The Good Russian

"This is a unique and necessary book. The Good Russian takes us inside wartime Russia, to a city that Jana Bakunina knows intimately. She brings us face to face with ordinary Russians, and also tells her own compelling personal story. Best of all, she writes very well." Simon Kuper, FT Journalist and author of the bestselling Chums

When Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the writer Jana Bakunina, who has lived in the UK for 20 years, felt furious, ashamed, but most of all helpless. A year later she travelled to her home city of Yekaterinburg to see how ordinary Russians viewed the conflict - and whether the soul of her nation had truly been crushed.

Jana finds a booming city seemingly untouched by war. Reconnecting with old friends, she discovers people either happy to go along with a regime that has brought them stability, or else staying out of politics. Most painful of all, her once liberal father has channelled his personal disappointments into becoming a firm fan of Putin.

In the grand humane tradition of Russian dissident writers, Jana Bakunina grapples with a universal problem: what happens when a country you love becomes infected by nationalism? What hope is there when voices of conscience are silenced by dictatorship? And can Russians in exile still imagine a liberated future?

Jana Bakunina came to Britain in 1999 to study at Oxford University and after a career in finance, she has written on Russia for multiple publications including the Financial Times, New Statesman, The Standard, Sifted and the Spectator. Her fiction was shortlisted in the 2022 Bridport Prize, she was finalist for the 2022 London Independent Short Story Prize and in 2023 came second in the Olga Sinclair Prize.

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