Join Howard Amos for a conversation with Tom Parfitt about his book Russia Starts Here: Real Lives in the Ruins of Empire, which has been shortlisted for the Pushkin House Book Prize 2025. Russia Starts Here offers a critical perspective of modern Russia through the prism of Pskov Region, in the far west of the country, drawing on hundreds of Amos’ interviews and visits over more than fifteen years. 

Pskov Region on Russia’s European borderlands has weathered the tides of history. It was once a thriving nexus of trade, cultural exchange and democratic tradition, and one of the earliest outposts of the Vikings in Eastern Europe. Yet the region and its communities have been shaped by the remnants of successive empires, and today it is one of the poorest and most rapidly depopulating places in Russia.

In Russia Starts Here, Howard Amos examines the legacies of history and the scars of recent politics through the eyes of those who live in Pskov Region. He takes us from historical and cultural monuments, including Pushkin’s ancestral estate, to an orphanage and psychiatric hospital; and from half-abandoned villages to the heavily guarded frontier where Russia meets NATO and the EU.

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 the invasion of Ukraine, and indigenous communities caught up in politics of shifting borders. By bringing together these voices from the periphery into his multifaceted and nuanced book, Amos makes a crucial contribution to our understanding of contemporary Russia.

You can our interview with Howard Amos here.

Howard Amos is a writer and journalist who has been published by outlets including The Guardian, Newsweek, Foreign Policy, The Associated Press and The New Republic. Raised in London, he spent a year living 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. Amos now lives in Edinburgh. Russia Starts Here, published by Bloomsbury Continuum in February 2025, is his first book.

Tom Parfitt lived and worked as a journalist in Russia for twenty years. He was a correspondent for The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph and The Times and frequently reported on Chechnya and the wider North Caucasus. His book High Caucasus: A Mountain Quest in Russia’s Haunted Hinterland (Headline, 2023), shortlisted for the Pushkin House Book Prize 2024, tells the story of his thousand-mile walk across the Greater Caucasus Mountains from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea. He is currently a doctoral researcher in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.

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