Elena Kostyuchenko (2018 Klebnikov Russian Civil Society Fellow) is the author of I Love Russia: Reporting from a Los Country, published this month by Penguin Random House. 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.

A fearless, cutting portrait of Russia and an essential cri de coeur for journalism in opposition to the global authoritarian turn

 

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.

Kostyuchenko’s essay “HZB,” translated by Bela Shayevich, first appeared in Harriman Magazine (Fall 2018).

The Harriman Institute is one of the first stops on Kostyuchenko’s book tour.