In Russia Starts Here: Real Lives in the Ruins of Empire, Howard Amos takes us from historical sites, including Pushkin’s ancestral estate and an ancient monastery, to an orphanage and psychiatric hospital; and from half-abandoned villages to the heavily guarded frontier where Russia meets NATO. To understand the darkness that has captured Russia, Howard journeys through a landscape of small towns, re-wilding fields and dilapidated churches. Among those he meets along the way are border guards and businessmen, the political and religious elite, historians and artists, former Red Army officers, families of Russian soldiers who fought in Ukraine, and indigenous communities caught up in politics of shifting borders.
This is a lyrical portrait of Russia where it meets NATO and the EU – a place of frontiers that reveals unfamiliar and uncomfortable truths. Why do Russians support Putin? Why have hundreds of thousands of Russian men volunteered to go and kill Ukrainians? The answers to these questions are not simple—they are rooted in Russian history, and the lived experience of ‘ordinary’ Russians. Pskov Region is a prism through which to offer some tentative answers.
Published by Bloomsbury Continuum in February 2025, Russia Starts Here was shortlisted for the Pushkin House Book Prize, and has been longlisted for Scotland’s National Book Awards.
The event is taking place in Bush House North East wing, room 1.03.
SPEAKER
Howard Amos is a writer and journalist who has been published by outlets including The Guardian, Newsweek, Foreign Policy, and The Associated Press. Raised in London, he spent a year in Russia’s Pskov Region before working for almost a decade as a correspondent in Moscow. He left Russia in the days after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and, based out of Armenia, did a year-long stint as editor-in-chief of The Moscow Times in exile. He now lives in Edinburgh. Russia Starts Here is his first book.
