An Old Master Too Large to Ignore
Joe Luc Barnes, Farewell to Russia: A Journey Through the Former USSR
Elliott & Thompson, 320pp, £22.00, ISBN 9781783969401
reviewed by WJ Davies
The first line of the Soviet Union’s national anthem proclaimed ‘an unbreakable union of free republics’. Time proved ‘unbreakable’ wrong, and ‘free’ was always pretty dubious. The fortunes of those ‘free republics’ after the USSR’s collapse were as varied as its population, yet they have seldom troubled Western news cycles unless Russia has threatened their sovereignty. Between 2022 and 2024, journalist Joe Luc Barnes visited each of the 15 nations that formerly comprised the USSR. The result, Farewell to Russia, is a timely travelogue that explores what, if anything, still binds the ex-Soviet states together beyond ‘a tragic history and their use of the 1,520mm rail gauge.’ The book also offers a street-eye look at Russia’s recent foreign policy and what happened to its former empire, from independence until the invasion of Ukraine.
Farewell to Russia follows Barnes’ journey chronologically, with chapters on each country interspersed with very welcome regional maps. He begins in Moscow as Russia prepares to invade Ukraine. Just days before, over raw herring and a lot of vodka, Barnes’s friend Yegor waxes lyrical about how modern Moscow has become. Once Russia’s troops cross Ukraine’s border, though, any liberal veneer the city has acquired from eco buses and craft beer bars slips away. Police activity rapidly increases. Barnes’ friends consider protesting but fear arrest. After one of them is forcibly stopped to have their phone searched for opposition and Ukrainian-affiliated content, Barnes decides it is time to leave. He flies to Armenia and from there travels across the Caucasus, Central Asia, Belarus, the Baltics, Moldova and, eventually, Ukraine. He interviews anyone he can, from taxi drivers and barflies to activists and historians, unpicking how these countries see themselves and their 'fraught relationship with an old master too large to ignore.’ Barnes is fluent in Russian, though soon learns that one thing which unites the former USSR is unease about the imperial tongue. Russian is as often a sign of Moscowphiia or Soviet nostalgia as it is the language of modernity and commerce.
Brief histories provide context in each chapter, but the book’s worth is in what Barnes gleans from across dinner tables or adjacent bar stools. In Armenia, over homemade wine at a family barbecue with Artur, who picked him up while he was hitchhiking to Goris, Barnes learns about the hostilities with Azerbaijan that have dominated Armenian politics since independence. The conversation gets heated at times, yet the family respects Barnes’ desire to see the conflict from each angle. ‘You need to see both sides,’ Artur muses. ‘Mercedes-Benz is older than their country!’ his brother Abram quips in protest. Many Armenians Barnes meets dismiss ‘post-Soviet’ as a way to describe modern Armenia. ‘Armenia is not a post-Soviet country; it’s a post-genocide country. The Soviet period is nothing to what we went through at the start of this century,’ a local journalist tells him. But the war over the Nagorno-Karabakh region has left Armenia with little choice about its economic future. Russia offers lifelines, be it through remittances sent home from Armenians working in Moscow and St Petersburg or the Eurasian Economic Union, which Vladimir Putin one day hopes will reunite all ex-Soviet states.
Azerbaijan itself has not had to cosy up to the Kremlin in the same way thanks to its oil and gas, which are especially appealing to Europeans looking for alternatives to Russian energy. Yet democracy has not followed. A nationalist dictatorship filled Azerbaijan’s political vacuum in the nineties and the same ruling family governs today. Opposition voices are silenced and corruption is rife. A lack of opportunities for young people makes it a place of hope with few prospects. ‘My sister only had enough money to send one child to university,’ an Azeri local tells Barnes; the other is headed for Poland to work in a butcher’s factory.
In Georgia, Barnes meets an activist who reveals how Russia disrupts integration with Europe by funding the Georgian Orthodox Church to oppose LGBTQ+ rights as ‘degenerate’ Western values. The strategy has attracted support from ultra-conservatives in America, who have also provided resources to the Church. In doing so, Putin has successfully weaponised homophobia, ‘creating instability, [and] undermining the idea of pro-EU integration.’ Georgia broadly remains in favour of Europe but has struggled to tackle the economic disparity that emerged since independence. As a result, many Georgians who feel left behind look fondly on the Soviet era, as a time when a cobbler’s son could become the leader of a superpower, regardless of the monster he turned out to be.
Central Asia shows Barnes the role China has carved out for itself in the former USSR. ‘All five Central Asian states have been happy to accept Beijing’s help for everything from roadbuilding to oil refineries,’ Barnes writes, ‘with lending running to tens of billions of dollars.’ The full might of China’s soft power in action, Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative is by far the most ambitious international infrastructure project since the Marshall Plan, and just as politically motivated. What will happen when China calls in its debts remains to be seen. It would have been interesting if Barnes had probed a little deeper into how people in the region feel about another Communist power preparing to flex its muscles in their territory.
The Baltic States further complicate what it means to be ‘post-Soviet’. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are nations which only became Soviet through the expansion of the Iron Curtain. They are therefore not new states created after independence but independent states that have shed their occupiers. No one refers to France as a post-Nazi country, an indignant local contact tells Barnes. He wonders silently whether ‘it would be churlish to point out that a four-year wartime occupation is a bit different to half a century of Soviet rule.’ What mattered most in the Baltics following the fall of the Soviet Union was that they join the EU and NATO as soon as possible. They reformed at pace, tackling corruption, debt management and election transparency in time to be accepted en masse into the EU in 2004.
Barnes observes a degree of irony in the Baltics trying to assert their freedom and independence from centralised rule only to subsequently ‘have been forced to outsource their government’s power,’ but then it would be churlish to point out that there is quite a difference between the iron clasp of Moscow and the mutual support promised by the EU. Whatever its faults, at least the EU does not solve its problems with coups, repression and assassinations. Generally, however, Barnes’ pragmatic scepticism serves him well, whether directed at those who romanticise the Soviet era or overestimate the joys of independence, or the well-meaning but ultimately patronising gaze the West still casts over much of the former Eastern Bloc.
When Barnes reaches Kyiv, the second thing that shocks him (the first is the bullet proof vests in the trunk of his friend’s car) is how many people continue going about their daily lives. They go to work. They socialise. The Ukrainian Railway runs on time. Living life has become resistance. He is amazed to find Kyiv’s restaurants crowded and buzzing. When he asks what would happen if an air raid siren went off, his friend laughs. ‘We can’t stop life for every air alert. We’d get nothing done. And sometimes you can’t find cover.’ Black humour is a common trait among the people Barnes meets throughout his travels, be it jokes about life under the Soviets or jibes over who makes the best potato pancakes.
Barnes is good company on the page, acerbic but easygoing, as are the many people he drinks and eats with on his travels. Aside from his habit of closing chapters on a bad pun (there’s a particularly excruciating play on piti, an Azerbaijani meat soup), he is a witty writer who successfully balances accessibility with insight. Full of food, booze and laughter as well as many nuanced appraisals of the Soviet and post-Soviet eras, Farewell to Russia provides a humanising corrective to the cold eye of political history usually cast on the USSR, inserting life into places too often defined by their tragedies. These are countries many of us still fail to understand. As the war in Ukraine continues and Putin’s imperial ambitions persist, knowing more is the least we can do.
Farewell to Russia follows Barnes’ journey chronologically, with chapters on each country interspersed with very welcome regional maps. He begins in Moscow as Russia prepares to invade Ukraine. Just days before, over raw herring and a lot of vodka, Barnes’s friend Yegor waxes lyrical about how modern Moscow has become. Once Russia’s troops cross Ukraine’s border, though, any liberal veneer the city has acquired from eco buses and craft beer bars slips away. Police activity rapidly increases. Barnes’ friends consider protesting but fear arrest. After one of them is forcibly stopped to have their phone searched for opposition and Ukrainian-affiliated content, Barnes decides it is time to leave. He flies to Armenia and from there travels across the Caucasus, Central Asia, Belarus, the Baltics, Moldova and, eventually, Ukraine. He interviews anyone he can, from taxi drivers and barflies to activists and historians, unpicking how these countries see themselves and their 'fraught relationship with an old master too large to ignore.’ Barnes is fluent in Russian, though soon learns that one thing which unites the former USSR is unease about the imperial tongue. Russian is as often a sign of Moscowphiia or Soviet nostalgia as it is the language of modernity and commerce.
Brief histories provide context in each chapter, but the book’s worth is in what Barnes gleans from across dinner tables or adjacent bar stools. In Armenia, over homemade wine at a family barbecue with Artur, who picked him up while he was hitchhiking to Goris, Barnes learns about the hostilities with Azerbaijan that have dominated Armenian politics since independence. The conversation gets heated at times, yet the family respects Barnes’ desire to see the conflict from each angle. ‘You need to see both sides,’ Artur muses. ‘Mercedes-Benz is older than their country!’ his brother Abram quips in protest. Many Armenians Barnes meets dismiss ‘post-Soviet’ as a way to describe modern Armenia. ‘Armenia is not a post-Soviet country; it’s a post-genocide country. The Soviet period is nothing to what we went through at the start of this century,’ a local journalist tells him. But the war over the Nagorno-Karabakh region has left Armenia with little choice about its economic future. Russia offers lifelines, be it through remittances sent home from Armenians working in Moscow and St Petersburg or the Eurasian Economic Union, which Vladimir Putin one day hopes will reunite all ex-Soviet states.
Azerbaijan itself has not had to cosy up to the Kremlin in the same way thanks to its oil and gas, which are especially appealing to Europeans looking for alternatives to Russian energy. Yet democracy has not followed. A nationalist dictatorship filled Azerbaijan’s political vacuum in the nineties and the same ruling family governs today. Opposition voices are silenced and corruption is rife. A lack of opportunities for young people makes it a place of hope with few prospects. ‘My sister only had enough money to send one child to university,’ an Azeri local tells Barnes; the other is headed for Poland to work in a butcher’s factory.
In Georgia, Barnes meets an activist who reveals how Russia disrupts integration with Europe by funding the Georgian Orthodox Church to oppose LGBTQ+ rights as ‘degenerate’ Western values. The strategy has attracted support from ultra-conservatives in America, who have also provided resources to the Church. In doing so, Putin has successfully weaponised homophobia, ‘creating instability, [and] undermining the idea of pro-EU integration.’ Georgia broadly remains in favour of Europe but has struggled to tackle the economic disparity that emerged since independence. As a result, many Georgians who feel left behind look fondly on the Soviet era, as a time when a cobbler’s son could become the leader of a superpower, regardless of the monster he turned out to be.
Central Asia shows Barnes the role China has carved out for itself in the former USSR. ‘All five Central Asian states have been happy to accept Beijing’s help for everything from roadbuilding to oil refineries,’ Barnes writes, ‘with lending running to tens of billions of dollars.’ The full might of China’s soft power in action, Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative is by far the most ambitious international infrastructure project since the Marshall Plan, and just as politically motivated. What will happen when China calls in its debts remains to be seen. It would have been interesting if Barnes had probed a little deeper into how people in the region feel about another Communist power preparing to flex its muscles in their territory.
The Baltic States further complicate what it means to be ‘post-Soviet’. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are nations which only became Soviet through the expansion of the Iron Curtain. They are therefore not new states created after independence but independent states that have shed their occupiers. No one refers to France as a post-Nazi country, an indignant local contact tells Barnes. He wonders silently whether ‘it would be churlish to point out that a four-year wartime occupation is a bit different to half a century of Soviet rule.’ What mattered most in the Baltics following the fall of the Soviet Union was that they join the EU and NATO as soon as possible. They reformed at pace, tackling corruption, debt management and election transparency in time to be accepted en masse into the EU in 2004.
Barnes observes a degree of irony in the Baltics trying to assert their freedom and independence from centralised rule only to subsequently ‘have been forced to outsource their government’s power,’ but then it would be churlish to point out that there is quite a difference between the iron clasp of Moscow and the mutual support promised by the EU. Whatever its faults, at least the EU does not solve its problems with coups, repression and assassinations. Generally, however, Barnes’ pragmatic scepticism serves him well, whether directed at those who romanticise the Soviet era or overestimate the joys of independence, or the well-meaning but ultimately patronising gaze the West still casts over much of the former Eastern Bloc.
When Barnes reaches Kyiv, the second thing that shocks him (the first is the bullet proof vests in the trunk of his friend’s car) is how many people continue going about their daily lives. They go to work. They socialise. The Ukrainian Railway runs on time. Living life has become resistance. He is amazed to find Kyiv’s restaurants crowded and buzzing. When he asks what would happen if an air raid siren went off, his friend laughs. ‘We can’t stop life for every air alert. We’d get nothing done. And sometimes you can’t find cover.’ Black humour is a common trait among the people Barnes meets throughout his travels, be it jokes about life under the Soviets or jibes over who makes the best potato pancakes.
Barnes is good company on the page, acerbic but easygoing, as are the many people he drinks and eats with on his travels. Aside from his habit of closing chapters on a bad pun (there’s a particularly excruciating play on piti, an Azerbaijani meat soup), he is a witty writer who successfully balances accessibility with insight. Full of food, booze and laughter as well as many nuanced appraisals of the Soviet and post-Soviet eras, Farewell to Russia provides a humanising corrective to the cold eye of political history usually cast on the USSR, inserting life into places too often defined by their tragedies. These are countries many of us still fail to understand. As the war in Ukraine continues and Putin’s imperial ambitions persist, knowing more is the least we can do.