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I Love Russia

Reporting from a Lost Country

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I Love Russia

Written by: Elena Kostyuchenko, Bela Shayevich - translator, Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse - translator
Narrated by: Tiana Yarik
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About this listen

 * 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. 21st Century Art & Literature Journalists, Editors & Publishers Modern Russia War Scary
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It is no surprise to see Russia described as a degenerate society and a morally failed state, but it’s also good to be reminded why this is so, especially when the message arrives in the words of one of its citizens. Given that the author was likely poisoned by thugs from that state and barely escaped with her life, her animus is also no surprise. One small irritant: it’s not necessary to have the book read in a heavily Russian accented voice. The words speak for themselves.

Morally failed state

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