Ordinary Russians: On Elena Kostyuchenko’s “I Love Russia”
Elena Kostyuchenko, transl. Bela Shayevich and Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse | I Love Russia: Reporting from a Lost Country | Penguin Press | October 2023 | 363 Pages
Like many noteworthy Russian books, Elena Kostyuchenko’s I Love Russia was conceived in Ukraine. In May 2022, the journalist visited four locations—the Polish border, Kherson, Mykolaiv, and Odesa—on a five-week assignment for the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta. She witnessed destruction on an apocalyptic scale—apartment blocks reduced to rubble, orphanages emptied by the threat of heavy shelling, bodies scorched with “charred black [messes] for a face.” At the end of her trip, she was told not to return to Moscow. Because she’d transgressed Russia’s draconian new censorship laws specifically targeting anti-war media, a target had appeared on her back seemingly overnight. These conditions made Kostyuchenko turn inward. She began to work on a book that contextualized her past reportage with personal reflection. “It was the first time I wrote about myself,” she disclosed in an interview with the literary magazine syg.ma, “because for my whole life I’ve concentrated on other people, on my subjects. But then I realized that, if I want to write about what’s happened to Russia over the last seventeen years, it wouldn’t be quite honest to exclude myself from the picture.”
The seventeen-year-long event in question is the arrival of fascism in Russia, a turn completed with the invasion of Ukraine. It’s understood throughout the book that Kostyuchenko didn’t regard her life as a site of political meaning until February 2022. To American readers, this might be a baffling claim. For one, the personal essays in I Love Russia make it clear that everyday life has taken a similar emotional toll on her as it has on her journalistic subjects. There’s also the fact that she’s done jail time for her LGBTQ activism and works for a newspaper that’s seen six of its top reporters assassinated—how much more skin could one have in the game of defending free expression in an authoritarian state? But that reigning truism of American liberalism today—that the personal is political—only makes sense where representative democracies, institutions whose primary unit is the individual, exist. That one’s personal problems can have political gravity is not a widely held belief in Russia.
Still, though the shift to personal writing that I Love Russia represents is not outwardly polemical, it supposes the critical idea that during wartime, the only ethical way to be Russian is to feel culpable for the political status quo. When does personal tragedy start to inspire protest? How might victims of policy stand up for themselves? Where does the buck stop? Kostyuchenko lived happily in Moscow before the war started. She admits that comfort made it difficult to perceive her government’s precipitous but quiet rightward turn until it was too late. “This book is about love of country, about how this love changes over the course of our lives and how it changes us, not always for the better,” says Kostyuchenko. Though her memoir and her journalism are motivated by different feelings—shame in the former and, in the latter, a love of Russia’s people—they are united by their author’s belief that things could be better.
The book is structured like this: a brief personal narrative prefaces each of the thirteen Novaya essays. These introductory texts are anecdotal reflections concerning Kostyuchenko’s shared experiences with her subjects. In one chapter thematizing violence against women, a reported story (“The Highway”) about a brothel operating from a truck stop on the Dagestani border follows Kostyuchenko’s impression (“What It’s Like To Be A Woman”) of a chauvinistic taxi driver who became increasingly threatening as he drove her to an assignment at the scene of a terrorist attack. Another chapter, “Childhood Ends,” concerns drug addiction among Russia’s youth. It consists of a piece from 2011 in which Kostyuchenko follows a crew of drug-addled teen skinheads onto home turf: an abandoned hospital in their shitty Moscow suburb. (Among other get-rich-quick schemes, they charge an entry fee to visiting urban explorers.) Kostyuchenko relates this to the day she found her younger brother dead in his friend’s apartment, where he’d been huffing butane on the couch.
There is a defiant populism in Kostyuchenko’s reportage, which is focused largely on social and political unrest in Russia’s provinces. It’s possible to get leads from Moscow in the Baltics, but the grassroots investigative work that is Kostyuchenko’s bread and butter is impossible at present. The personal essays in I Love Russia mark the essential facts of Elena’s being: her nineties childhood, her career, her lesbianism, her travels, her complicated family. In the hands of someone with less to risk, this project—in which, crudely put, a journalist makes her coverage about herself—could have failed. But it’s not an exaggeration to say that the story of Elena’s own life is the story of the Russia that was decisively lost in February 2022.
•
Elena Kostyuchenko was born in 1987 in Yaroslavl, a small city roughly five hours northeast of Moscow. Kostyuchenko belongs to the first generation of Russian citizens—even if she was technically born in the Soviet Union, being four years older than the country. She learns about mortality at the age of five as the First Chechen war is broadcast to her living room and gangs start regularly shooting up her block. National politics, then, serve as the benchmark of Kostyuchenko’s personal coming of age. She also remembers wistful images of childhood: catching colds, the view at twilight from her mother’s high-rise, a piano nobody played. And she remembers her auspicious, if purely material, attraction to the family’s early-nineties tv set, its tendency to gather dust—“dust adored it”—and static.
Kostyuchenko’s post-Soviet upbringing was, if dark, entirely ordinary. The only way she regards her family as exceptional is in its miraculous lack of wartime casualties over the twentieth century. Her grandmother, born a peasant, witnessed some degree of real social mobility because of Soviet modernization efforts. Her frugality, a factory job, and self-sacrifice were enough to afford her own daughter, Elena’s mother, the relative security to become the first member of the family to graduate high school and even college. She saved for Kostyuchenko’s future, too. “Your daughter will never need for anything,” she is remembered to have said. “If she wants to, she can even live in Moscow. If she doesn’t want to, she never needs to get married.” In typical fashion, the family’s resources were wiped under shock therapy, the liberalization of the post-Soviet economy. Despite such ambitious, even feminist attempts to provide Kostyuchenko with enough cushion to finance her life, when she withdrew her grandmother’s savings in adulthood, they were worth 1000 rubles: “Two pairs of socks; two pairs of underwear.”
But Kostyuchenko did move to Moscow, entering Moscow State University's prestigious journalism department in 2004. She recalls being shocked by the unbelievable wealth in her new city, balking at the idea that skirts could cost three times her mother’s monthly salary. In a personal essay titled “Moscow Isn’t Russia,” Elena reflects on how alienating it was to become a Muscovite. The essay doesn’t expressly say so, but it’s easy to read Kostyuchenko’s choice to join the independent media as a product of her class commitments. She does acknowledge that, around the time she finished school, Putin had reformed the Russian tax system such that “the provinces had to pay Moscow first and then Moscow decided how much to give back to them. . . . The tiles, the streetlights, the cultural spaces, they were not cheap. The tiles I walked on were paid for by my mother, the teacher in Yaroslavl.” Unlike many of her college classmates, who found work at official state newsrooms while holding nominally liberal worldviews, Kostyuchenko knew from the jump that she wanted to expose the corruption actively impoverishing the people she grew up around. “I wasn’t friends with my colleagues from other media outlets,” she recalls. “I didn’t go to the big media parties. . . . It felt like they were all talking about bullshit and not real work.”
The world into which Kostyuchenko graduated—the so-called innocent aughts—was one in which decadence overwhelmed the Moscow intelligentsia’s aspirations for a Western-style democracy. Even the inception of such a vital democratic institution as Novaya involved deals with the same oligarchic funders whose systemic transgressions against the Russian people its reportage intended to expose. As early as 2006, the oligarch Alexander Lebedev owned a thirty-nine percent stake in the newspaper; Gorbachev controlled an additional ten percent of shares. (As of 2017, Gorbachev maintained his ten percent share, while Lebedev’s had decreased to seventeen percent.) Novaya always maintained total editorial independence from its partial funders, whose approach to building the media infrastructure of a fledgling liberal government was much more friendly to Putin than its staff’s. Editor-in-Chief Dmitry Muratov went on the record about the newspaper’s relationship with its patrons in 2009: “We believe the corrupt system in Russia is a vertically corrupt system personally created by Putin. Lebedev and Gorbachev don't. They think it is bad Russian officials who are stopping Russia becoming a normal European country.”
Kostyuchenko’s distrust of Moscow society informs every part of her writing. It motivates her commitment to regional news, yes, but also her pathos-driven rhetorical style—she and her Novaya colleagues often faced criticism from other media outlets for being too activist—and the elegant simplicity of her prose. Kostyuchenko tends to insert herself into her reporting, which takes her to some exceptionally depressing corners of the world—a Northern Siberian indigenous community suffering from a suicide epidemic, a sleepy village along the Moscow-Saint Petersburg Sapsan line where everyone knows someone who’s been flattened by the train. In a piece from 2014, Kostyuchenko connects with a widow trying to identify her husband’s body, who was killed during a covert operation in the Donbass before Russia admitted its military presence in the region. For the piece, Kostyuchenko performs a bizarre pro-bono private eye job for the widow. When the state sends his body in a closed casket, one that likely contains another man’s remains, they try together to locate the right corpse. It’s astounding how, in her destitution, this widow lets herself rely on a journalist’s assistance. Kostyuchenko likewise gets deeply intimate with her subject, running around a strange city for days to help arrange a stranger’s funeral. This act of solidarity with a woman mourning an insurgent may, in light of today’s war, seem unsavory. But to Kostyuchenko, her grief contains a kernel of the pessimism that might cause even a patriot to doubt their government’s intentions—a critical hermeneutic that personal tragedy can engender.
On and off the job, Kostyuchenko enters again and again into unlikely allegiances with people who would seem, on paper, to want her dead. To some extent, her ethnicity enables her to move through her work with relative ease. In one anecdote, Kostyuchenko has bought her dream fixer-upper apartment in Moscow. Because she’s so affable, a Russian Orthodox nationalist contractor who knows she’s a lesbian journalist from Novaya Gazeta offers to renovate her home for cheap. But there are plenty of injustices that neither charm nor a Slavic appearance can save her from. Being openly gay, Kostyuchenko and her partners have been beaten time and again for attending Pride—and by people with the same beliefs as her contractor: “Nationalist, Cossacks, and Russian Orthodox people.” But she continues to attend Moscow’s tiny Pride celebration annually, knowing she’ll be beaten and arrested. Even in writing, she’s cool about her exposure to violence, making the choice to endanger her life sound as banal as the choice to wake up in the morning. She’s also just plain funny: “[My girlfriend] Anya and I went to gay pride. We wrote, ‘Hate is Boring’ on our rainbow flag.”
The motivation of Kostyuchenko’s work is that someday, to cite the motto of the entire Russian political opposition, “Russia Will Be Free.” It’s a hopeful statement—a rallying cry uniting the left, the Navalnyist center, and a few lone Russian paramilitary groups defected to Ukraine’s International Legion. But for every coterie that sees through the present regime’s talk, there’s another whose grievances about the abysmal policy failures of a cruel and degenerate state will never orient toward action. The limited power of subversive journalism to foment change at home owes not only to her federal government’s sophisticated fake news apparatus, but also to the way in which corruption and deception have penetrated every level of Russian society. Kostyuchenko’s 2006 essay, “Justice vs. Decency,” explores the decorative nature of civil law in Russia by way of a Georgian refugee on a hunger strike against her undeserved deportation. A jail inspector asks the plaintiff to sign a document revoking her writ of appeal. When the Georgian refuses to sign, the inspector responds, “You’re an adult woman. Why are you torturing yourself and your loved ones? It is indecent.” At this point in the essay, Kostyuchenko pauses to explain the cultural significance of the inspector’s callousness: “In Russia,” she writes, “decency is not the same thing as morality—it is actually the opposite. A decent person follows established rules. For example, they’ll pay off a cop to avoid getting a speeding ticket. . . . They don’t insist on their rights—especially if they are aging Georgian refugees. . . . Don’t piss off the people more powerful than you.” The Georgian refugee dies in her holding cell. It’s a cogent outline of how all kinds of gross injustices against ordinary people fail to end in protest. This is not to say that Russians are, by dint of historical fate, inherently apathetic, but the contrary: that pretty much everyone sees exactly what’s going on, and clearly at that.
In early 2023, Kostyuchenko fell mysteriously ill on her way back to Berlin from a trip to the Ukrainian consulate in Munich. At the time, she’d been hoping to return to the field. She had never considered her life could come under threat in Europe, but as doctors monitoring her condition began to suspect foul play, they handed her case over to the police. The attending detective was shocked by Kostyuchenko’s laissez-faire attitude toward her own safety. “You come here and think you’re on vacation,” he scolded. “We have political murders here. Russia’s secret services are active in this country.”
As of October 2023, Kostyuchenko has no plans to return to Ukraine. But Ukraine is where she wants to be—it is the place where she, a Russian, can do a small part to address her country’s crimes. Her motivation, as ever, is the love she feels for her place of origin. In one of her personal essays, she admits, writing from Europe, “I’m Russian. I was born in Russia . . . I braid my long hair. My native language is Russian, which I speak without any accent. I’ve never felt like a foreigner in my own country. I belong here.” Elena Kostyuchenko will always be an ordinary Russian: she belongs to a country that wants to kill her.