In October last year, Elena Kostyuchenko’s book with the provocative title I Love Russia was released in English. Drawing from her previous reporting for the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta, Kostyuchenko tries to understand how her home country has descended into fascism. The picture she paints is so horrific, that fellow journalist and writer Svetlana Satchkova had to put the book down several times. She found herself having an internal dialogue with its author, asking: what do we mean when we say that we love Russia? 

By Svetlana Satchkova

In October 2023, Elena Kostyuchenko’s book, I Love Russia, was released in English. Despite its provocative title, it was soon named one of the best books of the year by both The New Yorker and The New York Times. Kostyuchenko previously worked as a journalist at Novaya Gazeta, an independent newspaper which has seen seven of its reporters killed over the years because of their work and whose license was ultimately revoked by the Russian authorities.

When Elena went to Ukraine in 2022, shortly after Putin’s troops invaded, she learned that the Russian military had orders to eliminate her. She escaped to Germany, where she fell severely ill a few months later. German doctors concluded that she’d been poisoned by an unidentified substance - an incident that mirrored reports of other Russian journalists experiencing similar symptoms.

While recovering, Elena began writing the book, which is comprised of her articles originally published in Novaya Gazeta, alongside shorter autobiographical essays. She reflects on how she’d failed to recognize what was happening to her native country and how it had come to attack a neighboring state.

Love for a lost country

In the book itself, Kostyuchenko doesn’t explicitly discuss what she means when she says that she loves Russia. However, in preparation for her book’s release and the inevitable questions that would follow, she seems to have developed a definition that works for her. ‘For me, a country is, first and foremost, people united by a common destiny, not always a good one,’ she says in interviews. Her stories often focus on particular kinds of people - those frequently neglected by the mainstream media. Her incredible capacity for compassion shines through in every one of them.

I never mention in public that I love Russia

Elena has a bigger heart than I do, because I am inclined to exclude all people who don’t share my values from this definition. But I’m still not sure what I mean when I say - to myself, since I never mention this in public - that I love Russia.

A fellow journalist, I left the country in 2016 because living under Putin’s regime had become unsustainable for me as both a writer and a human being. Since then, I have been living in New York. While reading Elena’s book, I found myself having an internal dialog with her. Unlike her, I can’t clearly define what it is that I love. What is a country? It is not simply defined by its political regime or the physical space it occupies. I can’t possibly be attached to everything that’s enclosed within Russia’s  borders, given its vast territory. Born in Vladivostok in the Russian Far East, I grew up in Moscow and haven’t visited my birthplace since my early teens. I’ve been to Yekaterinburg, to Saint Petersburg and to some smaller towns outside Moscow - that’s the extent of my knowledge of Russia. What I do know for certain is that the difference between the capital and the rest of the country - in terms of the level of wealth, violence and social structures - is staggering, which is what Kostyuchenko writes about.

She grew up in Yaroslavl, a city 250 kilometers northeast of Moscow, during the nineties. In the first chapter of her book, she talks about the desperate poverty her family experienced, even though her mother had a PhD and worked at an ‘institute’. Hospitals didn’t have doctors or medication, and criminals freely roamed the streets. This situation, she suggests, explains why so many Russians welcomed Putin’s rise to power, since under his leadership they finally began to emerge from the humiliation and poverty they’d been plunged into after the fall of the USSR.

Elena Kostyuchenko in February 2024. Photo: Jean-Christophe Bott / EPA / ANP

On the margins of society

Her own childhood ended with the death of her adopted brother, a boy who grew up in an orphanage and never learned fractions or how to tell time on an analog clock. As an adult, he drank and slept with men for money.

In the shocking piece of reporting that follows, Kostyuchenko recounts the time she spent in an unfinished and abandoned hospital in a Moscow suburb in 2011, a place inhabited by people with nowhere else to go. Many of them are neglected children who survive by pushing drugs and bringing tourists inside their abode for cash. Kostyuchenko describes a particularly harrowing scene she witnessed, in which the police raid the crumbling ten-story building and one of the teenagers, fleeing from them, falls down an open elevator shaft. Reading this chapter was so painful I had to put the book down several times - a reaction I would have later on as well, with some other chapters.

A country is people united by a common destiny, not always a good one

What Kostyuchenko excels at is reporting on people living on the margins of society, often far from big cities. One chapter focuses on the day-to-day lives of prostitutes residing in trailers along a federal highway. Another striking piece takes her to the Taymyr Peninsula in the far north of Siberia, home to the Nganasan people. During Soviet times, their nomadic existence was outlawed, forcing them to settle in villages without running water or access to a sewage system, in houses heated by coal. They once survived by catching and selling fish, but now the fish are gone due to an industrial diesel spill perpetrated and covered up by the company Nornickel. As a result, they’ve been driven into destitution, with nothing to do but drink. Many are dying from alcohol abuse, and many others commit suicide. In a related piece, Elena travels to Norilsk, where Nornickel is headquartered, to report on the spill. She documents how both local activists and she herself are obstructed by the company’s security service, the police, and state intelligence agents, who prevent them from uncovering the facts.

A horrifying picture of Russia

In another section of her book, Kostyuchenko reflects on living in Russia as a lesbian - about trying to secure a loan with her girlfriend and being denied, attending a gay pride where she is hit on the head so severely that she begins losing her hearing. On a different occasion, she recalls, people tore off her dress, leaving her naked on the street; and yet another time, she was beaten and arrested. This section also includes a piece of reporting about two elderly men in Ilsky, a settlement in the Krasnodar region, who were murdered because they were suspected of being in a same-sex relationship.

The more closely involved with the state the individuals are, the harder it was for me to empathize with them

Overall, Kostyuchenko’s book paints such a horrifying picture of Russia that readers might find themselves wondering - what is there to love? I know I kept asking this question. This paradox isn’t resolved by the book’s end, at least not directly. What she does is as subtle as it is profound. The intense attention Elena pays to each person she comes across reveals them to be unmistakably human, their own truth visible. It was easier for me to understand her subjects in some parts of her book and harder in others, like in the piece where she describes the time she spent in a police department, posing as an intern. The officers do unspeakable things, yet we can see how they do them because the system forces them to. In general, the more closely involved with the state the individuals Elena describes are, the harder it was for me to empathize with them.

People celebrate the 75th anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany in World War Two in Norilsk on May 9, 2020, amid the coronavirus pandemic. Irina Yarinskaya / AFP / ANP

In 2014, Kostyuchenko writes, many Russians, including her own highly educated mother, welcomed the annexation of Crimea. Elena attributes this to state propaganda and the lingering belief among older generations that the USSR was the greatest country in the world, with Crimea as part of it. The question of ‘Who does Crimea belong to?’ split Russian society into two opposing camps. Families were torn apart by this - and it was then that I decided to leave Russia. To me, it seemed a point of no return. Among other things, I couldn’t understand how some of my friends, who had always been decent people, saw nothing wrong in their country snatching a chunk of someone else’s rightful territory. The war in the Donbas began that same year, with Putin’s regime refusing to acknowledge its involvement.

I couldn’t understand how some of my friends saw nothing wrong in their country snatching a chunk of someone else’s rightful territory

One of Kostyuchenko’s texts explores how the relatives of Russian soldiers killed in the Donbas struggle to locate the bodies of their loved ones, only to be stonewalled by officials who insist that no soldiers have died there, since according to the state no Russian military presence exists there. Eventually, the relatives receive the bodies under the table, with no official identification and strict orders not to open the caskets, leaving them unsure of who they are actually burying.

Internat

But Kostyuchenko considers the most important text in the book to be ‘Internat,’ originally published in Novaya Gazeta in 2021, which explores a state institution for people with psychiatric and neurological diagnoses. She was allowed to spend two weeks there on the condition that she wouldn’t use any identifying information, so that the facility couldn’t be tracked down. Its residents, she found, have been stripped of their basic human rights. They cannot control any aspect of their existence, from the length of their hair to the times they wake up or eat. If women become pregnant, they are forced to get abortions and are often sterilized. Those who show any sign of dissent are drugged to the point of near-unconsciousness. Some residents live in conditions that are beyond anything one could imagine: isolated in a ward resembling a prison cell, naked, using a bucket for bodily functions that is emptied once a day. And others are perfectly healthy, having ended up there because their relatives wanted to get rid of them and bribed an official, who then slapped a false diagnosis on them.

After her stay at the internat, Kostyuchenko realized that Russia had become a fascist state

Many years ago, I volunteered at a similar facility for children. This particular institution was based in Moscow, so it was presumably much better funded and more closely monitored than those outside the capital, yet what I saw there was so deeply disturbing it stayed with me throughout the years. Kostyuchenko writes that after her stay at the internat, she realized that Russia had become a fascist state, with the internats - housing 177,000 people, including 21,000 children - functioning as a system of concentration camps. From this realization, the organizing principle for her book emerged: to understand how Russia had descended into fascism. She’s tracing this meticulously, every chapter adding a crucial element to her argument.

Internat. Photo: Instagram Elena Kostyuchenko

Hostages

In interviews, Kostyuchenko talks about how shocked she was when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, despite having worked as a journalist for seventeen years, which should have primed her to see where things were heading. I remember being shocked, too. Just days before the invasion, I was telling my American friends that it would never happen. The reason? Because it was crazy - starting a war in the twenty-first century went against everything we’ve achieved as humanity.

Yet I differ with Elena on one important point. She says that ‘we’ attacked Ukraine and that ‘we’ are continuing the war, meaning perhaps every Russian, but I’m certain that it is Putin who has done this and is still doing this. He is separate from Russia in my mind; his criminal regime is holding my native country hostage. This didn’t happen overnight, of course. It took him more than twenty years to build a system that promotes the erosion of ethical standards, in which the average citizen feels helpless and insignificant. Our fault lies in not paying attention, in not noticing how he did this - and in not doing enough to fight against it.

Putin’s criminal regime is holding my native country hostage

In an interview with Meduza, an independent Russian-language media outlet, Kostyuchenko said, ‘When the system is inhumane, you yourself become dehumanized very quickly. If you want to see those who are kept in internats as people, then you simply won’t be able to perform your duties. And very quickly, you learn not to see them as people. This is how we are all designed, and it is a very scary thing to understand.’ I find this to be very true. Russia isn’t special; there is nothing in its culture that predisposes it to fascism. This can happen anywhere, and it’s something every country must guard against.

For Kostyuchenko, her own love for Russia means, above all, being honest and not conforming to others’ ideas of what that love should imply. Putin has been trying to convince Russians that if they love their country, they must go and kill Ukrainians. But this is exactly what they shouldn’t be doing, she says, if they truly love it – ‘we have to make sure our country does the right thing.’ I, too, want Russia to become a nation governed by the principles of equality, humanity, and respect for others. I believe this is what Alexey Navalny meant when he spoke about ‘the beautiful Russia of the future.’

Neither Elena nor I can return to Russia while Putin is in power. What remains for us is to fight his regime, to resist his propaganda machine and to support the Ukrainian cause in every possible way. And to understand how we came to where we’re at so that we can forge a way forward. Kostyuchenko’s book is a huge step on this path.

Svetlana Satchkova is the author of three novels in Russian. She grew up in Moscow and currently lives in New York. Her latest novel People and Birds has been released in Dutch by Woord in Blik, translated by Arie Van Der Ent.