I Love Russia
**WINNER OF THE PUSHKIN HOUSE BOOK PRIZE 2024**
To be a journalist is to tell the truth. Here is Russia as it really is.
'Important ... this is the Russia we need to understand' TIMOTHY SNYDER
'A haunting book of rare courage' CLARISSA WARD
'Read this book' SVETLANA ALEXIVICH
Part memoir, part collection of Elena Kostyuchenko’s fearless reporting, I Love Russia introduces us to places we’ve never seen and to people who’ve been systematically, brutally erased from view by Putin’s regime. We enter secretive state-run facilities for disabled people, abandoned buildings haunted by suicide and violence, and a schoolyard marked by unacknowledged massacre. We meet village girls recruited into sex work, queer people in the outer provinces, and patients and doctors on a Ukrainian maternity ward.
The result is a singular, uncompromising, and profoundly humane portrait of a nation – and of an extraordinary woman who refuses to be silenced.
'Shocking and moving ... [a] gritty insider's take on Russia' SUNDAY TIMES
'Reportage at its brave and luminous best' OBSERVER
'Deeply personal, beautifully written' IPAPER
*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.