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Reporting from a Lost Country
by Elena Kostyuchenko
A fearless, cutting portrait of Russia and an essential 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 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.
"Sharp-edged ... harrowing ... With gritty determination, she ventures beyond the Kremlin and its state-managed propaganda ... Kostyuchenko's journalistic integrity is unquestionable and the dangers she faces are very real. It's a vivid and poignant account." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Intimately, disturbingly detailed ... important. A deeply felt, fractured collection reveals a fractured, benumbed society." —Kirkus Reviews
"Elena Kostyuchenko is an important guide to the twenty-first century. She exemplifies all the reportorial virtues, from physical courage through careful prose. The Russia she recounts here is the Russia we need to understand." —Timothy Snyder, author of The Road to Unfreedom
"A haunting book of rare courage. Kostyuchenko's searing reportage takes the reader under the skin of a Russia that few outsiders get to see. With spare, unflinching prose she lays bare the cynicism and corruption, but also the bravery and heart, of her beloved country." —Clarissa Ward, CNN chief international correspondent and author of On All Fronts
"Not only does Kostyuchenko find her way into the very darkness, she goes for its blackest corners... . The good news that emerges is her talent. Read her. It's worth it." —Dmitry Muratov, editor-in-chief of Novaya Gazeta and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize
"A fascinating, frightening, compulsively readable chronicle of life in Putin's Russia. As a girl, Elena Kostyuchenko wanted to believe in her country; as a journalist she has dedicated her life to exposing its darkness. Her prose is haunting, edgy, searing. Her stories are unforgettable, and deeply important." —Carol Off, author of The Lion, the Fox, and the Eagle and former host of CBC As It Happens
This information about I Love Russia was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Elena Kostyuchenko was born in Yaroslavl, Russia in 1987. She began working as a journalist when she was fourteen, and spent seventeen 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.
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