I Love Russia

Reporting from a Lost Country

By: Elena Kostyuchenko, Bela Shayevich - translator, Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse - translator

Narrated by: Tiana Yarik

* Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker and TIME * Winner of the Pushkin House Book Prize * A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice *

“A haunting book of rare courage.” —Clarissa Ward, CNN chief international correspondent and author of On All Fronts

To be a journalist is to tell the truth. I Love Russia is Elena Kostyuchenko’s unrelenting attempt to document her country as experienced by those whom it systematically and brutally erases: village girls recruited into sex work, queer people in the outer provinces, patients and doctors at a Ukrainian maternity ward, and reporters like herself.

Here is Russia as it is, not as we imagine it. The result is a singular portrait of a nation, and of a young woman who refuses to be silenced. In March 2022, as a correspondent for Russia’s last free press, Novaya Gazeta, Kostyuchenko crossed the border into Ukraine to cover the war. It was her mission to ensure that Russians witnessed the horrors Putin was committing in their name. She filed her pieces knowing that should she return home, she would likely be prosecuted and sentenced to up to fifteen years in prison. Yet, driven by the conviction that the greatest form of love and patriotism is criticism, she continues to write.

I Love Russia stitches together reportage from the past fifteen years with personal essays, assembling a kaleidoscopic narrative that Kostyuchenko understands may be the last work from her homeland that she’ll publish for a long time—perhaps ever. It exposes the inner workings of an entire nation as it descends into fascism and, inevitably, war. She writes because the threat of Putin’s Russia extends beyond herself, beyond Crimea, and beyond Ukraine. We fail to understand it at our own peril.

A life changing read

True power is the ability to unflinchingly tell the truth, no matter the consequences. Thank you, Elena

I am a Russian and I love this work

Elena Kostyuchenko created a beautiful story. When I lived in Russia many years ago, I did not know my own country’s history and what was going on right in front of me because I was very busy living my own life. Now I am shocked and saddened.
Novaya Gazeta still has a website where its authors works are published. It still has Politkovskya and Kostyuchenko articles dating back to 1999 and 2006 respectively.
Fascinating book! Thank you Elena!

Great story

What a great look behind the veil of Russia. So many things going on there to so many innocent people.

An extraordinary and powerful book 

This is a very powerful book, describing some of the deeply painful realities in Russian society over the recent past. It also gives sharp insight into some of the costs of Putin’s suppression end of the invasion of Ukraine. Most of all, it illustrates the price paid by individual Russians many forgotten and invisible. But also, of course, by individual Ukrainians.

Beautiful but sad.

I had hoped that the book would focus more on politics and the war, but many of the vignettes about life is Russia were quite moving. The Conclusion is very moving, when Novaya Gazeta is shut down in 2022. I still subscribe to the version published in exile, but it is a shame they cannot publish the truth to the people who really need it. Contrary to another listener to this audiobook, I enjoyed the Russian narrator. I felt she brought an authentic voice to the work.