When Elena Kostyuchenko was five years old, in Yaroslavl, a provincial city a hundred and seventy miles from Moscow, the corner of the room that she shared with her mother was taken up by a television with a bulging screen and a fuzzy picture. Kostyuchenko was captivated. She brushed the dust off the picture with her fingers. “It felt like touching a moth’s wings, ever-so-gently,” she writes in “I Love Russia,” a memoir and collection of reportage translated by Bela Shayevich and Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse and published this month. Later, as a teen-ager, Kostyuchenko discovered newspapers at the school library. “I got obsessed with them—the pictures didn’t change, you could think while you read,” she writes. “I decided to go work at one.”
The paper for which Kostyuchenko most dreamed of working was Novaya Gazeta, where Anna Politkovskaya, a fearless and revered reporter, filed dispatches telling the grim truth of the Russian war in Chechnya. Kostyuchenko describes the sensation of encountering Politkovskaya’s articles. “I’d feel like I was getting a fever,” she writes. “It turned out I didn’t know anything about my country.”
In 2005, Kostyuchenko started as an intern at Novaya Gazeta, tiptoeing into Politkovskaya’s office to leave apples on her desk. Vladimir Putin was relatively new to the Presidency, and high oil prices were fuelling a consumer boom. But Kostyuchenko was less interested in the Russia hurtling forward than the one left behind, a place—or, rather, a people—defined by trauma and disorientation, but also hardiness and resolve.
For one early piece, Kostyuchenko spent a night hanging out at a roadside brothel, “the Market,” observing how the sex workers and their customers squabbled, connived, ingratiated, treated—and mistreated—one another. For another, she wandered among the ruins of an unfinished hospital in Moscow’s northern outskirts, which had become a mecca for misfit teen-agers and others who found themselves lost or cast aside. She describes one such itinerant, who arrives in search of a mystic encounter and instead gets his head shat on in an empty elevator shaft; he leaves in a huff, declaring, “The spirits have rejected me.” For Kostyuchenko, it was a familiar Russia, not sophisticated, moneyed, or powerful, but one that, as her book’s title suggests, she loved—and still does.
“You know the kind of love you have for your hand, or for your leg,” Kostyuchenko told me recently in Berlin, where she moved last year. “Or for your home, or your family. It’s a love that, above all, is connected to a sense of attachment, of belonging.” One should be both conscious and mature about this fact, she said. “You take responsibility for what belongs to you.” She went on, “I am connected to the people who live on this land by a common fate. Yes, this fate is not always happy, but yet it is ours, all of ours.”
In Putin’s Russia, muckraking journalism has become a difficult, underpaid, thankless, and oftentimes outright dangerous profession. In 2006, a little more than a year into Kostyuchenko’s tenure at Novaya Gazeta, Politkovskaya was shot dead in the elevator of her apartment building in Moscow. She is one of seven Novaya Gazeta journalists who have been killed during the past two decades. Kostyuchenko describes her memorial picture being hung in the paper’s conference room, alongside those of her murdered colleagues. “Every time a new portrait goes up, we try to hang it so that there is no more room on the wall,” she writes. “When you can’t protect yourself or your people, you get superstitious.” But, she knows, “There is always room for one more.”
Kostyuchenko is now thirty-six, and one of Russia’s premier journalists; she carries herself with a subdued, almost ethereal bearing that belies a stubborn, even fierce, reportorial energy. She can feel anger, shame, disgust, but she doesn’t feel as if she and the Russia she writes about are something apart. “I’m Russian. I was born in Russia,” she writes. “My mother is Russian and so is my biological father. . . . My last name is Ukrainian, it was my mother’s from her first marriage. Our family name is Malyshev. I have blue eyes and white skin, Slavic features. I braid my long hair. My native language is Russian, which I speak without any accent. I’ve never felt like a foreigner in my country. I belong here.”
The book, Kostyuchenko told me, is a personal reckoning, an attempt to work through how she missed—or, rather, failed to adequately react to—Russia’s descent into fascism. That trajectory led to the invasion of Ukraine and a war that has dragged on for nearly two years, but in truth began much earlier. For Kostyuchenko, the clock started as she reached civic consciousness: that is, in the years when Putin was cementing his power and constructing an autocratic system that would eventually launch a war against its neighbor.
Kostyuchenko, who is gay, became involved in L.G.B.T. activism in her twenties. At the time, she writes, she thought that if she and her then girlfriend attended Pride parades in Moscow—which were officially banned—they would, over time, be able to calmly and convincingly argue for their rights. Instead, she was punched in the temple and her girlfriend was arrested. In 2013, when the Russian Duma passed a law banning the distribution of so-called “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relationships,” she stood in front of the Duma and, in an act of protest, kissed her girlfriend. Orthodox activists pelted them with eggs and feces. “The law was clear,” Kostyuchenko told me. “We are not socially equal. This is clearly a fascist formulation.” But, she said, “This was an unpleasant thought, and I didn’t want to fully look in that direction.”
In 2021, Kostyuchenko spent two weeks living inside a state-run residential facility for people with psychiatric and neurological disorders. The article that emerged from that experience is the masterwork at the heart of “I Love Russia,” a wrenching and visceral text that almost seems to waft off the page: industrial cleaning supplies; stale, watery soup; soiled bedsheets. Nurses roam the wards ready to inject anyone who causes any problems with a syringe full of tranquillizers. Walks outside, even just to the walled-in courtyard, are granted or withheld with similar caprice. Kostyuchenko has a searing encounter with two women, Alina and Vera, who had their pregnancies forcibly terminated and were then sterilized without consent. “How do I get out of this hell?” Vera asks.
Behind a metal door in Ward 3-A, which held the most difficult cases, Kostyuchenko encounters Tyoma, a thin, naked man with drool hanging from his lips, and buttocks bruised from repeated injections. When Kostyuchenko and a volunteer named Katya suggest taking him for brief strolls in the yard, the doctor in charge of Tyoma’s case reacts with bemused skepticism. But, after a few days, the nurses in Ward 3-A are amazed that Tyoma has stopped ripping up and chewing pieces of the windowsill. “It turns out that, in Russia, we have concentration camps maintained at state expense,” she told me. “Our taxes go to keep people locked up like animals, deprived of their rights.”
The care home, Kostyuchenko also realizes, is a particularly ghoulish manifestation of the larger Russia beyond its walls. “You are alone, face-to-face with the state,” she said, “and here it is, that is what it looks like, this is the state’s true nature.” A paternalistic state presumes to know what’s best for its charges, but its real concern is for its own authority and convenience. If that means delivering a shot of tranquillizer to the butt, so be it. Your best chance is only to avoid an even worse fate. “If you want to stay safe, you must put a smile on your face, or at the very least be neutral,” Kostyuchenko writes. “Indifferent, docile, to what they do to you and those around you.”
In hindsight, Kostyuchenko told me, “I knew there was fascism in my country and at the same time believed that if I did my job, if I described this fascism, that would somehow be enough. But it could never be enough.” Even as the life of an independent Russian journalist wasn’t easy or glamorous, it had its own comforts and rituals and satisfactions. There were reporting trips and nights at the theatre and even later nights drinking with colleagues in someone’s kitchen. “I liked my life, and didn’t want to change it,” she said. For Kostyuchenko and others in her circle—nonprofit founders, experimental-theatre directors, bookshop or café owners—it could feel as if these “small crystalline worlds,” as she put it, would keep steadily expanding. And then one day these many small worlds would merge into one, and there would be no place left for Putin; this Russia wouldn’t belong to him. But, she told me, “On February 24th”—the day of Russia’s invasion—“these worlds shattered, they vanished.”
Late the next evening, Kostyuchenko crossed into Ukraine, becoming one of an exceedingly small number of Russian journalists who managed to report from the war zone. (That is, from the perspective of those under attack—plenty of correspondents from state media were embedded with those Russian units doing the attacking.) She reported from Odesa and Kherson, then under Russian occupation. She sneaked in and out across the front lines; inside Kherson, she located the building where Russian troops brought local residents to be tortured. Her articles were published by Novaya Gazeta, whose editor, Dmitry Muratov, was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2021 on behalf of the paper; but, given Russia’s wartime censorship laws, she and her editors excised certain words and passages, stating in brackets or italics that text had been removed. “We didn’t want to hide this act of forced censorship but make it plain,” she told me. “Plus, in Russian, you can tell well enough what is missing.”
Her dispatch from the southern city of Mykolaiv, which Russian forces shelled relentlessly in the early days of the war, appears in its original form as the book’s last chapter. The writing is bracing, painful in its clinical documentation, laced with a sense of guilt and the utter futility of that guilt. Kostyuchenko visits the Mykolaiv morgue. “The bodies in the cold storage are stacked up in layers,” she writes. “Two girls lie one on top of the other. They are sisters. The older one is seventeen. All I can see in the heap of bodies is her hand, her slim, long fingers with neat pink nail polish. The younger girl is three years old and lies on top of her sister. She is blond. Her jaw has been tied shut with gauze, her hands tied together to rest on her stomach. Little red wounds from the shrapnel cover her body. The girl looks alive.”
In late March, Kostyuchenko was on her way to Mariupol, then the site of the most prolonged and brutal siege of the war, when she got a call from Muratov, Novaya Gazeta’s editor in Moscow. He had information that pro-Kremlin Chechen militants had orders to intercept Kostyuchenko at a checkpoint and kill her. Muratov said she had to leave Ukraine immediately; at first, Kostyuchenko resisted. “An entire city was destroyed along with tens of thousands of its inhabitants,” Kostyuchenko said of Mariupol. “This is a war crime at an incredible scale, and must be documented and recorded.” But she relented, and made plans to flee Ukraine. The sudden inability to fulfill this task weighed on her more acutely than the threat against her life. “I couldn’t come to terms with my own helplessness,” she wrote in an essay for Meduza, an independent Russian news site based in Riga.
Kostyuchenko never returned to Moscow. She began an enervating exile—Venice, Prague, a village in Switzerland, a spell in the States—along with her girlfriend, Iana, a journalist and disability-rights activist. (They met when Iana showed up at Novaya Gazeta’s offices after Kostyuchenko published her article on care homes.) By then, Novaya Gazeta was effectively shuttered. After multiple warnings from state regulators, and fearing criminal prosecution, its employees had voted to indefinitely suspend operations. Kostyuchenko disagreed with the decision but chose not to cast a vote—she was abroad, facing her own difficulties, but not those confronted by her colleagues who were still in Russia. “I didn’t bear the risks of making a different decision,” she told me. “They did. And so I’m not sure my opinion mattered much.”
Kostyuchenko and Iana ultimately rented an apartment in Berlin. Kostyuchenko wanted to get back to work; in particular, she hoped to return to Ukraine, but that was no easy task, given that, after the invasion, Russian citizens needed approval, rarely granted, in order to enter the country. She travelled to the Ukrainian consulate in Munich to apply for a visa. On her way back to Berlin, she fell ill. The symptoms came in waves: stomach pain, nausea, swelling of her face, fingers, and toes. For two months, doctors had little clue what might be wrong with her. Finally, one of them suggested that she may have been poisoned. “It seemed too wild an idea,” she told a police detective. “I was in Europe. I felt that I was safe.” The detective answered harshly. “You come here and think you’re on vacation,” he said. “We have political murders here. Russia’s secret services are active in this country.” He chastised Kostyuchenko for what he said was a reckless and lackadaisical attitude to her own safety.
She was admitted at Charité hospital in Berlin, where Alexey Navalny was treated after his poisoning in 2020. The prosecutor’s office closed the investigation, then reopened it, but she hasn’t heard anything further. When the Insider, an independent Russian site that often covers the security services, briefed a number of doctors and chemists on Kostyuchenko’s case, all said her symptoms “cannot be explained by anything other than exogenous poisoning.” They named an organochlorine compound as the likely poison, and suggested it was ingested or absorbed through the skin.
German police told Kostyuchenko to keep an unpredictable schedule, to move regularly, and to avoid repeating her routes or destinations. She and Iana moved out of their Berlin apartment and headed to a residency program in a remote, bucolic stretch of northern Scandinavia. From there, they began shuttling between friends’ houses and apartments in Europe. This fall, they plan to visit the U.S. for Kostyuchenko’s book launch. She recalled one of her early scares at Novaya Gazeta, when she was investigating a ring of Moscow gangsters and corrupt police officers that killed people so as to steal and then sell their expensive cars. Kostyuchenko was followed, and someone tried to break into her apartment; some of the officers showed up at the paper’s offices and made threats. She told me what a sympathetic police investigator had relayed to her: “If they are set on killing you, they will kill you. You can make this process longer and more costly for them. But it is impossible to guarantee your safety.”
The alleged poisoning is an awkward subject for Kostyuchenko. She tries not to dwell on the inherent danger of her work. “There are various professions that carry a potential risk to your life,” she told me. “Police, rescue services, excuse me for the example, military.” That’s just the nature of the job, she said. “It turns out that, in Russia, journalism is one of them. It doesn’t make it more or less important. Of course, it’s unfortunate to work in these conditions, but I’ve been doing it for a very long time.”
The more difficult thing, Kostyuchenko told me, is being separated from Russia. As the war drags on, and Russia continues to inflict suffering on Ukrainians and repress its own citizens, she has found it harder to maintain or profess her love for her country. Kostyuchenko doesn’t subscribe to the illusion that her country is somehow trapped by Putin alone. “He is a symptom, let’s say, the personification of all our shit,” she told me. “But he’s not the root of all troubles.”
Not long ago, in one of their regular phone calls, Muratov—who remains based in Moscow—offered a metaphor that Kostyuchenko found compelling. Putin and other top Kremlin officials, he told her, present themselves like priests who purport to mediate a believer’s relationship to God. That is, they act as intermediaries in how Russians feel love, or anything at all, toward their country. “The state stands between us and our love for our country,” she told me, explaining the idea, “and tells us what is right, how we should feel, what we are obligated to do.” In her work, Kostyuchenko has tried, perhaps futilely, to challenge this idea. “Love does not require silence,” she told me. “It doesn’t require lying. It doesn’t require murder.” Rather, she said, love is an “active feeling.” She explained, “You see Russia’s many shortcomings and name them. You try to stop the evil it commits, correct what you can, mourn what you can’t, and find some purpose in this sorrow.” ♦
