Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (Oct.)
Guardian Review
In October 2022, Elena Kostyuchenko suddenly fell ill. She was on a train to Berlin when the symptoms started: a severe headache, sweating, stomach pain. And a curious smell of rotten fruit. The illness continued. Kostyuchenko's fingers ballooned; she felt exhausted and weak. Doctors initially diagnosed long Covid and then hepatitis. Eventually, they came to a different and troubling conclusion: someone had poisoned her. The German police opened, closed and reopened an investigation. Seemingly, she had been the victim of an assassination attempt on European soil. The culprit was not hard to guess: the Russian state and its shadowy spy agencies. Kostyuchenko is a celebrated Russian journalist, now 36 years old, who works for Novaya Gazeta. Or at least she did. The Moscow-based independent opposition newspaper was shut down last year after Vladimir Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Photos of her murdered colleagues hang in the paper's editorial meeting room Kostyuchenko describes Novaya as "the best newspaper on earth". A provincial kid who grew up in the Moscow region, she discovered journalism at the age of 14 through the writings of Anna Politkovskaya. At 17, she joined the paper. It became her intellectual home, and a thorn in the side of Putin's regime. "We were a cult, a family," she writes. In spring 2022 - appalled by her country's "descent into fascism" - Kostyuchenko went to Ukraine. She spent four weeks reporting from the frontline. While she was away, the State Duma passed laws banning "fake news". That meant accurate articles about the war - the flattening of peaceful cities, the murder of civilians, a litany of crimes. Free media in Russia ceased to exist. Kostyuchenko's intention was to then travel to Mariupol. Her Nobel prize-winning editor, Dmitry Muratov, told her to abandon the trip after learning that occupying Russian soldiers had been instructed to shoot her. "I know that you want to come home. But you cannot go back to Russia. They will kill you," he warned. In exile, and unwell after the poisoning, she continued to write. Her book I Love Russia brings together many of her published pieces and investigations. There are brilliant and immersive dispatches from "a lost country", as she puts it. Kostyuchenko seeks out those on the margins of society: teenage runaways; highway sex workers; inmates in a psychiatric institution; and a suicide-prone Indigenous population in Russia's frozen north. Her writing is reportage at its brave and luminous best. The Russian authorities try to stymie her activities; someone dumps green dye on her head. In 2020, she flies to the remote Arctic mining city of Norilsk to investigate the latest environmental disaster. She treks across the tundra with a group of Greenpeace activists, collecting samples from a polluted river, and dodging pursuers from the FSB, the Kremlin's secret police. As Putin's first presidential term extends into a second, and then a third, Russia grows more intolerant and brutish. Kostyuchenko and her girlfriend attend gay pride rallies in Moscow. She is beaten up, arrested, and stripped naked; a policeman spits in her face. Meanwhile, her colleagues are snuffed out. Politkovskaya is one of six murdered Novaya employees. Their photos hang in the paper's editorial meeting room. Kostyuchenko writes obliquely about politics. Her mother supports Putin's annexation of Crimea and believes the lies about "Ukrainian insurgents" told by Russian state TV. They quarrel. Eight years later, Putin's all-out assault on Ukraine stuns her. "Really, it is impossible to be ready for being the fascists. I was not ready for this at all," she admits, as she sets off to cover the war. Her experiences in Ukraine are recounted in a few impressionistic pages. Kostyuchenko heads south, where Russian troops have seized the city of Kherson and are advancing towards Mykolaiv. She interviews a driver who rescued staff from an orphanage. Twenty-five kilometres after setting off, Russian soldiers opened fire on his Mercedes van. Three female passengers are killed. Another is wounded in the shoulder. The Russians were "completely indifferent" to these deaths, and "stood around" afterwards, Kostyuchenko reports. The driver, Anatoly Geraschenko, recounts a scene of horror: "There was a woman sitting by the door - she had no face left. Just her guts out. Her finger was lying on the running board¿ The woman who had been sitting behind me was dead, too. I Love Russia is not without flaws. Kostyuchenko captures the destructive fatalism that has engulfed Russian thinking, and writes with empathy about the grim existence of the have-nots. But she does not explain why Russia went back to totalitarian rule, and a culture of organised lying, three decades after the end of the USSR. Nor does she examine why Putin unleashed a bloody war. The uncomfortable fact is that most Russians support Putin's landgrab in Ukraine. In the view of Ukrainians, they are perpetrators rather than victims. In Kostyuchenko's telling, ordinary people are not to blame. Nor are liberals. I Love Russia does not speculate as to why so many Russian citizens embrace fascism: propaganda; brainwashing by the president; ignorance; or the weight of terrible history? The author's decision to call her book I Love Russia is a little bizarre. My Russia would have been a better title, and less open to misinterpretation. Kostyuchenko's fearless coverage of the war in Ukraine speaks for itself. The price has been high: she has lost Russia, home and her health. She argues that to love one's country - truly, deeply - is to view it critically, through a harsh and unblinking gaze.
Kirkus Review
A veteran Russian journalist reflects on her journey over the decades of increasingly stringent government censorship and violence. In a vernacular style, Kostyuchenko, whose coverage of Russian's invasion of Ukraine contributed to the 2022 shuttering of the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta, charts her early passion for journalism in the late 1990s when she began to read the work of the fearless Anna Politkovskaya, who was murdered in 2006, to learn what was really happening with the war in Chechnya. Growing up in Yaroslavl, Kostyuchenko learned the "official" line from TV, which her mother and neighbors listened to without asking questions, about the annexation of Crimea, and she began working at the activist newspaper when she was only 14. Within the loosely chronological, sometimes uneven narrative, the author inserts her own journalistic pieces that reveal unsettling strata of Russia social and political life. She writes about "stalkers, diggers, suiciders, guards, and ghosts" inhabiting the abandoned Hovrino hospital, a piece that becomes a kind of sad statement on the greater Russian society; going undercover as an apprentice criminologist in Moscow in 2009; trying to cover the aftermath of the storming of the Beslan school in 2004, "the worst terrorist attack in Russian history," and being thwarted by authorities; and getting stonewalled regarding the causes and environmental effects of the 2020 oil spill in Norilsk. The essays delineating the author's work in the "internat," a hugely understaffed facility for neurologically impaired inmates, are intimately, disturbingly detailed. Near the end, Kostyuchenko writes about the harried staff at Novaya Gazeta, and she movingly describes how they tried to tell the truth about Ukraine before they were shut down: "Outside, fascism was descending on our country." For English readers, the translation may appear uneven and choppy and occasionally ungrammatical, but the author's stories are important. A deeply felt, fractured collection reveals a fractured, benumbed society. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Chapter 1 The Men from TV I don't remember myself as an infant, my memories begin from the time I am four, maybe three. I remember the silhouettes bending over me, or maybe I just think I do. I remember my grandma, she died when I was five, which must mean I have memories from when I was younger. Babushka would make fun of me and slap my hand and then laugh. She wasn't always all there, she was sick. When madness came over her, she would get shy and searching. She thought she was living with strangers and would become eager to make us like her. When she regained her senses, she'd turn back into the woman who had for many years been-and remained-the head of the household. She was accustomed to being obeyed and demanded obedience. I was sick all the time, I'd always get colds. I rarely went out. In my memory, it's always twilight. A new building was slowly rising up in front of our windows, rising to block out the light. In the right corner of the room we lived in, there was a piano for me to grow into. Mama hoped I would one day learn how to play. In the left corner, there was the television. It worked, but the picture was fuzzy, shot through with static, making it look black-and-white. The television was huge, or it seemed huge to me, with a bulging silver-gray screen made of thick glass. Dust adored it. I would pull up a chair, climb onto it, and brush the screen with my fingers. It felt like touching a moth's wings, ever-so-gently. Mama would say: that's the static. I waited for evening for my allotted pleasure. That's when Good Night, Little Ones ! would come on. The puppets, a piglet named Khryusha and a bunny named Stepashka, would talk to each other, and then they would play a cartoon. I loved the hand-drawn animations, but sometimes they'd be stop-motion instead, clay or just dolls. Those seemed like a sad waste of the magic of television. I could play with dolls all by myself. I noticed that Mama turned on the TV before it was time for Good Night. She came home from work, hung up her trench coat, and sat down on the couch, still in her shoes. She'd wait a few minutes for her feet to "settle" and then she'd get up and plod over to the TV to turn it on. It'd be a show about grown-ups or news. I hated the news and didn't understand how anybody could voluntarily watch it. The pictures that broke through the grainy broadcast were mystifying. People yelled, went places, there were identical anchors with identical intonations. I couldn't understand what they said. Mama watched them in silence. She was so tired. Little by little, I was figuring out what was going on. One day, Mama told me our country used to be called the USSR, but now it was Russia. It had been better in the USSR: there was a lot of food, people were kind to each other. Now things were different. Later, I learned that Mama had been a chemist, but the institute where she had worked no longer paid money, so she became a cleaning woman and teacher and also washed diapers at my preschool. This was why she was so tired and didn't play with me and didn't hug me as much as I wanted. I asked her whose fault it was that the USSR had turned into Russia. Mama said Yeltsin. Who's Yeltsin? The president. What is the president? The most important person in the country. Mama pointed him out to me on the news. The most important person in our country was ugly and old, with a giant head. I didn't understand what he was saying. He mumbled just like my grandma did when she was sick, stretching his words. I'd watch him and think, It's your fault that my mama is tired. That she drags her feet when she walks like she's old. That she doesn't play with me and doesn't hug me as much as I want. That people used to be kind and live in the USSR, and now we live in Russia, and Russia is worse. When Yeltsin appeared on the screen, I'd furrow my brow and say, Yeltsin is bad. And Mama would smile. I started watching the news with Mama and yelling at Yeltsin just so I could see her smile. Sometimes Mama's friends from the institute would come over. They'd sit in the kitchen and I would be underfoot. Whenever anyone mentioned Yeltsin, I'd perk up my ears. And then, in the next available pause, I would add, "Yeltsin is bad." The grown-ups laughed. They'd say, "Your little girl is so grown up." The grown-ups told me that Yeltsin was also a drunk. And so I started saying, "Yeltsin is a bad drunk." The grown-ups laughed at this, too. The older I got, the more I could understand the news. Miners were beating their helmets against a bridge in Moscow. Mama sent the miners money, she said they were starving. Chechens were fighting with Russians. I was afraid of Chechens, I thought they were all scary bad guys with beards, just like pirates. I wished I could see one of them in real life. Then came the criminals. I never saw them but I would hear them. Sometimes, there would be shooting outside. Mama would say, Stay away from the window. When I was five, I found out that we were all going to die. Even Mama. A little while later, I realized that Mama might not die of old age sometime in the future, she could die any moment because of the criminals. I started being scared of the night. Evil came closer at night, darkness opened the door to it. I would get up on the windowsill and stare into the darkness. I believed that my gaze lit Mama's way home and protected her. Sometimes, the terror would overwhelm me. Then I would take out our tin of old buttons and pore through them all like they were treasure. The buttons protected me from the terror a bit. When I was in third grade, I finally saw the criminals up close. I was taking a shortcut home, through the courtyards, instead of taking the streets. Mama said never to do that, but I was in a hurry. I came upon three men and another one with them, but somehow apart. I remember them wearing black leather trench coats, but I probably made that up. One of the three men was swearing and then another one got out a gun. It was small and very black. I ducked into the nearest building to wait out the shooting. Two gunshots. I waited a little while longer, then peeked out of the doorway. The man who had been standing apart was curled up on the ground. Behind his ear, there was red. I couldn't see the criminals anymore. I made a wide arc around the man, then ran home. I didn't tell Mama. I knew that worrying could make the heart stop, and, with all of my little body, all I wanted was for Mama to live. The criminals were because of Yeltsin, and so was the darkness outside the window, and all the long evenings waiting for Mama, and how we never had enough money-I knew what money was now, how much it cost. We didn't always have food. When I was nine, I joined a choir, we'd sing in hospitals and Houses of Culture. They paid choir members 30 rubles a concert, 60 for soloists. I wanted to be a soloist. Sixty rubles could get us seven loaves of bread. I would ask Mama, If the USSR was such a good country, why didn't you stand up for it? Mama would say, We were deceived. Yeltsin lied to us. I began watching the news with a voracious rage. I was impatient for Yeltsin to die. They would definitely show that on the news. But: he kept not dying. Other people were dying. There were constantly funerals, coffins upholstered in red were continually being carried out into our courtyard. I would go up to our neighbors and ask, Why did he die? Why did she die? Alcohol poisoning, hanging, shooting, being murdered during a robbery, dying in a hospital that didn't have any drugs or doctors. My mama lived, my gaze protected her. Sometimes I'd bargain with God. I'd tell him, If Mama dies and I go off to live in the forest, what are You gonna do then? When I was in seventh grade, here is what Yeltsin did. On New Year's Eve, while Mama and I were having our holiday dinner, he came on TV and he said, "I am tired. I'm stepping down." And with that, he stopped being the president. It was a New Year's Eve miracle. Mama cried and laughed and called all her friends and I thought, Finally. Now our new life would begin. Six months later, there were elections. Vladimir Putin won. Putin was nothing like Yeltsin, he was athletic and young, with clear eyes. The eyes were the only memorable thing on his face. He had a special voice, it always sounded like he was restraining a growl. But when he smiled, everybody around him was very happy. Mama didn't vote for Putin. She said he was KGB. I knew what KGB agents were, two of them had apartments across the way. They were maniacally suspicious, they drank a lot and weren't friendly. We didn't talk to them much. On the day of the election, I went out to the courtyard to play. People were coming home from the polling places and asking each other, Did you vote for Putin? Me too. People would ask me about my mother. I would say, No, we're for the communists. Boys from our courtyard told me the communists were all rotting in their graves. We almost got into a fight. People believed that Putin was going to protect them. Before the elections, buildings were blown up in several cities. We learned the term terrorist attack . Men from our building took turns doing night shifts, making sure that nobody wired our house with explosives. Putin said that we simply needed to kill all the terrorists and then the buildings would stop blowing up. He started a new war in Chechnya. I started washing floors. I was almost a grown-up now and I wanted to make some money so that my mother could be less tired. I'd get so tired, I would come home and do exactly what Mama did: go and sit down on the couch with my shoes on until my feet "settled." Mama didn't get mad. Our television kept getting worse; it became hard to make out the faces in the black-and-white static. I started reading newspapers, we had them at our school library. I got obsessed with them-the pictures didn't change, you could think while you read. I decided to go work at one. The pay was no worse than washing floors. I wrote about bus pass scams, a teen health clinic, the skinheads that had appeared in our city. I was proud I was writing about grown-up things and considered myself a reporter. Then one day I happened across a copy of Novaya Gazeta . I opened it up to a story about Chechnya. It was about a boy who wouldn't let his mother listen to Russian songs on the radio. Russian soldiers had taken his father away and brought him back as a corpse with no nose. The article had the words cleansing and filtration center . Soldiers killed thirty-six people in the village of Mesker-Yurt. One man (he survived) was crucified, they drove nails through the palms of his hands. The article was signed "Anna Politkovskaya." I went to the public library and asked to see the collection of Novaya Gazetas . I searched for Politkovskaya's articles. I read them. I'd feel like I was getting a fever, I'd put my hand on my forehead, but it was just clammy and dead. It turned out I didn't know anything about my country. TV had lied to me. I walked around with this realization for several weeks. I'd read, go pace in the park, and then read more. I wanted to talk to a grown-up about it, but as it turned out, there weren't any around-all of them believed television. I was angry at Novaya Gazeta . It had torn the commonly held truth away from me. I'd never had my own truth before. I am fourteen, I thought, and now I'm like some sort of invalid. I decided I had to work at Novaya Gazeta . It took me three years, but I made it happen. Putin's Been At It for a Long Time, but PICKING Medvedev Was a Huge Pain in the Ass May 8, 2008 The Kremlin has been on high alert since 11 a.m. on May 6 because of the inauguration. Instead of the usual gaggle of camera-clutching tourists, the cobblestones have been swarming with military men, peculiar people in black suits, tuxedoed musicians, and chorus girls. They're holding the final rehearsals for the parade, and the choir, and the orchestra, too. But most important, these rehearsals are for the TV correspondents. Sixty-nine cameras will be trained on the president as he assumes his new role. They will film from the ground, from the waists and shoulders of cameramen, and from the towers overlooking the square. Channel 1 will be filming from helicopters. After many rounds of negotiations, a Belgian TV crew has been granted permission to mount their cameras to cables strung over the fortress walls. Rehearsals began at the end of April. The Channel 1 camp by Sobornaya Square has been up for a whole week-some vans, an HQ tent. Inside their tent, they have internet, hot water, salami, and ramen. Men's suits hanging along the walls (anyone caught on camera has to be dressed for the occasion), assorted notices, rehearsal schedules. They've already filmed one hundred hours of the fifty inaugural minutes, from every angle. Putin's procession across the parade, then Medvedev's, the ceremony in the Grand Kremlin Palace, both presidents' reappearances before the crowd, their speeches-again and again and again. It doesn't seem like the camera choreography should be too complicated. There are just two principal figures. Putin exits one building, then walks to another. He goes up the right-hand staircase of the Grand Kremlin Palace. A short while later, Medvedev's motorcade sets off from the White House and heads to the Kremlin. He enters through a different door. They only meet once they are both inside. After the ceremony, they go down to the soldiers together. Excerpted from I Love Russia: Reporting from a Lost Country by Elena Kostyuchenko All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
