I Love Russia : Reporting from a Lost Country - Elena Kostyuchenko

I Love Russia

Reporting from a Lost Country

By: Elena Kostyuchenko

Paperback | 6 February 2024

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Blending personal memoir with frontline reportage, this is an intimate and fearless portrait of contemporary Russia by one of Russia's most prominent independent journalists

An unprecedented and intimate portrait of Russia, and fearless cri de coeur for journalism in opposition to the global authoritarian turn

To be a journalist is to tell the truth. I Love Russia is Elena Kostyuchenko's fearless and unrelenting attempt to document Putin's Russia as experienced by those whom it systematically and brutally erases- sex workers in Moscow, queer people in the outer provinces, patients and doctors at a Ukrainian maternity ward, and reporters like herself.

The result is a singular portrait of a nation and a young woman who refuses to be silenced. In March 2022, as a reporter 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 15 years in prison. Yet, driven by the conviction that the greatest form of love and patriotism is criticism, she continues to write, undaunted and with eyes wide open.

I Love Russia stitches together reportage from the past 15 years with personal essays, assembling a kaleidoscopic narrative that Kostyuchenko understands may be the last thing she'll publish for a long time-perhaps ever. 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.

About the Author

Elena Kostyuchenko was born in Yaroslavl, Russia in 1987. She began working as a journalist when she was 15, and spent 17 years reporting for Novaya Gazeta, Russia's last major independent newspaper until it was shut down in the spring of 2022 in response to her reporting from Ukraine. She is the author of two books published in Russian, Unwanted on Probation and We Have to Live Here, and the recipient of the European Press Prize, the Gerd Bucerius Award, and the Paul Klebnikov Prize.
Industry Reviews
Brilliant and immersive ... reportage at its brave and luminous best * Luke Harding, Observer *

Fearless reporting... shocking and moving... This gritting insider's take on Russia will prove more helpful than the welter of book by western experts when it comes to countering Putin's disinformation * Sunday Times, *Book of the Week* *

I Love Russia is full of rigorous journalistic detail, but is also deeply personal, beautifully written ... real and intimate * Rob Hastings, I Paper *

Few have tried to examine the life of ordinary people in the world's biggest country (by physical size) the way this one does ... [Elena's] style of brave, intimate reporting is likely to be a rarity in Russia for years to come * New York Times *

Elena Kostyuchenko is an important guide to the twenty-first century. The Russia she recounts here is the Russia we need to understand * Timothy Snyder *

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