I Love Russia by Elena Kostyuchenko

This book is almost unbearably sad, from start to finish--the weight of that sadness begins almost immediately, and that is the thing that for me made it hard to read. The idea for the book was conceived in Ukraine. In May 2022, the author, a journalist, visited four locations—the Polish border, Kherson, Mykolaiv, and Odesa—on a five-week assignment for the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta. She witnessed destruction on an apocalyptic scale—apartment blocks reduced to rubble, orphanages emptied by the threat of heavy shelling, bodies scorched with “charred black [messes] for a face.” At the end of her trip, she was told not to return to Moscow. Because she’d transgressed Russia’s draconian new censorship laws specifically targeting anti-war media, a target had appeared on her back seemingly overnight. These conditions made her turn inward. She began to work on a book that contextualized her past reportage with personal reflections on Russia and the turn to fascism that Putin has been driving. The entire book has moments that cause the reader to reflect, but the section where her mother explains to her that Ukraine has always been Russian and why, which aches with both manipulation and naivete, is what runs through the book as a whole, and you leave with a better understanding of just how hard it is to escape a fascist leader once they have you in their grips.