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.
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.
Luke Harding’s Invasion: Russia’s Bloody War and Ukraine’s Fight for Survival, shortlisted for the Orwell prize, is published by Guardian Faber
I Love Russia: Reporting from a Lost Country by Elena Kostyuchenko is published by Bodley Head (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
