In a talk at Columbia University, Kostyuchenko suggests that her choice of title was an attempt to reclaim concepts of ‘love’ and ‘patriotism’ from the narrow interpretations that Putin would impose on them. She argues that the ‘greatest form of love and patriotism is criticism’. However, she does not develop these ideas in the book, which perhaps could have done with a clarifying introduction… Without one, the book loses some thematic coherence and leaves Kostyuchenko’s feelings about her country open to misinterpretation.
This is not a fatal flaw because in other respects the book is excellent, a gripping portrait of contemporary Russia, worthy of comparison with the reportage of writers whom Kostyuchenko particularly admires: Alexievich and Anna Politkovskaya. Like Alexievich’s Second-Hand Time, the book is structured as a patchwork of disparate stories and voices: the voices of ordinary and often marginalised people. Most of the book consists of long-form journalism articles that were originally published in the newspaper Novaya Gazeta, where Kostyuchenko worked for 17 years, from 2005 until the paper was shut down by the Russian government in 2022 – largely in response to her reporting on the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Each of the twelve articles is paired with a personal essay, linking the themes covered in the articles with reflections on Kostyuchenko’s own life: growing up in 1990s Yaroslavl, finding her vocation as a journalist at just 14 years old, and her evolving relationship with a state that has persecuted her both for her journalism and LGBT activism. Now living in exile, Kostyuchenko remains at risk from the Russian state. Forced to leave Ukraine, after receiving intelligence that the Russian army was under orders to kill her, she moved to Germany, where Russian agents are suspected to have poisoned her in October 2022. She wrote I Love Russia as she was recovering from this attack. Given the circumstances, her achievement in writing the book is all the more impressive. The book more than lives up to the promise on the dust jacket that it will ‘[take] us to places that non-Russians have never seen and [bring] us voices we have never heard’.
In a talk at Columbia University, Kostyuchenko suggests that her choice of title was an attempt to reclaim concepts of ‘love’ and ‘patriotism’ from the narrow interpretations that Putin would impose on them. She argues that the ‘greatest form of love and patriotism is criticism’. However, she does not develop these ideas in the book, which perhaps could have done with a clarifying introduction… Without one, the book loses some thematic coherence and leaves Kostyuchenko’s feelings about her country open to misinterpretation.
This is not a fatal flaw because in other respects the book is excellent, a gripping portrait of contemporary Russia, worthy of comparison with the reportage of writers whom Kostyuchenko particularly admires: Alexievich and Anna Politkovskaya. Like Alexievich’s Second-Hand Time, the book is structured as a patchwork of disparate stories and voices: the voices of ordinary and often marginalised people. Most of the book consists of long-form journalism articles that were originally published in the newspaper Novaya Gazeta, where Kostyuchenko worked for 17 years, from 2005 until the paper was shut down by the Russian government in 2022 – largely in response to her reporting on the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Each of the twelve articles is paired with a personal essay, linking the themes covered in the articles with reflections on Kostyuchenko’s own life: growing up in 1990s Yaroslavl, finding her vocation as a journalist at just 14 years old, and her evolving relationship with a state that has persecuted her both for her journalism and LGBT activism. Now living in exile, Kostyuchenko remains at risk from the Russian state. Forced to leave Ukraine, after receiving intelligence that the Russian army was under orders to kill her, she moved to Germany, where Russian agents are suspected to have poisoned her in October 2022. She wrote I Love Russia as she was recovering from this attack. Given the circumstances, her achievement in writing the book is all the more impressive. The book more than lives up to the promise on the dust jacket that it will ‘[take] us to places that non-Russians have never seen and [bring] us voices we have never heard’.
