I Love Russia
Reporting from a Lost Country
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4.9 • 10 Ratings
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
* Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker and TIME * Winner of the Pushkin House Book Prize * A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice *
“A haunting book of rare courage.” —Clarissa Ward, CNN chief international correspondent and author of On All Fronts
To be a journalist is to tell the truth. I Love Russia is Elena Kostyuchenko’s unrelenting attempt to document her country as experienced by those whom it systematically and brutally erases: village girls recruited into sex work, queer people in the outer provinces, patients and doctors at a Ukrainian maternity ward, and reporters like herself.
Here is Russia as it is, not as we imagine it. The result is a singular portrait of a nation, and of a young woman who refuses to be silenced. In March 2022, as a correspondent for Russia’s last free press, Novaya Gazeta, Kostyuchenko crossed the border into Ukraine to cover the war. It was her mission to ensure that Russians witnessed the horrors Putin was committing in their name. She filed her pieces knowing that should she return home, she would likely be prosecuted and sentenced to up to fifteen years in prison. Yet, driven by the conviction that the greatest form of love and patriotism is criticism, she continues to write.
I Love Russia stitches together reportage from the past fifteen years with personal essays, assembling a kaleidoscopic narrative that Kostyuchenko understands may be the last work from her homeland that she’ll publish for a long time—perhaps ever. It exposes the inner workings of an entire nation as it descends into fascism and, inevitably, war. She writes because the threat of Putin’s Russia extends beyond herself, beyond Crimea, and beyond Ukraine. We fail to understand it at our own peril.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this sharp-edged debut, Kostyuchenko shares experiences from her harrowing career as a reporter for Novaya Gazeta, a Moscow-based independent newspaper. With a free-flowing style, she describes covering the war in Donbas, Ukraine, in 2004 ("I was caught in the shelling twice. I learn that I can run on all fours. I glide along in long leaps... I don't believe I am going to die"); deplores the Putin regime; and writes about the contract killings of six colleagues, including Anna Politkovskaya, whose exposés on Putin's Second Chechen War inspired Kostyuchenko to become a reporter. With gritty determination, she ventures beyond the Kremlin and its state-managed propaganda: she encamps in an abandoned hospital in Moscow occupied by squatters and reports on Russia's growing homeless subculture; mingles with prostitutes in a roadside brothel; travels to the Arctic to report on the alarming numbers of Nganasan people ("the northernmost people on our continent") committing suicide; and in the most bizarre story of the mix, tries to help a widow recover the body of her husband, who was killed during the battle for the Donetsk Airport in 2012. (Putin denied Russian soldiers were fighting in Donetsk, so the morgue denied having the body.) Throughout, Kostyuchenko's journalistic integrity is unquestionable and the dangers she faces are very real. It's a vivid and poignant account.
Customer Reviews
Too important to pass up . . .
Is the writing great?—this was written by a journalist and translated from Russian to English. What's written is tremendous. Did I get lost in the shuffle at times?—you betcha'—just trying to keep up with the names is Sisyphean task—but worth every minute of it. This is a book by a hero about heroes and their heroic struggle to tell truth to power. That their newspaper no longer exists is tragic. That so many of the author's associates were lost in their endeavor to do what journalists do for us is gut-wrenchingly tragic. And when I think of what is happening in America today and compare it to what the author has written about her experience as a Russian journalist—it is downright chilling.