From Russia, Without Love

The fearless Elena Kostyuchenko, whose engrossing new work, ‘I Love Russia: Reporting From A Lost Country,’ chronicles her experiences as an investigative journalist for Novaya Gazette, whose doors Russia forced close as it invaded Ukraine. That hasn’t stopped Kostyuchenko from writing dispatches about Russian assaults on Ukrainian civilians and other atrocities in what she sees as an unrighteous war perpetrated by Putin’s war machine.

The 35-year-old Kostyuchenko has led a difficult life. She grew up the lonely daughter of a single busy mother in Yaroslavl, four hours from Moscow.  Her mother worked initially as a chemist but her job collapsed when the U.S.S.R. did; she made ends meet working as a cleaning lady and local teacher. Despite her mother’s fall from grace, she still thinks of Russia with great affection and tries to share cherished memories of earlier times when she insists things were better.  That is, until the 1990’s arrived with its privatization and economic reforms sending inflation into the stratosphere. Many business enterprises, including the one where Kostyuchenko’s mother worked, simply stopped paying their employees. In 1996, 49.3 percent of workers in Central Russia weren’t paid.

Kostyuchenko’s book weaves together reportage from the last 15 years with personal reflections that reveal an ongoing strained relationship between mother and daughter.  Neither can hear what the other one is saying.  Recently, Kostyuchenko called her mother from Ukraine and said “Mom, I saw dead children today, killed…” and her mother interrupts and says, “Russian soldiers could not do this, they just could not.”  Kostyuchenko believes the relentless propaganda of Russian state television has brainwashed her mother. Putin has been in power for 23 years, and although her mother initially wasn’t a fan, she has come to respect his emphasis on nationalism and modernism which she feels has given Russians a sense of pride.

When Russia invaded Crimea in 2014, her mother saw Putin trying to reclaim what was rightfully his. She resented her daughter’s assertions that he was transgressing Ukraine’s sovereign borders, in place since 1991.  But despite disagreeing with her, Kostyuchenko grasps her mother’s despair. She writes: “I remember her stories about it from childhood: the enchanted peninsula. The sea, the warmest, the sky, the bluest, so many cliffs, some of them white. The palaces—real palaces—each one of them different. The ruins of an ancient Greek city, columns amid a wasteland. Going to Crimea was a dream for every Soviet person.  People would make jokes about it, call it the central beach of the Soviet Union. But was it really about the beach?  The whole place was magical, almost unreal.”  Kostyuchenko recalls her mother asking “What did Ukraine do to deserve such luck?  It used to belong to everyone.”

It’s difficult to get a clear sense of Kostyuchenko; she says in interviews she is fearless and does not know what it is like to experience fear.  The scary part of her proclamation is we believe her.  There is a cut-off quality to her that ripples through all her writing that speaks to someone who can only love and hate from afar; someone who has difficulties with the intimacies that come with close personal relationships. She mentions casually she is a lesbian, and after trying for a while not to be, she realized she must embrace her identity. She went to some Pride protests in Moscow and got beat up by the cops and occasionally arrested, and soon stopped going. As for girlfriends, she mentions them, but they remain nameless and without identifying characteristics.

She seems very much alone, like she was as a little girl wandering the streets while her mother was at work looking for inspiration. She found it almost accidentally when she picked up a copy of the Novaya Gazette. It transported into another realm; one she wanted to live inside. She was 14 at the time, and by 17 was working at the newspaper as an intern.

Her editor, Dmitry Maratov, won the Nobel Prize for Peace for his efforts “to safeguard freedom of expression which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace”.  She worked alongside Anna Politkovskaya for a brief period, until Putin had her assassinated at 48 for her brazenness in criticizing the regime. Kostyuchenko had always idolized Politkovskaya, and her death shook her. She writes:  “After her murder, I spent many hours bargaining with death-if her killers were found right away, could she be resurrected?  If I promised to tell her everything that I always wanted to say but was too afraid, about how she had changed my life and so many others, and how grateful I was to her, would she come back to life?”

We hear in her regret Kostyuchenko’s reserve with others; she fears getting too close, as if she might be smothered.  When writing her own stories about harrowing events, we often become distracted by her disembodied voice, longing for a deeper connection with her.

She explains that Russia is a place like no other, where decency has taken on a new meaning.  She writes: “Decency is not the same thing as morality—it is the opposite. A decent person follows established rules. For example, they’ll pay off a cop to avoid getting a speeding ticket—everyone does that. They obey their elders. They don’t insist on their rights.”  She explains the passivity that has become entrenched in the people’s hearts knowing they live in a place where they must always be wary of the more powerful.

The jury system makes a mockery of itself. In 2021, Russia held 783,000 trials and found only 2,190 people innocent, which represents an infinitesimal 0.28 percent of the people tried.  Suspiciousness is rampant. She recalls a Jewish neighbor who was fired from her job at a university who would beg her not to become an enemy of the state.

She devotes many pages to recounting the events that took place when armed terrorists seized a school in Beslan on September 1, 2004.  The terrorists were demanding the release of Chechnyan prisoners.  The botched response from Russia resulted in the death of 734 people, 186 of them were children.   She resents how the government is trying to purge the memory of Beslan from the local people.  Money has poured into the area; not to deal with the trauma that is prevalent, but to beautify the area where the event happened as if that alone could repair the damage.  During the Beslan siege, the human rights of the hostages were forfeited, and the government failed to put forth an effective counterterrorism offensive. Today, Chechnya lives under the control of a Russian-appointed leader named Raman Kadyrov.

Kostyuchenko  visits the area where the Norilsk diesel oil spill occurred on May 29, 2020.  A fuel tank failed and flooded local rivers with 17,500 tons of diesel oil. Russia has not  cleaned up the pollution, which is causing damage. She writes another piece about the dumping of toxic waste into the river and lands in the Tamyr peninsula near Norilsk in Siberia.

One of the most shocking pieces tells of her long term stay at a psychoneurological boarding school where she lives among the patients.  It is unclear how she got permission to do this, or if she did.  She outlines for us the abominable living conditions, the forced sterilizations, the medicating of patients to quiet them, and the lack of any psychological services to make the patient’s lives less despairing.   There are 177,000 patients in these horrid places, and they remain there untreated until they die.  Stalin established them, believing the mentally ill put a stain upon the new Socialist world order he was creating.

Kostyuchenko seems determined not to stop writing; it is where she draws her strength. She dreams of one day returning to Russia but knows they would throw her into jail for several years if she tried to. Putin’s hold on his countrymen is still firm despite recent displays of vulnerability. The country seems to have been hypnotized into a nationalistic fervor, silencing all ambivalent voices. Many of the best minds have already left the country for good. There are no independent presses anymore. Russians only receive state-sanctioned news.

A fatalism has set in; one familiar to the Russian people. They are clinging to a mawkish Soviet nostalgia for earlier times when the Russian empire was more powerful. They see Putin as trying to take them back to a greatness that never was but still lives in their hungry imaginations. Perhaps Anna Politkovskaya saw best what was happening.  She wrote shortly before her death: “We are hurtling back into a Soviet abyss, into an information vacuum that spells death from our own ignorance.”