Rainsford’s book, her ‘personal reckoning’, is dedicated to her parents: ‘I won’t [publish] another book ever again,’ she says. (I’m not sure I believe her. She has already written one about her time in Cuba.) ‘But I needed to write this, I think because I felt shame – after the war on Ukraine – for my old feelings for Russia.’
The morning Rainsford was detained at the airport, she filmed herself crying, clips broadcast after she had left Russia. ‘I regret the film of me crying now because I still meet people who think I love Russia. Being expelled was shocking at the time, though, and a big deal for the BBC.’ The book is her way of rejecting Russia, expelling it from her life as it expelled her.
The BBC maintains a presence in the country – Steve Rosenberg is its Russia editor – but it is nowhere near as large as it once was. Rainsford will not be drawn on how correspondents in Russia stay safe from detainment and charges of espionage, except to say there is a need for constant assessment of how their reporting will play with the Kremlin.
Her own book is deeply critical. Is she still at risk? ‘I’m a blip on their consciousness. I wasn’t thinking about that when I wrote it. I was thinking more, “If I die tomorrow, I don’t want to be that person who cried in the airport, that person who was in love with Russia.”
‘Putin is a liar. He and the Kremlin tell lies on a daily basis. There is no pussyfooting around that fact. My job is to report facts… Russia today is an exporter of profound lies, which are terribly disruptive to our Western order. There is no justification for the war on Ukraine apart from Putin’s paranoia and imperial ambitions.’
Warsaw is home, for now: ‘Poland is an opportunity for me to carry on doing the same sort of work… But how long will I be here? I don’t know.’
The morning after we meet, the sun is shining. Warsaw feels like a different city. Rainsford messages me: ‘I’d like to think another Russia is possible one day: the kind of country people like Boris Nemtsov and Anna Politkovskaya dreamed of and where people like Vladimir Kara-Murza would be free. But right now, that Russia feels further away than ever.’
Goodbye to Russia: A Personal Reckoning from the Ruins of War, by Sarah Rainsford (Bloomsbury, £22), is published on 15 August; pre-order from The Telegraph Bookshop here
An extract from Goodbye to Russia: A Personal Reckoning from the Ruins of War
Moscow, May 2015
Three months after Boris Nemtsov was assassinated on the bridge beside the Kremlin, his close friend and political protégé was fighting for his life in a Moscow hospital. By the time Vladimir Kara-Murza’s wife made it to his bedside, his vital organs were shutting down. When Evgenia tried to find out what had caused such catastrophic problems, the chief doctor was blunt to the point of cruelty. ‘Imagine a train. It crushes you. Does it matter what train it was?’ She was told her husband’s chances of survival were around five per cent.
As reports started coming in that the opposition activist was critically ill, I spoke to his father, a well-known journalist. Kara-Murza was in a coma, doctors were still doing tests and his father was cautious at first about suggesting any kind of foul play. An editor in London suggested the very fact an activist had fallen so ill might be a story, so soon after Nemtsov had been shot, but I hesitated. I didn’t know Kara-Murza personally then, but I knew he’d been devastated by his friend’s murder and a doctor had mentioned antidepressants.