Description
‘The Russia recounted here is the Russia we need to understand. Elena Kostyuchenko is an important guide to the twenty-first century’ TIMOTHY SNYDER
Elena Kostyuchenko 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, and beyond Ukraine. This book is her fearless 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 doc-tors at a Ukrainian maternity ward, and reporters like herself. It takes us to places that non-Russians have never seen and brings us voices we have never heard.
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. But here also is a woman who refuses to be silenced.
‘Fascinating, frightening, and compulsively readable’ CAROL OFF, author of All We Leave Behind
‘A haunting book of rare courage’ CLARISSA WARD, author of On All Fronts
