I Love Russia

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

To be a journalist is to tell the truth. To be patriotic is to be critical, honest and fearless.

I Love Russia takes us to places that non-Russians have never seen and brings us voices we have never heard. It is Elena Kostyuchenko’s courageous 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 doc­tors at a Ukrainian maternity ward, and reporters like herself.

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. She 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, beyond Crimea, and beyond Ukraine.

This is a singular portrait of a nation, and of a woman who refuses to be silenced.

'Elena's bravery and reportage are astonishing' CHRISTINA LAMB

'Kostyuchenko is an important guide to the twenty-first century' TIMOTHY SNYDER

'Would you like to know where Putin comes from? What the Russians are like today? And why? Read this book' SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH


©2023 Elena Kostyuchenko (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Critics Review

  • Brilliant and immersive … reportage at its brave and luminous best

    Luke Harding, Observer

  • Fearless reporting… shocking and moving… This gritting insider’s take on Russia will prove more helpful than the welter of book by western experts when it comes to countering Putin’s disinformation

    Sunday Times, *Book of the Week*

  • I Love Russia is full of rigorous journalistic detail, but is also deeply personal, beautifully written … real and intimate

    Rob Hastings, I Paper

  • Few have tried to examine the life of ordinary people in the world’s biggest country (by physical size) the way this one does … [Elena’s] style of brave, intimate reporting is likely to be a rarity in Russia for years to come

    New York Times

  • Elena Kostyuchenko is an important guide to the twenty-first century. The Russia she recounts here is the Russia we need to understand

    Timothy Snyder

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