I Love Russia

Reporting from a Lost Country

By: Elena Kostyuchenko, Bela Shayevich - translator, Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse - translator

Narrated by: Tiana Yarik

* 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.

©2023 Elena Kostyuchenko (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

“Defined by trauma and disorientation, hardiness and resolve . . . a wrenching and visceral text whose details almost seem to waft off the page. . . [Kostyuchenko] filed dispatches on Russia’s occupation and bombardment of Ukraine’s southern cities, bracing accounts laced with a sense of guilt and the utter futility of that guilt . . . Kostyuchenko’s writings are also a personal reckoning, an attempt to work through how she missed—or, rather, failed to adequately react to—Russia’s descent into fascism.”—The New Yorker, Best Books of 2023 (Essential Read)

“A stunning collection . . . [Kostyuchenko] has been assaulted, arrested, and, she writes, nearly killed in retribution for criticizing her country . . . a portrait of a country falling ever deeper into fascism. She says this vital read will be the last book she ever publishes.”—Shannon Carlin, TIME, 100 Must-Read Books of 2023

“Jaw-dropping . . . her style of brave, intimate reporting is likely to be a rarity in Russia for years to come.”—Valerie Hopkins, New York Times Book Review

So breathtaking!

Such a badass woman!! I love how raw this book is. It was so good to know more about Russia’s reality through so many touching stories.

Great story

What a great look behind the veil of Russia. So many things going on there to so many innocent people.

A life changing read

True power is the ability to unflinchingly tell the truth, no matter the consequences. Thank you, Elena

I am a Russian and I love this work

Elena Kostyuchenko created a beautiful story. When I lived in Russia many years ago, I did not know my own country’s history and what was going on right in front of me because I was very busy living my own life. Now I am shocked and saddened.
Novaya Gazeta still has a website where its authors works are published. It still has Politkovskya and Kostyuchenko articles dating back to 1999 and 2006 respectively.
Fascinating book! Thank you Elena!

Beautiful but sad.

I had hoped that the book would focus more on politics and the war, but many of the vignettes about life is Russia were quite moving. The Conclusion is very moving, when Novaya Gazeta is shut down in 2022. I still subscribe to the version published in exile, but it is a shame they cannot publish the truth to the people who really need it. Contrary to another listener to this audiobook, I enjoyed the Russian narrator. I felt she brought an authentic voice to the work.

A Reporter’s Story

I liked learning about Russia, and how it made me think more about doing everything possible in America to prevent having an authoritarian government. When a book changes the way you think, it’s a good book. I also liked hearing about the daily life of a reporter working for an independent publication and what happened to the publication when the government became more repressive. It was one of the saddest books I have ever read and it was hard to listen to because the stories were so tragic, one after the other.

Mostly Aimless. Russian life is hard. Okay.

What a frustrating read. Initially, the book is confusing for its lack of storyline, then you realize there is no storyline, just a collection of disconnected mini stories about Russian life. It doesn’t add up to much.

Unbelievably poor narration

This review is not about the story.

I’m 39 minutes in and this has to be an all new low for Audible. The narrator’s accent is extremely difficult to understand, but worse than that, she sounds like she doesn’t understand what she’s reading. On top of the terrible narrator, I just hit a point where she flubbed a phrase and re-read it, and it wasn’t edited out. I honestly believe no one listened to this between recording and putting it out into the world. Embarrassingly low quality.

What’s frustrating is how this impacts my enjoyment of the underlying work. Someone put years of effort into writing this book, and treating it this way as an audiobook is so disrespectful.