, always very rich, individuals.
The only period of genuine democracy in Russia – in fact, in the world – came immediately after the successful Bolshevik revolution of October 1917. Representatives elected to the ruling soviets were subject to recall and received no more than a skilled worker’s wage. Within seven years of the ousting of the Tsars, however, a vast under-developed country was wracked by civil war and imperialist intervention. Socialist revolution did not succeed in the more advanced economy of Germany and elsewhere. From 1924 onwards, under the dictatorship of Joseph Stalin, political counter-revolution and the wiping out of workers’ democracy were inevitable.
Sarah Rainsford, and other journalists like the Guardian’s Luke Harding, are honest and well-meaning. Most have suffered the same fate as she has and can no longer work in Russia. Harding was expelled before her in 2011. Evan Gershkovich, who worked in Russia for the Wall Street Journal, was jailed in 2023 for a term of sixteen years for ‘espionage’. He is now home in the US only as the result of the biggest prisoner swap since the end of the ‘Cold War’. Russian-born oppositionist, Vladimir Kara-Murza, was also released in that same prisoner exchange deal. He had been sentenced to 25 years in prison in 2023 and, like his father before him in Stalin’s day, sent to Siberia.
Since Rainsford’s own expulsion from Russia, many more Russian journalists and oppositionists have been locked away for years, now mainly on the pretext of voicing opposition to the war in Ukraine. This includes even the ageing academic socialist, Boris Kagarlitsky, serving a brutal five-year prison sentence which could kill him.
The prospect of new struggles on the part of the working class and youth of Russia and Ukraine might seem remote. Even minimum democratic rights are denied. But anger will accumulate, and workers will draw on distant memories of past revolutionary movements. They will embark on a fight to the finish not just to clean up capitalism but to sweep the whole rotten system from the face of the earth.
Goodbye to Russia – A personal reckoning from the ruins of war
By Sarah Rainsford
Published by Bloomsbury, 2024, £22
