I LOVE RUSSIA

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.