May 1, 2023
Russian journalist/activist Kostyuchenko entered Ukraine in March 2022 to report on the war for her country's last independent press, Novaya Gazeta, intent on showing her compatriots the horrors being inflicted in their name and knowing she faced arrest if she returned. (The paper was subsequently shuttered.) Here she combines personal essays with her reportage from the last 15 years, ranging from queer rights to village girls forced into sex work, to document authoritarian Russia today. Prepub Alert.
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August 15, 2023
A veteran Russian journalist reflects on her journey over the decades of increasingly stringent government censorship and violence. In a vernacular style, Kostyuchenko, whose coverage of Russian's invasion of Ukraine contributed to the 2022 shuttering of the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta, charts her early passion for journalism in the late 1990s when she began to read the work of the fearless Anna Politkovskaya, who was murdered in 2006, to learn what was really happening with the war in Chechnya. Growing up in Yaroslavl, Kostyuchenko learned the "official" line from TV, which her mother and neighbors listened to without asking questions, about the annexation of Crimea, and she began working at the activist newspaper when she was only 14. Within the loosely chronological, sometimes uneven narrative, the author inserts her own journalistic pieces that reveal unsettling strata of Russia social and political life. She writes about "stalkers, diggers, suiciders, guards, and ghosts" inhabiting the abandoned Hovrino hospital, a piece that becomes a kind of sad statement on the greater Russian society; going undercover as an apprentice criminologist in Moscow in 2009; trying to cover the aftermath of the storming of the Beslan school in 2004, "the worst terrorist attack in Russian history," and being thwarted by authorities; and getting stonewalled regarding the causes and environmental effects of the 2020 oil spill in Norilsk. The essays delineating the author's work in the "internat," a hugely understaffed facility for neurologically impaired inmates, are intimately, disturbingly detailed. Near the end, Kostyuchenko writes about the harried staff at Novaya Gazeta, and she movingly describes how they tried to tell the truth about Ukraine before they were shut down: "Outside, fascism was descending on our country." For English readers, the translation may appear uneven and choppy and occasionally ungrammatical, but the author's stories are important. A deeply felt, fractured collection reveals a fractured, benumbed society.
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Starred review from August 14, 2023
In this sharp-edged debut, Kostyuchenko shares experiences from her harrowing career as a reporter for Novaya Gazeta, a Moscow-based independent newspaper. With a free-flowing style, she describes covering the war in Donbas, Ukraine, in 2004 (“I was caught in the shelling twice. I learn that I can run on all fours. I glide along in long leaps... I don’t believe I am going to die”); deplores the Putin regime; and writes about the contract killings of six colleagues, including Anna Politkovskaya, whose exposés on Putin’s Second Chechen War inspired Kostyuchenko to become a reporter. With gritty determination, she ventures beyond the Kremlin and its state-managed propaganda: she encamps in an abandoned hospital in Moscow occupied by squatters and reports on Russia’s growing homeless subculture; mingles with prostitutes in a roadside brothel; travels to the Arctic to report on the alarming numbers of Nganasan people (“the northernmost people on our continent”) committing suicide; and in the most bizarre story of the mix, tries to help a widow recover the body of her husband, who was killed during the battle for the Donetsk Airport in 2012. (Putin denied Russian soldiers were fighting in Donetsk, so the morgue denied having the body.) Throughout, Kostyuchenko’s journalistic integrity is unquestionable and the dangers she faces are very real. It’s a vivid and poignant account.