I Love Russia: Reporting from a Lost Country
£16.00£20.90 (-23%)
‘Would you like to know where Putin comes from? What the Russians are like today? And why? Read this book’ SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH
‘Brilliant and immersive … reportage at its brave and luminous best’ OBSERVER
To be a journalist is to tell the truth. To be patriotic is to be critical, honest and fearless.
I Love Russia takes us to places that non-Russians have never seen and brings us voices we have never heard. It is Elena Kostyuchenko’s courageous attempt to document Russia 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.
At once uncompromising and deeply humane, it stitches reportage and personal essays into a kaleidoscopic, often other-worldly 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 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.
This is a singular portrait of a nation, and of a woman who refuses to be silenced.
‘Elena’s bravery and reportage are astonishing’ CHRISTINA LAMB
‘Kostyuchenko is an important guide to the twenty-first century’ TIMOTHY SNYDER
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by Roman Simonov
It’s a hard reading. But it’s worth to know what’s it’s about.
by MRS A CALDWELL
I really couldn’t put this book down. Every chapter was enthralling. The sections on Beslan were particularly heartbreaking. Wonderful book from start to finish.
by Ms Rachel Esther Epps
Kostyuchenko never glosses over reality, never softens the truth; but also never exaggerates or indulges emotions. She stays true to her reportage genre. I loved this book, for me it was a real page turner. The reader is left to draw their own conclusions on what her views are on those in power, but they are clear and again, uncompromising. I looked forward to when I could sit down with it each time and read it – which for me is the mark of a great book.