I Love Russia: Reporting From a Lost Country

Kostyuchenko, a reporter who has won several international awards, is one of the very few Russian journalists who covered Russian military atrocities in Ukraine in the early weeks following the February 2022 invasion. She is a person of outstanding courage, even by the standards of her independent paper, Novaya Gazeta (now shuttered in Russia). At least five Novaya journalists have been assassinated, including Anna Politkovskaya in 2006. Kostyuchenko sees Politkovskaya as her role model. “There was nobody in the world I respected more,” she writes. Her book combines her published articles with more memoiristic chapters about her childhood in a provincial town, her mother who trusts Russian TV propaganda over Kostyuchenko’s own eyewitness accounts, and her LGBTQ activism. She has a predilection for the down-and-out and the dismal, and the book immerses the reader in a world of roadside prostitutes, care homes that isolate people with disabilities, and the struggles of dwindling ethnic minorities in Russia’s far north.