A child driving a miniature tank at the Army International Games, organized annually by the Russian Ministry of Defense, near Moscow, August 2022
NANNA HEITMANN/MAGNUM PHOTOSI Love Russia: Reporting from a Lost Country
by Elena Kostyuchenko, translated from the Russian by Bela Shayevich and Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse. Penguin Press, 363 pp., $30.00
On February 25, 2022, the front page of Novaya Gazeta, Russia’s acclaimed independent newspaper, ran the headline “RUSSIA IS BOMBING UKRAINE.” People reading The New York Times or watching the BBC already knew this. But it was news to most people in Russia. In those last days of February I asked people around me in St. Petersburg—friends, acquaintances, strangers working the counters at diners and stores—“What do you think, are we shelling Ukrainian cities? Are we shelling Kyiv?” Those who had friends or family abroad typically said yes. Those who didn’t said no, of course not, what a crazy idea.
And although the dissemination of “unreliable information” about the Russian Armed Forces was not criminalized until March, some people already took the question as a moral transgression. One older woman I work with overheard my conversation in line at the office coat check and confronted me about it hours later. No, she said, we are not shelling Kyiv. The TV would have reported it if we had been. There was a flash of confidence in her eyes, a claim that certain lines should not be crossed. Elena Kostyuchenko gives us a term for this certainty. She calls it decency: “A decent person follows established rules,” she explains. “They obey their elders. They don’t insist on their rights.”
Kostyuchenko is an investigative journalist. Her new book, I Love Russia, is about power in Russia, and about the media. It is also a love letter of sorts to Novaya Gazeta, where she worked for seventeen years. Founded in 1993, Novaya Gazeta has received numerous prizes for the courage and quality of its coverage. Its journalists have been threatened, assaulted, and murdered.
Once, the paper came out in print three times a week. It was available, but has become hard to access in Russia. The state censorship agency, Roskomnadzor, blocks its web pages.