August 7, 2024

To title a book I Love Russia, in these times, is provocative. It invites questions, including: What is ‘Russia’? Or, if that is too complicated, which aspects of Russia does the author love, and why?

Although The BEARR Trust currently has little contact with Russia, and is unable to work there, such questions remain pertinent, as we look for glimmers of hope that Russia might one day become – in the words of the recently released political prisoner Vladimir Kara-Murza – a ‘normal, modern, democratic country’. Whether this happens will, of course, affect the civil society organisations and people with whom BEARR does still work in neighbouring countries. Hence this review of a book about Russia, and about the author Elena Kostyuchenko’s sense of loss for a Russia that might have been.

In a talk at Columbia University, Kostyuchenko suggests that her choice of title was an attempt to reclaim concepts of ‘love’ and ‘patriotism’ from the narrow interpretations that Putin would impose on them. She argues that the ‘greatest form of love and patriotism is criticism’. However, she does not develop these ideas in the book, which perhaps could have done with a clarifying introduction of the type that the Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich employs at the beginning of Second-Hand Time, another polyphonic portrait of post-Soviet Russian society. Without one, the book loses some thematic coherence and leaves Kostyuchenko’s feelings about her country open to misinterpretation.

This is not a fatal flaw because in other respects the book is excellent, a gripping portrait of contemporary Russia, worthy of comparison with the reportage of writers whom Kostyuchenko particularly admires: Alexievich and Anna Politkovskaya. Like Alexievich’s Second-Hand Time, the book is structured as a patchwork of disparate stories and voices: the voices of ordinary and often marginalised people. Most of the book consists of long-form journalism articles that were originally published in the newspaper Novaya Gazeta, where Kostyuchenko worked for 17 years, from 2005 until the paper was shut down by the Russian government in 2022 – largely in response to her reporting on the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Each of the twelve articles is paired with a personal essay, linking the themes covered in the articles with reflections on Kostyuchenko’s own life: growing up in 1990s Yaroslavl, finding her vocation as a journalist at just 14 years old, and her evolving relationship with a state that has persecuted her both for her journalism and LGBT activism.

Now living in exile, Kostyuchenko remains at risk from the Russian state. Forced to leave Ukraine, after receiving intelligence that the Russian army was under orders to kill her, she moved to Germany, where Russian agents are suspected to have poisoned her in October 2022. She wrote I Love Russia as she was recovering from this attack, which she has described in an article for the American magazine N+1, available at this link.

Given the circumstances, her achievement in writing the book is all the more impressive. The book more than lives up to the promise on the dust jacket that it will ‘[take] us to places that non-Russians have never seen and [bring] us voices we have never heard’. Dmitry Muratov, her former chief editor at Novaya Gazeta, writes: ‘Not only does Kostyuchenko find her way into the very darkness, she goes for its blackest corners’.

Her bravery and persistence to dig out these stories are remarkable. For one article, she goes undercover as an apprentice criminologist to describe twenty-four hours behind the scenes at a Moscow police station. For another, she spends two weeks as a ‘guest’ at an internat, a state-run facility for people diagnosed with psychiatric and neurological illnesses. She is frequently stonewalled or threatened, and sometimes physically attacked, by state agents determined to cover up their dirty secrets: the bodies of dead soldiers returned from Putin’s shadow war in 2014 Donbas; the testimonies of grieving Beslan mothers; the large[1]scale, illegal pumping of chemical waste by Nornickel into the once-pristine lakes and rivers of Northern Siberia. The latter article, in which Kostyuchenko and a group of environmental activists race around the tundra, collecting samples and video evidence, while under hot pursuit by private and state security goons, has the pace and suspense of an eco-thriller.

The quality of Kostyuchenko’s writing is superb: generally spare, laconic, reportorial, but with an artist’s eye for the telling detail, and a flair for lyrical description: a ‘milky slick shivering on the water’, a flock of birds ‘like a necklace of beads tossed up into the sky’. Like Alexievich, she has a tremendous ear for dialogue; for capturing the ‘true voices of true Russian people’. Whereas Alexievich composes her books from hundreds of hours of transcribed interview recordings, Kostyuchenko seems often to be in situations – as in the above-mentioned police station, or among sex workers and their drunken clients on a rural highway – where note-taking or covert recording must be impossible. However she does it, the voices come through as rich and authentic. And for this her translators, Bela Shayevich and Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse, also deserve high praise, equally skilful in rendering the colourful Russian vernacular as Kostyuchenko’s more elegant descriptive prose.

So, what is the Russia that Kostyuchenko describes? In the book’s subtitle, she refers to it as a ‘lost country’, in two senses: firstly, as a country that she has lost, now that she must live in exile; and secondly, as a country that has lost its way, that has ‘descended into fascism’. In her Columbia University talk, Kostyuchenko defines a country as a ‘union of people who share a common fate’. Yet her articles reveal fault lines and contradictions everywhere. Between wealthy Moscow and the impoverished regions, where Kostyuchenko does most of her reporting. Between the authoritarian regime and liberal opposition. Perhaps, above all, between Russians and ‘non-Russians’, such as the Nganasan people of Northern Siberia, about whom Kostyuchenko writes in two articles. For the Nganasans, Russian colonisation has been catastrophic: their language and culture erased, their land and habitats destroyed, vodka and violence in their place. It seems contradictory therefore for the author to imply that so many dozens of peoples, from Chechnya to Chukotka, are still unified by some quality of ‘Russianness’ that binds them to the same destiny. After all, the Soviet Union was also a country once.

Whatever Russia’s fate will be, most people in her articles hold out little hope for it. ‘There’s no work, there is nothing,’ says a shop-keeper in a Nganasan village. ‘You look to the future, it’s empty.’ Such helpless fatalism is pervasive. Alcoholism, drug addiction, violence and suicide are rife. Nihilism also. In an abandoned hospital, drug-addicted youths play a game that is ‘very simple’: ‘you pick a cinder block off the ground – any broken hunk of concrete will do – and try to throw it at another person’s head’. In another article, about life in villages along the Moscow–St Petersburg express train line, the young people are marginally more creative. They have a game called ‘cards of fire’, in which ‘somebody who loses at cards has to set buildings on fire’. In such places, the Russian state seems remote and indifferent. Although trains stop at some villages, no one can be bothered to instal decent platforms, so that old women have to hold up their arms to be dragged on to the trains. Most ‘fall down and land on their backs just like beetles, waving their arms around’.

The book culminates with a March 2022 article from Mykolaiv, on Russian army brutality in the early stages of the full-scale war, and a final essay reflecting on the closure of Novaya Gazeta and its legacy. This reflects Kostyuchenko’s stated aim in the book of charting ‘how Russia descended into fascism’, with the war marking its nadir. The book certainly describes the effects of this descent, though not so much its causes or what might happen next. For that type of analysis, the Russian novelist Mikhail Shishkin’s My Russia: War or Peace? would make for a good companion book. Shishkin describes Russia as locked in a vicious historical cycle, an ‘old drama for three actors: the silent people, the democratic opposition and the state’. Under these terms, I Love Russia could be perceived as a book by a member of the ‘democratic opposition’ attempting to give voice to the ‘silent people’. But whereas Shishkin is scathing about his country’s (non)-development, Kostyuchenko takes a more neutral stance, seemingly reluctant to implicate ordinary people in the ‘fascism’ that she and her colleagues fought so hard against. From a non-Russian perspective, it remains hard to see what there is to love about the various bleak manifestations of Russia presented in the book. On the other hand, perhaps love is the essential ingredient that makes Kostyuchenko’s journalism so fearless and compelling.

Questions about Russian collective guilt and complicity, touched on in I Love Russia, come through strongly in Katerina Gordeeva’s Take My Grief Away: Voices from the War in Ukraine. As the title suggests, Gordeeva shares the commitment of Kostyuchenko, Alexievich and others to give voice to people who would be otherwise unheard – in this case, Ukrainian refugees whose lives have been devastated by the war. Their stories are harrowing, including the testimony of survivors from places such as Mariupol and Bucha, which have become synonymous with Russian atrocities. Gordeeva’s Russianness is a source of tension in her encounters with Ukrainians, sometimes leading to confrontation – and Gordeeva is honest about these dynamics and how they make her feel.

Gordeeva is originally a TV journalist and documentary maker, who began her career in Russian television in the mid-1990s. In the introduction to the book, she explains that she had to quit her job ‘when propaganda began replacing freedom of speech’ and then left Russia in 2014, after the annexation of Crimea and outbreak of war in the Donbas. Since then, she has worked as an independent journalist, setting up a YouTube channel, Tell Gordeeva, which has over 1.5 million subscribers. Endorsing her book, Muratov describes her as a ‘one-person alternative to a huge government propaganda machine’.

Take My Grief Away originated as a 3.5-hour documentary on her YouTube channel, Humans at War, which is freely available to watch. Many of the people who tell their stories in the book also appear in the documentary, which came out in July 2022. But as Gordeeva puts it, the people in her film ‘weren’t letting her go … Their voices sounded in my head constantly’, so she began to write the book.

Most of the interviews were conducted between the spring and autumn of 2022, so cover the outbreak and early weeks of war: the shock and trauma of innocent citizens caught up in places such as Mariupol, witnessing loved ones maimed and killed by out-of-control Russian soldiers, the mindless destruction of their lives and homes. Most people are confused and disbelieving about what has happened to them. ‘I don’t know why, what did we do to you?’ asks one interviewee from Kharkiv. ‘Why are you like this to us?’ Although most are now physically safe in places such as Poland and Germany, there is an overwhelming feeling of loss: ‘You left, right from under their bombs. But you’re no longer you. You’re no longer a person, you’re a refugee’.

There is disbelief also at the ignorance and inhumanity of the Russian invaders. One Ukrainian woman is asked at a Russian ‘filtration’ point whether she knows any people who are against ‘Russia’s liberation operation’. She is amazed at their stupidity: ‘What, do you really think everybody was just sitting and waiting until they’d come to take everything away from us and shoot us all?’ Another woman from Mariupol describes how her husband is killed when a tank swivels and fires into their apartment. Leaving the city, she has to go through a checkpoint manned by Kadyrovites, who force everyone to state their support for Putin, confiscate their SIM cards and shoot their phones. By way of consolation, a soldier slaps her on the shoulder, gives her a bar of chocolate and says: ‘Don’t cry, woman, everything will be fine’.

Most of the stories are told by Ukrainian women, victims of war, but Gordeeva also includes a handful of other perspectives: the fiancée of a young Russian conscript who commits suicide; a pro-Russian sympathiser in Donetsk; another Russian soldier who, on the first day of the invasion, only realises that he has been sent to Ukraine when the data roaming on his phone changes to a Ukrainian provider. If anything, these interviewees are more antagonistic towards Gordeeva than the Ukrainians, seeing her brand of independent journalism as treachery. A Russian patriot promises to ‘show the likes of you how to love the motherland’. Here, and elsewhere, there are echoes of themes and voices in I Love Russia.

Despite their suffering, the Ukrainian interviewees are unfailingly polite and dignified, even when they admit to being uncomfortable around Gordeeva as a Russian. Some describe feeling repulsed that they still speak and think in Russian. ‘I’m now learning Ukrainian,’ says one native Russian speaker. ‘When the war’s over, I’ll only speak Ukrainian.’ Although most interviewees accept that Gordeeva is ‘different’ in her views from most Russians, some still feel anger towards her. A Ukrainian volunteer drives Gordeeva to a meeting with her mother, who has asked to speak to her, as a fan of her YouTube channel. In the car, the daughter berates her: ‘You write on your social media how bad you feel, oh-oh, we’re so proper […] how is this all possible, it’s not us, it’s some kind of other Russians. It’s you. I wanted to tell you that, Katya.’

Gordeeva’s exploration of her own feelings, and the back stories behind her interviews, are the main aspects of the book that distinguish it from the original documentary film. In terms of structure and style, however, the book does not transcend its origins as a collection of television interviews – and some people may prefer to watch the film. The other disadvantage of the book format, in the context of an ongoing war, is the long lead time to publication. Whereas the documentary was timely in mid-2022, the book may feel a little belated, at least to readers who have closely followed the war and its evolution over the ensuing two years. Until the war is over, the stories told in books like this are bound to feel unfinished, and as yet there is sadly no end in sight. It will need more time and distance, and Ukrainian authors, to write this history. But as Muratov writes of Russian journalists in these dark times: ‘Even if you can’t change anything, that doesn’t remove your duty to document everything’. And in this regard, Gordeeva and her translator Lisa Hayden have performed a valuable service to record these voices for posterity.

Like Kostyuchenko, Gordeeva is now unable to work in Russia, and in September 2022, she was designated a ‘foreign agent’. No Russian publishers will dare to publish their books – although in both cases the independent Russian news site Meduza has stepped in to publish Russian-language versions. Hopefully one day both authors will be able to return to a home country that accepts them and values their work: a more lovable place, perhaps.

Book review by BEARR Trustee Sam Thorne.