An orthodox church, a long curved sword, a candle; a fish, a ladder, a red arrow, a red spoon and a saw blade crowd the canvas around a confused man in a top hat, his mouth open. This is a 1914 work titled Kazimir Malevich An Englishman in Moscow. reading Rebatea new book from TimesSenior Russia correspondent Marc Bennetts, it’s hard not to see him in the picture.
)Credit: Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Subtitled “Witnessing Russia’s Spiral into Madness Under Putin,” Bennetts’ book begins with a familiar story of a hopeful and somewhat disorganized young British man who moves to a foreign country and is (almost) going native. Unfortunately for the author, he traveled to Russia instead of Tenerife or Thailand – and so he was forced to pack up and leave abruptly after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Bennetts recalls his 25 years in the country he came to know very well indeed – far better than Vladimir Putin, he claims – and the amusing and horrifying anecdotes collected along the way. He studied Russian by talking to homeless Afghan War veterans in St. Petersburg, learned to drive a nuclear waste truck in Voronezh, interviewed a psychic who claimed to have Kremlin officials among her clients, escaped drunken fishermen in the Arctic, ate blueberry muffins with religious believers known as ofThe orthodox Talibanextremely drunk with Spartak Moscow hooligans and tried to decipher the neurotic impulses of a nationalist party boss.
But the stories of exotic encounters serve a purpose: to try to answer a series of questions that now keep the author up at night in Britain. Why has Russia “allowed itself to be governed by the same former KGB officer, a man of extraordinary intellectual ability” for more than 25 years? And “how and why did Russia slide so quickly into violent nationalism?” Of course an answer appears immediately. Those who dared to challenge the regime could face professional devastation, torture, enforced disappearance, arrests on trumped-up charges, and imprisonment. But even those who quietly oppose the regime seem to have always been in the minority.
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Does that make Putin supporters a majority? Not really, says the author, pointing to the near-total absence of organic pro-government or, as of 2022, pro-war rallies. To get a good turnout, both federal and local governments had to either force public sector workers to attend a rally—or pay random people to do so. Bennetts tells a fascinating story of a 2018 pro-Putin rally in Tyumen, Western Siberia. It was organized by local opposition activists, curious to see how many people would participate without being offered bribes or pressure. In a city of over 800,000 people, only seven men showed up.
So where does this leave the rest of the country, if both pro-government and opposition-leaning citizens are in the minority? Most simply don’t care, says Bennetts: “The overwhelming feeling I got from traveling through Russia was apathy. Most people were completely convinced that nothing depended on them, a belief that the Kremlin did its best to encourage.”
This pervasive apathy later developed into cynicism and nihilism. Again, why? One gets the idea that it was a consequence of the deep poverty into which millions were plunged after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The author’s first contact in Russia in 1997 was a woman with “a scarf wrapped around the lower half of her face”. He later revealed that “she was embarrassed to have a stranger see her blackened and chipped teeth.” And while life in the big cities has gradually gotten better — and in Moscow some have had it very well over the past two decades — for most of Russia, little has changed. But however small the improvements in daily life, Putin’s rule seems to have been worth it. The author summarizes this logic as: “What were a few stolen votes compared to a guarantee of warmth and electricity?”
None of this is to justify or exonerate the actions of the Russians, or the lack thereof. Early on, Bennetts confesses that he has nothing but loathing for active pro-regime agitation and tacit acquiescence, especially after reporting from Kiev and elsewhere since the full-scale war began. Bennetts has covered cities devastated by Russian airstrikes and interviewed Ukrainians tortured under Russian occupation. Or, for that matter, having reported similar torture used against the opposition inside Russia, when it was still safe enough for him to make a home there.
In 2026, moral outrage at Russians’ perceived indifference to the suffering of others isn’t exactly an original idea. But Bennetts didn’t just judge from afar – he argued with those he disagreed with, from his Russian mother-in-law and neighbors to football hooligans and nationalist firebrands. His recollections of these arguments are perhaps the most compelling part of the book. The narrator is vulnerable, often emotional and sometimes naïve, anything but a detached observer. Take, for example, a visit to a neighbor from his palace, who turned out to be connected to state television and its lies. “I thought she might listen to me if I told her the truth,” Bennetts writes. But listen, she didn’t hear him: “My neighbor’s eyes flashed with sudden fury, and her voice seemed to drop a tone. <…> It was like being possessed by a demon.”
No less amusing are his repeated attempts to awaken the conscience of leading Russian propagandists. As a Russian, “I wanted to look into her eyes, though not for too long, and judge for myself whether she really believed the things she was saying or whether she was just saying them to move up the bloody rungs of Russia’s political ladder,” Bennetts writes of a meeting. Unlike his neighbor, the loyal MP in question found his arguments intellectually stimulating and wanted to keep talking. When Bennett finally presented her with evidence of the illegality being condoned from above, she shot back a desperate message, “What do you want from me?”
The reader is tempted to imagine scenes of an Englishman wandering the streets of Moscow arguing with people from all walks of life. For a change, I found myself mildly scandalized by this image as I shook my head at every page. He describes Russia exactly as millions of Russians in their 30s, myself included, know it without harping on its deep differences from the West – or pretending it’s a proper European country. But the thought of debating politics with perfect strangers, let alone propagandists, is baffling to a Russian. In a fractured and polarized society, there is rarely any interest in a discussion with anyone outside of what is called “people in our circle,” a euphemism for social class and educational background. It takes a stranger with no particular allegiance and some naivete about the country to strike up a conversation.
And whatever little Bennett shares of his post-Moscow life is just as entertaining: a Bristolian returning to England after 25 years, observing Russian superstitions and mixing Russian NO (a filler like “um” or “okay”) in his speech. Perhaps contrary to the author’s design, his quirks make him the book’s most interesting character. He is also the book’s only recurring character. Others are a familiar cast of heroes and villains whose stories would be familiar to international audiences with even the vaguest interest in Russia. Alexey Navalny, Boris Nemtsov, Pussy Riot and others represent one side and Putin, the FSB and nationalist ideologues the other. These mini-profiles sprinkled with the exact quotes expected from each figure provide some new material to understand each side.
Far more intriguing are the mentions of Russians with outlandish life trajectories, like a lesbian rock band playing secret gigs across Moscow, or a teacher in Siberia organizing his colleagues to protest poor wages but remaining a staunch believer in Putin’s benevolence. Another oddball is Jeff Monson, a retired UFC star from Minnesota who moved to Russia to sit on a city council in the Moscow region and work for state propaganda. He tells Bennetts that he doesn’t like being called a “useful idiot” and then proceeds to act exactly like one.
These minor characters rarely get more than a few paragraphs. An exception is a profile of Dani Akeli, a young Russian-Syrian who grew up between Moscow and Aleppo. He studied philosophy in Russia, but was expelled after a conviction for attending opposition rallies. In 2022, he traveled to Ukraine and eventually joined a unit of Russians fighting with the Ukrainian armed forces against their country. The author met him while reporting from Ukraine, and they stayed in touch until Akel’s death on the battlefield, aged 25. Bennetts later brought a photo of Akel’s favorite place in Moscow, Tsvetnoy Boulevard, to the man’s grave in Kiev. It’s a powerful and complex story, not least because even some of Putin’s leading critics have doubts about Russian units fighting on Ukraine’s side.
There is also a larger question on this and other recent books by foreign correspondents. What is their role in an age where social media is flooded with footage of drone strikes, violent crime and mass protests for millions of sleep-deprived news junkies to “monitor”. If Evelyn Waugh wrote Scoop in the 2020s, William Boot would not need to leave his beloved Boot Magna Hall armed with a collapsible canoe and split sticks.
Equally, another type of foreign correspondent, one with a taste for strong opinions about the country, is also at risk. Everyone on the internet has a hot opinion and there are thousands of regional experts with PhDs offering instant analysis. In other words, it will be difficult for a new Robert D. Kaplan or Tom Friedman to break out of the traditional sources of print newspapers, magazines, and serious non-fiction publications.
But there is also a different approach to the role, based on a deep personal connection to the country. Rather than exclusively reporting news from a foreign country or offering grand theories about it, it is built around both personal introspection and what is called strategic empathy, an effort to understand another’s perspective without falling head over heels in love with it. It usually involves spending a long time in a country, city or even neighborhood, instead of going to the office.
After all, Western readers would only care about a distant nation if the correspondent reporting from it felt its suffering as his own, “which in a sense is what love is,” wrote Suzy Hansen in Istanbul. Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World.
Bennetts book passes this test. He moved to St Petersburg in 1997 with “only a handful of Russian words”. In 2022, he was leaving Moscow with his Russian wife and their daughter, and at the time he was dreaming in tongues. “It’s a strange and rare experience to lose yourself so completely in a foreign culture, especially one that had been so inaccessible for so many years,” he muses. Moscow is now closed off once again, at least to those like the Bennetts who have an argument with the Kremlin.
(Further reading: How Russia became a franchise of the Wagner Group)
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