Good Russian – Bakunina Jana (2025)

“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,” says Simon Kuper, FT journalist and author. When Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in February 2022, writer Jana Bakunina, who has lived in the United Kingdom for 20 years, felt furious, ashamed and, above 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 thriving city seemingly untouched by the war. As she reconnects with old friends, she discovers people who are either content to support a regime that has brought them stability or prefer to stay out of politics. Most painful of all, her once-liberal father has channelled his personal disappointments into becoming a staunch supporter of Putin. In the humane tradition of Russian dissident writers, Bakunina grapples with a universal problem: what happens when a country you love becomes infected by nationalism? What hope remains when voices of conscience are silenced by dictatorship, and can Russians in exile still imagine a liberated future?