'Brilliant and immersive ... reportage at its brave and luminous best' OBSERVER 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. *A SPECTATOR BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023*
