Kostyuchenko is a celebrated Russian journalist…who works for Novaya Gazeta. Or at least she did. The Moscow-based independent opposition newspaper was shut down last year after Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Kostyuchenko describes Novaya as “the best newspaper on earth”. A provincial kid who grew up in the Moscow region, she discovered journalism at the age of 14 through the writings of Anna Politkovskaya. At 17, she joined the paper. It became her intellectual home, and a thorn in the side of Putin’s regime. Her book I Love Russia brings together many of her published pieces and investigations. There are brilliant and immersive dispatches from “a lost country”, as she puts it. Kostyuchenko seeks out those on the margins of society: teenage runaways; highway sex workers; inmates in a psychiatric institution; and a suicide-prone Indigenous population in Russia’s frozen north. Her writing is reportage at its brave and luminous best. The Russian authorities try to stymie her activities; someone dumps green dye on her head. In 2020, she flies to the remote Arctic mining city of Norilsk to investigate the latest environmental disaster. She treks across the tundra with a group of Greenpeace activists, collecting samples from a polluted river, and dodging pursuers from the FSB, the Kremlin’s secret police.
Kostyuchenko is a celebrated Russian journalist…who works for Novaya Gazeta. Or at least she did. The Moscow-based independent opposition newspaper was shut down last year after Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Kostyuchenko describes Novaya as “the best newspaper on earth”. A provincial kid who grew up in the Moscow region, she discovered journalism at the age of 14 through the writings of Anna Politkovskaya. At 17, she joined the paper. It became her intellectual home, and a thorn in the side of Putin’s regime. Her book I Love Russia brings together many of her published pieces and investigations. There are brilliant and immersive dispatches from “a lost country”, as she puts it. Kostyuchenko seeks out those on the margins of society: teenage runaways; highway sex workers; inmates in a psychiatric institution; and a suicide-prone Indigenous population in Russia’s frozen north. Her writing is reportage at its brave and luminous best. The Russian authorities try to stymie her activities; someone dumps green dye on her head. In 2020, she flies to the remote Arctic mining city of Norilsk to investigate the latest environmental disaster. She treks across the tundra with a group of Greenpeace activists, collecting samples from a polluted river, and dodging pursuers from the FSB, the Kremlin’s secret police.
