Elena Kostyuchenko

Ilona Chavasse

Bela Shayevich

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I Love Russia

It's here! Browse the 2024 Penguin Christmas gift guide

Brilliant and immersive ... reportage at its brave and luminous best

Fearless reporting… shocking and moving… This gritty insider’s take on Russia will prove more helpful than the welter of books by western experts when it comes to countering Putin’s disinformation

I Love Russia is full of rigorous journalistic detail, but is also deeply personal, beautifully written ... real and intimate

Few have tried to examine the life of ordinary people in the world's biggest country (by physical size) the way this one does ... [Elena's] style of brave, intimate reporting is likely to be a rarity in Russia for years to come

Elena Kostyuchenko is an important guide to the twenty-first century. The Russia she recounts here is the Russia we need to understand

Elena's bravery and reportage are astonishing - the Russia we never see, every page another insight into life under Putin

Christina Lamb, author of Our Bodies, Their Battlefields

A fascinating, frightening, compulsively readable chronicle of life in Putin's Russia. As a girl, Elena Kostyuchenko wanted to believe in her country; as a journalist she has dedicated her life to exposing its darkness. Her prose is haunting, edgy, searing. Her stories are unforgettable, and deeply important

A haunting book of rare courage. Kostyuchenko's searing reportage takes the reader under the skin of a Russia that few outsiders get to see. With spare, unfliching prose she lays bare the cynicism and corruption, but also the bravery and heart, of her beloved country

Not only does Kostyuchenko find her way into the very darkness, she goes for its blackest corners. . . . The good news that emerges is her talent. Read her. It's worth it

Dmitry Muratov, editor-in-chief of Novaya Gazeta and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize

Would you like to know where Putin comes from? What the Russians are like today? And why? Read this book. For years, the author has been keeping a diary of the soul of her people, with love and with hate. Scientists claim that there is no place in the body where the soul resides. So where is it then? The author goes to homes and schools, sits at weddings and celebrations, asking about love and hate, children and parents. We get to see the rise of the monster that now leaves its footprints in Kyiv, Bucha, and Irpin — and how it forces the whole world to fear the future

Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and author of Second-hand Time

Bold, revelatory ... This is remarkable, courageous first-person journalism from a Russian woman who was raised a proud patriot, and now finds herself compelled to tell the awful truth of the country's oppressive authoritarianism under Vladamir Putin

In this sharp-edged debut, Kostyuchenko shares experiences from her harrowing career as a reporter for Novaya Gazeta, a Moscow-based independent newspaper ... Throughout, Kostyuchenko's journalistic integrity is unquestionable and the dangers she faces are very real. It's a vivid and poignant account

Injustice screams out from the tenacious reporting

Striking and exceptional ... The book can’t provide any sudden magic answer to the questions of why Russia has become what it is or how it could foreseeably change, because no one, as far as I know, can do that fully, but its accuracy, honesty and wide-reaching scope certainly make for a significant contribution

[A] searing portrait of modern Russia… [that] reveals much hidden suffering: an indictment of Valdimir Putin’s long rule

Reporting from a Lost Country

**WINNER OF THE PUSHKIN HOUSE BOOK PRIZE 2024** 
 
'Would you like to know where Putin comes from? What the Russians are like today? And why? Read this book' SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH 
 
'Brilliant and immersive ... reportage at its brave and luminous best' OBSERVER 
 
To be a journalist is to tell the truth. To be patriotic is to be critical, honest, and fearless. 
 
I Love Russia takes us to places that non-Russians have never seen and brings us voices we have never heard. It is Elena Kostyuchenko’s courageous attempt to document Russia 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. 
 
At once uncompromising and deeply humane, it stitches reportage and personal essays into a kaleidoscopic, often other-worldly journey. Here is Russia as it is, not as we imagine it. 
 
I Love Russia may be the last work from her homeland Kostyuchenko will publish for a long time – perhaps ever. She writes driven by the conviction that the greatest form of love and patriotism is criticism. And because the threat of Putin’s Russia extends beyond herself, beyond Crimea, and beyond Ukraine. 
 
This is a singular portrait of a nation, and of a woman who refuses to be silenced. 
 
'Elena's bravery and reportage are astonishing' CHRISTINA LAMB 
 
'Kostyuchenko is an important guide to the twenty-first century' TIMOTHY SNYDER 
 
*A SPECTATOR BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023*

Elena Kostyuchenko (Author) 
ELENA KOSTYUCHENKO was born in Yaroslavl, Russia, in 1987. She began working as a jour­nalist when she was fourteen and spent seventeen years reporting for Novaya Gazeta, Russia's last major indepen­dent newspaper. 
 
In March 2022 she crossed into Ukraine to cover the horrors committed in Russia's name; Novaya Gazeta was shut down in the spring of 2022 in response to her reporting. Returning home now would likely mean prosecution and up to fifteen years in prison. 
 
She is also the author of two books published in Russian, Unwanted on Probation and We Have to Live Here, and is the recipient of the European Press Prize, the Free Media Award, and the Paul Klebnikov Prize. 
 
Ilona Chavasse (Translator) 
Ilona Chavasse was born in Belarus and, together with her family, emigrated to the United States in 1989. She has translated three novels by Yuri Rytkheu, including most recently When the Whales Leave, Aleksandr Skorobogatov's Russian Gothic, and Galina Scherbakova's short stories for the Dedalus anthology Slav Sisters, as well as The Village at the Edge of Noon by Darya Bobyleva. She lives in London. 
 
Bela Shayevich (Translator) 
Bela Shayevich is a Soviet American writer and translator. She is best known for her translation of 2015 Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich's Secondhand Time, for which she was awarded the TA First Translation Prize. Her other translations include Yevgeny Zamyatin's We and Vsevolod Nekrasov's I Live I See, which she cotranslated with Ainsley Morse. Her writing has appeared in n+1, Jew­ish Currents, and Harper's Magazine.

To be a journalist is to tell the truth. 
 
I Love Russia is Elena Kostyuchenko's fearless attempt to document Russia 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. It takes us to places that non-Russians have never seen and brings us voices we have never heard. 
 
At once uncompromising and deeply humane, it stitches reportage and personal essays into a kaleidoscopic, often other-worldly journey. Here is Russia as it is, not as we imagine it. 
 
I Love Russia may be the last work from her homeland Kostyuchenko will publish for a long time - perhaps ever. She writes driven by the conviction that the greatest form of love and patriotism is criticism. And because the threat of Putin's Russia extends beyond herself, beyond Crimea, and beyond Ukraine. 
 
This is a singular portrait of a nation, and of a woman who refuses to be silenced.

I Love Russia

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Elena Kostyuchenko

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