Natasha Gaither

I Love Russia: Reporting from a Lost Country by Elena Kostyuchenko, translated from the Russian by Bela Shayevich and Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse. Penguin Press, 363 pp., $30

“All the furniture I like is so expensive. I don’t know why! In Russia everyone decorates their houses so cheaply but over the top. It’s cheaper to get wallpaper with sparkles than without sparkles.” The girls on the couch giggle, conjuring their future home. Eventually, I discern that Lena’s preferred style is mid-century modern—unembellished and sincere, much like her writing. As the conversation turns to the couple’s present accommodations in Berlin, the young journalist draws her stockinged feet up and tucks them gently under her girlfriend’s thigh. In October 2023, Elena Kostyuchenko was the victim of an attempted assassination by the Russian government, which has left her exhausted and frail. She seems to require frequent transfusions of energy, and her effusive partner Yana happily complies. They have lived in many apartments since then—some provided by civil society organizations, others by friends—but the yearning to have their own never diminishes.

Published shortly after the attack, I Love Russia: Reporting from a Lost Country attempts to make sense of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Kostyuchenko accomplishes this through a blend of autobiography and her own nonfiction work for Novaya Gazeta, an independent newspaper in Moscow that was shut down just before the war. This deeply personal material positions I Love Russia as a counter to the Americentric, Foreign Affairs-style articles that groped for explanations among EU promises and NATO stalemates. But a more precise characterization of the book emerges in a re-examination of its provocative title: Моя Любимая Страна translates directly to My Beloved Country. This is, after all, a love story. It is a story about the deep feeling attached to the place of our childhood; the responsibility it demands; the hope it inspires. It also describes how that hope holds us hostage, blinds us to reality, and ultimately breaks our hearts.

Elena Kostyuchenko was born in 1987 in Yaroslavl, USSR. Four years later, the Soviet Union collapsed, unleashing crime and poverty on millions. The widespread feelings of fear and betrayal registered dimly with Lena. “Little by little, I was figuring out what was going on,” writes the journalist in the first chapter. “One day, Mama told me our country used to be called the USSR, but now it was Russia. It had been better in the USSR: there was a lot of food, people were kind to one another.” Her mother, a well-regarded chemist, became a cleaning woman. Boris Yeltsin, the democratically elected leader of Russia, became the reason Kostyuchenko’s mother refused to play with her and dragged her feet like she was old. If the USSR was so great—the girl queried—why hadn’t Lena’s mama stood up for it? “We were deceived,” the older woman would reply. “Yeltsin lied to us.” As soon as Kostyuchenko was old enough, she joined Russia’s newly capitalist economy alongside her mother, scrubbing floors until her bones ached. Late at night, they returned to their flat and put their feet up before the TV.

The TV was lying, too. A key takeaway from I Love Russia is that the country’s expansionist campaigns—and the propaganda machine designed to legitimize them—are coextensive with Russia itself. Whereas Westerners reacted to the Ukraine invasion with shock, Eastern Europeans recognized the tried-and-true strategy of forging nationalism by activating old ethnic hatreds. “Before 2022 there was 2014, and before that was Georgia, and before that was Chechnya,” recited residents of Vilnius, Lithuania, where I lived during the first summer of the war. In 1994, Russia had launched a full-scale invasion of Chechnya, an ethnically distinct region of the Caucuses that declared independence after the dissolution of the USSR. On Russian TV channels, which represent the public’s primary source of news media, information about the “special military operation” was vigorously suppressed. Despite the omnipresence of the TV in Kostyuchenko’s home, it was only when she came across Novaya Gazeta’s article about the Chechen war—and saw the words ethnic cleansing and filtration center in print—did the aspiring journalist begin to grasp the scale of Russia’s military-media-industrial complex.

It was Kostyuchenko’s turn to feel betrayed. “I was angry at Novaya Gazeta. It had torn the commonly held truth away from me. I’d never had my own truth before.” Accepting the reality of the Chechen war was a shameful, isolating experience, but one that solidified Kostyuchenko’s commitment to independent media. At seventeen, she joined Novaya Gazeta as an intern and was later assigned to a special task force that covered the most challenging topics: war, revolution, mass protests, ecological disasters. In the interim, she devoted her attention to Russia’s “invisible communities”: teenagers living in an abandoned hospital where elevator shafts materialized from the air to swallow people whole; factory workers in Norilsk, the most polluted city on earth; indigenous families in Ust’-Avam, who mourned the deaths of the Pyasina River’s fish as well as their own children. These are the real subjects of I Love Russia, and they are Putin’s victims too. In beginning to answer the question “How did Ukraine happen?” Kostyuchenko reveals how the Russian state derives power from the material, political, and psychological paralysis of its own people.

“Life on the Sapsan Wayside,” an article Kostyuchenko wrote for Novaya Gazeta in 2010, showcases the tragic irony of living alongside Russia’s high-speed railroad. The Sapsan completes the journey from Moscow to St. Petersburg—a distance of 634 kilometers—in four hours. While these trains now depart from Russia’s capital twelve or fourteen times a day, the number of commuter trains has decreased drastically to free up space on the tracks. Unable to travel to work or school, or to receive proper health care, the towns along the railroad succumb to monotony and isolation. The evening entertainment at the Shlyuz station is watching the Sapsans fly by, and people arrive on the platform half an hour early to take their seats. When a Sapsan hits someone, it does not stop. “There’s no point,” explains Anna Cheslavovna—the trains need at least 1000 meters to brake. “[The conductor will] just call the dispatcher. ‘A person was run over on such and such a mile.’ And it’s not ‘we hit someone,’ it's ‘got run over.’ That’s that, the train keeps going.” In the abyss between Russia’s most prosperous cities, healthy young men pick fights and drink moonshine. There is nothing else to do.

***

Lena fell in love with a woman, Anya. In some parts of Russia, being a lesbian means you will be murdered by your family, forcibly married, or subjected to an exorcism. In other parts of Russia, nobody cares. Living in Moscow, Kostyuchenko was relatively privileged; she and Anya could rent a studio together. They danced in bars and went on summer holiday. But Kostyuchenko ached to have her own home, a place to fill with pretty things—perhaps even a child’s laughter.

That year, Russia’s largest private bank announced its new campaign “Love Matters Most,” which promised to help any couples who were in love get a mortgage. When Kostyuchenko called the bank, however, she was informed that lesbian couples did not count. Other banks said the same thing. Despairing, Kostyuchenko began educating herself about marriage rights in her country, as well as LGBTQ+ activism abroad. Compared to those in other countries, Russian activists seemed to be inarticulate and ineffectual. Lena and Anya decided to go to gay pride; they were beaten, arrested, and hospitalized. They kept going. Last November, Kostyuchenko reflected on the naivete of her protesting years in a conversation with Yale Professor Marci Shore. “I was thinking that it was so fucking obvious, we are just like other people. We just need to explain to them that we have the same faces, the same hands, [we are] working, paying taxes, loving each other.” The Russian legislature responded by ruling that queer relationships were “socially unequal” and imposing fines on those who argued otherwise. Lena and Anya ran out of strength. They stopped loving each other.

“I believe the first openly fascist law we had in Russia was the 2013 law against LGBT [people],” Kostyuchenko elaborated. She views the systematic disenfranchisement of Russia’s queer communities and the mobilization of young men for war as inextricably intertwined: in both scenarios, the state deprives individuals of their bodily autonomy. Relieving Russians of the notion that they exercise control over their bodies—how they dress or who they kiss in public—is a prelude to sending them to kill and be killed in Ukraine. Even in death, their personhood is denied. In an unofficial war, corpses are evidence of a conflict much greater in scale than leaders are willing to admit, and so the state hides them in mass graves and expunges soldiers’ birth certificates.

Alcohol is another means for the state to usurp bodies, and it is everywhere in Kostyuchenko’s Russia. Vodka is liquid courage for teenage delinquents; vodka is lubricant for sex workers on the highways. It is the best-selling item in Masha’s rural canteen, capable of turning all the men of Ust’-Avam into “zombies.” Masha could turn an enormous profit selling vodka after curfew, but she is afraid of being assaulted in the dark—the ways in which alcohol perpetuates violence against women are well known. Instead, Masha sells it on credit and keeps the residents of Ust’-Avam in never-ending debt. While Kostyuchenko rarely draws on historical works in I Love Russia, the article “The Last Helicopter” includes a brief and compelling analysis of how vodka was employed to subjugate Russia’s indigenous populations. In the 19th century, Cossacks used alcohol to lure in nomads with outstanding tribute and trap them in cycles of addiction. In fact, the sale and consumption of alcohol played such an immense role in imperial expansion and Soviet politics that political scientist Mark Schrad dedicated a whole book to the topic. I Love Russia extends Schrad’s narrative to the accelerated decline of Nganasan life and culture. “More suicides in Volochanka and Ust’-Avam than natural deaths… the young especially,” Masha tells Kostyuchenko matter-of-factly. “[They] look to the future, it's empty.”

Throughout I Love Russia, the state is a menacing, amorphous thing, which seeps into all of life’s crevices like a noxious gas. Kostyuchenko first witnesses its “real face” in the internat, a gargantuan system of asylums-cum-labor camps that stretches across Russia. Over 150,000 Russians live in such facilities, having been declared “legally incompetent” because of age, mental illness, addiction, disability—or negligent parents, vengeful relatives, or fraud. A legally incompetent person is divested of their rights to personal property, to vote, to marry, and to bring a case to trial. In practice, they are also deprived of control over their bodies. Kostyuchenko lived in a women’s ward on assignment for Novaya Gazeta; not only did women suffer unspecified injections on a regular basis, but they also underwent abortions and sterilizations without their consent. Many were never informed of the procedures, simply waking to find painful, jagged scars traversing their abdomens. The grief they express for their stolen motherhood is echoed in Kostyuchenko’s doubts about raising a child as a queer woman in Russia. “Give birth,” Lena’s mother commands her. “There’s never going to be a better time.” Meaning, take charge of your body’s destiny. Also, open your eyes.

***

There is a long tradition in Soviet literature of the writer as witness. Valram Shalamov, author of Kolyma Tales, characterized his stories as “authenticity itself.” Vasilly Grossman was known to quote the maxim “absolute truth is the most beautiful thing of all.” Both he and Konstantine Paustovsky issued vows to write only what they had witnessed with their own eyes. Producing Truth was especially important in the context of Bolshevik ideology, as Lenin and his followers attributed metaphysical powers to the act of writing—in other words, pure theory could be superimposed on reality when the world was described through language. Kostyuchenko’s strategy of “Show, not tell” holds special resonance for readers in the post-Soviet world, but it is also what makes I Love Russia essential for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the war in Ukraine. The lack of analysis forces us to come to our own conclusions about Putin’s regime and those who suffer from it. Don’t believe that Russia is fascist because The Financial Times tells you so, or because Elena Kostyuchenko does, for that matter. See for yourself.

In illuminating Russia’s darkest corners, I Love Russia conveys the possibilities of language in the face of tyranny. But the journalist is equally aware of its limitations. During the Q&A portion of Kostyuchenko’s lecture, a Yale student challenged the power of literature to preempt violence, citing the dehumanization of Palestinians in the news media. “For the past two years, I’ve been thinking about it obsessively,” Kostyuchenko confessed. “The way media, literature, art presents war is the reason we keep tolerating it.” At Novaya Gazeta, some of Kostyuchenko’s colleagues had disregarded the vocabulary of war, preferring to focus on the facts. Kostyuchenko had resisted this approach in her reporting—forgoing collective nouns, scorning passive tense—and today I Love Russia is a testament to that philosophy. Nonetheless, Novaya Gazeta wrote about the impending invasion of Ukraine and it still happened; today, journalists write about the deaths of Palestinian women and children, and they still happen. At the book’s very end, Kostyuchenko’s vocabulary is as exhausted as her body:

How much does the word weigh?
(sometimes, an entire living life)
Can the word stand up to armed tyranny?
(no)
Can the word stop a war?
(no)
Can the word save the person who says it?
It saved me.
But just me.

Natasha Gaither is no longer a student (shh…).