Product Details
- Publisher: Random House Canada (2023-10-17)
- Language: English
- Paperback: 384 pages
- ISBN-13: 9781039008816
- Item Weight: 595.35 grams
- Dimensions: 9.55 x 6.38 x 1.27 cm
"Elena Kostyuchenko is an important guide to the 21st century." —Timothy Snyder, author of The Road to Unfreedom
"A fascinating, frightening, compulsively readable chronicle of life in Putin's Russia.... Her stories are unforgettable, and deeply important.” ― Carol Off, author of All We Leave Behind
“Would you like to know where Putin comes from? What the Russians are like today? And why? Read this book." ― Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
To be a journalist is to tell the truth.
I Love Russia is Elena Kostyuchenko's fearless attempt to document Putin's Russia as experienced by those it systematically and brutally erases: village girls recruited into sex work, queer people in the outer provinces; patients and doctors in a Ukrainian maternity ward; and reporters like herself, at risk not only because of her work but because she lived openly as a queer woman and LGBTQ activist in a deeply homophobic state. 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, her book stitches together reportage and personal essays into a kaleidoscopic, often otherworldly 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 as she does, because she is 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.
About the Author
ELENA KOSTYUCHENKO was born in Yaroslavl, Russia, in 1987, and began working as a journalist at 15. Until it was shut down in the spring of 2022 in response to her coverage from Ukraine, she spent 17 years reporting for Novaya Gazeta, which was Russia's last major independent newspaper. She is 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 Gerd Bucerius Award and the Paul Klebnikov Prize.
