I Love Russia: Reporting from a Lost Country

Winner of the Pushkin House Book Prize 2024! To be a journalist is to tell the truth. Here is Russia as it really is.
Part memoir, part collection of Elena Kostyuchenko's fearless reporting, I Love Russia introduces us to places we've never seen and to people who've been systematically, brutally erased from view by Putin's regime. We enter secretive state-run facilities for disabled people, abandoned buildings haunted by suicide and violence, and a schoolyard marked by unacknowledged massacre. We meet village girls recruited into sex work, queer people in the outer provinces, and patients and doctors on a Ukrainian maternity ward. The result is a singular, uncompromising, and profoundly humane portrait of a nation - and of an extraordinary woman who refuses to be silenced. 'Important ... this is the Russia we need to understand.' - Timothy Snyder. 'Shocking and moving ... [a] gritty insider's take on Russia.' - Sunday Times.