THE GOOD RUSSIAN

In Search of a Nation’s Soul

JANA BAKUNINA

THE BRIDGE STREET PRESS

First published in Great Britain in 2025 by the Bridge Street Press

Copyright © Jana Bakunina 2025

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-0-349-13660-8

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In memory of my grandfather –
what would he have made of it all?

Since February, we have been living in a black-and-white world, in which you are either on one side or the other.

LEV RUBINSTEIN (1947–2024)

Contents

Author’s Note

1. ‘What Is the Purpose of your Visit?’

2. Doublethink

3. Life Goes On

4. Churchill’s Key

5. ‘I Only Scream When I’m Asleep’

6. Suspended Hope

7. ‘Crimea Is Ours! And Are You Ours?’

8. ‘I Couldn’t Live There Any More’

9. The Accidentals

10. Cancel Putin not Pushkin

11. The Good Russian

References

Acknowledgements

Index

Author’s Note

I have changed many names and identifying details, including occupations, backgrounds, family members and settings, to respect the privacy and protect the safety of those I have spoken to, without compromising the integrity of the story. I have reconstructed conversations to the best of my ability, evoking the essence and spirit of what was said to me.

Chapter 1

‘What Is the Purpose of your Visit?’

The border control officer appears to be in his early twenties and inspects my Russian passport through thick glasses. His mother must feel relieved for him – his job at a provincial border control office, a branch of the Federal Security Service, and his severe myopia keep him safe from the war in Ukraine. He looks up and asks to see my British passport. I comply with his request. I even smile. He pauses for a moment, taken aback by my friendliness, then peers at his computer. I’ve been through this before.

A year earlier, in September 2022, I had travelled to Russia for the first time since the full-scale invasion began that February to look after my mother, who had fallen and fractured her sacrum. Without direct flights to Russia from Europe, I flew to Tallinn and then took a bus to Narva, a town with a striking backdrop: two medieval castles standing sentinel on opposite sides of the river that separates Estonia from Russia. It was at the Narva border control office where I was first asked to surrender my British passport and smartphone before being photographed, fingerprinted and interviewed by two plain-clothed Federal Security Service officers. At the time, I struggled to stay composed. While the officers remained courteous, they never explained why I had been singled out. It was only during questioning that they revealed what made me ‘special’: ‘You are a citizen of a non-friendly state.’ Having had dual British and Russian citizenship for over a decade, I had already been asked, ‘Are you a spy?’ and ‘Do you know anyone at MI6?’ ‘Not that I know,’ I replied. ‘But spies? They could be anywhere.’ They released me, promising another ‘chat’ the next time I travelled to Russia. I remember leaving the building with the heaviness of a cartoon convict, dragging a ball and chain. Nothing truly grave happened, but I felt exhausted.

This time in October 2023, I had decided to fly from Turkey directly to Yekaterinburg, where I grew up. Yekaterinburg, Russia’s fourth-largest city of some 1.5 million people, is situated in the Ural Mountains, which divide Western Russia and Siberia. It takes a two-hour flight or twenty hours on a fast train to travel there from Moscow. Famously, it is also where Tsar Nikolai II and his family were kept under house arrest and then executed by Bolsheviks in July 1918.

I grew up in a middle-class family of civil servants and academics. During perestroika, my father turned to entrepreneurship, initially importing microscopes and other lab equipment from Germany. At school, I learned English and later German, eager to study abroad and take advantage of the openness of the 1990s. After two years at a boarding school in Germany where, thanks to my father’s efforts, I received a full scholarship, I came back to Yekaterinburg in the summer of 1998. The city was thriving, with many foreign companies opening offices and showrooms, and Western financiers coming in to meet local aluminium and copper magnates and pour money into the rapidly transforming Russian economy. But that summer, Russia defaulted on its foreign and domestic debt, which led to a financial crisis. My father’s firm, like many small businesses, was nearly wiped out by the devaluation of the ruble. This painful personal experience, coupled with government ineptitude, only strengthened my resolve to leave Russia. I was eighteen years old and with a place at Oxford. I left a year later – just before Putin took over my country – and have lived in the UK ever since.

In the two decades that followed, I have never doubted my Russianness. It stayed with me when I was able to draw on my lived experience under Soviet rule when participating in debates on whether socialism would work in the West. As a Russian, I feel proud of my numeracy, a skill strangely disdained by some Brits. My heritage instilled in me the work ethic that earned me a first-class degree at Oxford and a career in banking. Perhaps it was the intellectual haughtiness of someone brought up on Pushkin, Chekhov and Tolstoy that gave me the confidence to turn from finance to writing. I grew up believing in the proudly multi-ethnic country that had established the periodic table, sent the first man into space and defeated fascism. I had to re-examine how I thought about Russia in relation to the former Soviet Republics and get other perspectives on the Second World War. While I had to rethink what I’d imbibed during my Soviet childhood, I never betrayed my nationality. I call London my home, but Russia – with all its maddening contradictions – is where I came from. I used to think of it as a place I could always return to, like a sailor occasionally dreaming of their homeland.

Hence, when the bespectacled officer enquires about the purpose of my visit, it stirs something within me. I remain a Russian citizen; do I need a reason to return? To the officer, I reply, ‘I am visiting my family.’ This is true enough. But I’m also here to ask questions and seek understanding. This I keep to myself. He returns my passports and waves me through. Relief.

The questions began percolating on that fateful morning of 24 February 2022.

The day before, the Evening Standard had got in touch, asking if I wanted to write a comment piece about the massed Russian troops at the eastern border of Ukraine. I interviewed a few people in Russia and, later that evening, called my friend Sergiy in Kyiv. He was in a bar. I could hear music and buzzing voices in the background. ‘We don’t know what’s happening, but hey, life goes on,’ he said. We chatted for a bit longer, and I called it a night. In the morning, I woke up to a different world – one where Russians invade, kill, loot and pretend it’s some swift, trivial ‘special operation’. I was stunned. Furious, ashamed, but most of all helpless. The article had to be rewritten. That is what pulled me out of my stupor. It was difficult to find words to express the anger I felt.

The day after the invasion, I was sitting in my therapist’s office. She was about my age, kind and lively, her sleeves rolled up. I told her about my background and how I was finding it difficult to talk to anyone about what was happening. As a Russian, I was proud of the sacrifice my ancestors had made to defeat Hitler in the Second World War. As a child, I believed in ‘Never again’ and grew up a pacifist. How was it possible that the same nation that had saved the world from Nazism was now the aggressor? How could our president be compared to Hitler?

I told my therapist that my friends in London didn’t seem to know what to say. I didn’t blame them. I told her I could not speak to my father, who thought me a traitor for living in the West and taking Ukraine’s side ever since Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and sent mercenaries to fuel separatism in Eastern Ukraine. When I talked to my mother, the person I am closest to, I stumbled. It was an open wound. I had called her the day before expecting to engage in mutual outrage. Instead, my mother was silent. She did not believe Russia had invaded Ukraine. ‘It was just a “Special Military Operation”,’ she said. ‘We are firing missiles at Kyiv,’ I pointed out. ‘I’ve seen photos and videos, and I spoke to Sergiy – you once met in Hyde Park?’ I tried to open her eyes but only succeeded in making her upset. She said I was frightening her with my ‘aggression’, a word I recognised from the Kremlin’s rhetoric. ‘It’s Western aggression,’ they’d say again and again, defending their actions in Syria or explaining pro-EU demonstrations in Ukraine in 2013 or even post-2020 presidential election protests in Belarus. In any case, my mother didn’t want to talk to me ‘about that’.

‘About that’ meant Putin tightening his authoritarian control; it meant the assassination of opposition politicians; the fabulous wealth of Putin’s men; corruption and theft; the closing down of independent media outlets and NGOs; Russia’s meddling in Syria and African countries like Mali and Burkina Faso; and the endless anti-Western propaganda on TV and online. My mother didn’t want to hear any of that. Hoping to preserve a relationship with at least one of my parents, I rarely brought those things up. Had I been wrong not to challenge her sooner? In the days after the invasion, we simply could not speak to each other. We both cried, but not together.

The therapist listened to me and sat very still. Looking at the clock in the room, I asked if it was time. She pressed her lips together and stood up. Her eyes were moist. I thanked her and left. That night I sent a message to my mother saying that I loved her. The next morning, I went to an anti-war protest in Westminster.

If I was a little nervous about joining Ukrainians who would be making it very clear how they felt about Russia, I was soon swept away by the community of like-minded people carrying placards like ‘I’m Russian and I’m Ashamed’, ‘Hands Off Ukraine’ and ‘Stop Putin’. Here I found Russians and Ukrainians huddling together with deep bags under their eyes; Russians who found it impossible to talk to their parents back home; and Kazakhs, Georgians and Estonians who had come out in solidarity. We hugged and exchanged contact details. We also shared stories about Russians who had lived in London for years and yet still staunchly supported Putin. We all hoped that they would finally question their allegiance. Few of them did. One ‘Russian mums’ neighbourhood WhatsApp group became flooded with xenophobic memes and calls for ‘the necessary measures to purify Ukraine’. I couldn’t even begin to process the hatred.

Meanwhile, speaking out in Russia, already very difficult and mostly illegal after two decades of legislation, became downright impossible. Anyone peacefully demonstrating with a sign reading ‘No to War’ was arrested. Most were beaten up and detained for fifteen days. One Moscow friend who wanted to protest against the invasion told me that she was still breastfeeding her son and did not want to risk arrest. Within ten days of invading Ukraine, the Russian Duma adopted new laws criminalising independent war reporting and ‘discrediting’ or ‘spreading fake news’ about the Russian Armed Forces, whether by protest or social media post. Calling for an end to the war – or even using the word ‘war’ – became punishable by up to fifteen years in prison. Some 150 journalists left Russia within a fortnight.

A friend told me to book a holiday. It seemed a strange idea. Weren’t people fleeing Ukraine, leaving Russia, raising money to support refugees, signing up to take in Ukrainian families, protesting the war outside Russian embassies in every major capital city? In truth, many Russians I knew had succumbed to a similar state of inertia. So many had stopped talking to their families in Russia, unable to reconcile the horror of seeing wounded people and destroyed buildings in Ukraine with their Russian counterparts’ denial that anything tragic was happening. I turned to German post-war literature, like Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader, seeking to soak myself in remorse. But I got distracted by the news. In April 2022, a prominent Kremlin critic, Vladimir Kara-Murza, left his family in the US and travelled to Moscow to speak out in public against the invasion. He was arrested immediately. A thirty-two-year-old artist, Sasha Skochilenko, was arrested in St. Petersburg for replacing a handful of supermarket price tags with messages criticising Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. ‘Stop the war! In the first three days, 4,300 Russian soldiers were killed. Why don’t they show it on TV?’ said one tag. ‘Russian forces have destroyed 80 per cent of Mariupol. For what?’ said another. A year later, Kara-Murza, despite or because of his dual Russian-British citizenship, was sentenced to twenty-five years in a penal colony, charged with ‘high treason’ for ‘disseminating knowingly false information about the Russian Armed Forces’. In November 2023, Skochilenko was sentenced to seven years, a maximum sentence. Fortunately, both of them were released as part of a prisoner exchange on 1 August 2024.

My friend was right: I needed to get away. I went to Ischia, then stayed a few more days on the Amalfi Coast. In Positano, I ordered a coffee in a small cafe and overheard a barista speaking to a waiter in Russian with a Ukrainian accent. I said how sorry I was for what was happening. The barista replied that it wasn’t my fault. Then she told me that she’d come from Mariupol, where she had worked as a florist. I immediately pictured the city, which had come under siege by Russian forces at the end of February 2022. Mariupol’s hospitals and vital infrastructure had been destroyed, depriving its citizens of electricity and drinking water. A theatre, clearly marked as a refuge for children, was struck by missiles. Civilians were denied the chance to escape or access humanitarian aid. The young woman in the cafe was lucky. She escaped and got in touch with a friend who had moved to Positano some years ago. She was able to stay with him and get a job first at a laundry and then at this cafe. She was happier working here as it wasn’t so lonely. ‘Tell me,’ she said, ‘did you make it to Pompeii? It’s a must!’ I nodded, touched by her humanity. Then she followed up: ‘Do Russians know what is really happening to us? How can they support it?’

These questions kept piling up. Unlike in the Soviet days, full media censorship is no longer possible in the twenty-first century. From the conversations with my family and friends, I know that while my mother only watches TV and reads Yandex, the Russian social media portal, on her smartphone, both editorially controlled by the government, many others use VPNs to access banned media sources and subscribe to various broadcast channels on Telegram. My mother too has access to Telegram and, like everyone, chooses what she consumes.

Information still flows into Russia, but getting information out is a problem. A lack of impartial opinion surveys means it is impossible to say how many Russians actually support the regime and its military aggression. Understanding their views is even trickier when there are almost no Western or independent journalists left in the country – some left, some were expelled and some ended up in jail. In March 2023, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was arrested in Yekaterinburg and taken to a prison in Moscow accused of espionage, a charge he, his employer and the US government vehemently denied. In July 2024, he was sentenced to sixteen years in prison before his release as part of the prisoner swap. In October 2023, Alsu Kurmasheva, a dual Russian and US citizen who worked for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, was arrested in Kazan when visiting her family for failing to register as a ‘foreign agent’. In July 2024, she was sentenced to six and a half years for spreading ‘false information’ about the Russian army. Fortunately, she too was released on 1 August 2024. Some thirty Russian journalists, including Antonina Favorskaya, Sergei Karelin, Konstantin Gabov and Artem Kriger, remain behind bars.

Without direct access, the Western media often reports on Russians as ‘them’ – fervent supporters of Putin in the majority and just a handful of brave anti-government activists in opposition. I found myself thinking of the many successful middle-aged Russians I know who consider themselves well-informed, yet genuinely proud of Russia and its foreign policy. I also know people who struggle to breathe in Russia today. Some have left and others have stayed, both groups forced to make all sorts of compromises with the regime and with themselves. These are ordinary people I grew up with in Yekaterinburg. I hated the idea of these individuals being referred to as one homogenous ‘them’.

When I decided to go back to Russia in autumn 2023, I already had an idea that people of different political persuasions had retained their views following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Putin supporters had rallied behind him and his ‘Special Military Operation’; those of his opponents who stayed in Russia had to find a way to adapt to significantly curtailed freedoms. Following local news remotely, watching clips of the Russian TV programmes now banned in the West, reading the press and social media posts covering Russia and speaking to friends in Moscow and Yekaterinburg, I could piece together a patchwork of what it was like to live in Russia. But I sensed that a complete picture would be altogether different. A year earlier, in 2022, while visiting my mother as she recovered from her fracture, I had stayed with her in the countryside and resisted going into town or seeing friends. This time I prepared to immerse myself in Russian life and absorb as much as I could in person. I resolved to listen rather than to argue; seeking to understand rather than question. I also wanted to give a voice to people who are not represented in the Western media: ordinary people who neither speak for the Kremlin nor speak out against the regime in public. How has the war affected their lives, and how do they see the future? Is Russia inexorably trending back towards totalitarianism? Is there any hope of turning that around? What do my friends in Russia think of the West, and can we ever reconcile our diverging views? And what about my own family? Like many other Russian expats, I had stopped talking to my parents about politics because I felt it was futile. Could I at least attempt to understand them?