Journalist Elena Kostyuchenko was reporting in Ukraine last year when she got word that the Russian military was planning her assassination. She was told that soldiers at checkpoints had been ordered to kill her.
Days later, Kostyuchenko, a Russian citizen, fled the country. Unable to return home, she remains exiled in Europe. Earlier this year, she fell ill – in what doctors suggested may have been a poisoning attempt. The case is now being investigated by police in Germany.
Kostyuchenko spent 17 years writing for the independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta, until it was shut down in September 2022, as a result of her reporting on Russia’s war in Ukraine. During that time, she covered the war in Donbas and the 2020 Norilsk oil spill, spent two weeks undercover in a Russian “concentration camp” for people with mental illnesses, and reported extensively from Russian regions, including the North Caucasus.
Despite the atrocities she has seen and written about, Kostyuchenko still loves her homeland – as expressed in the title of her new book: ‘I Love Russia: Reporting from a Lost Country’. Ahead of its release, she spoke exclusively to openDemocracy about the alleged poisoning, what she has learned from years of reporting in Russia and the feeling of being stuck “between two worlds”.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
openDemocracy: It’s been reported that you were the victim of a poisoning attempt. How has it affected your life?
Elena Kostyuchenko: I take some safety measures that I can’t talk about [Kostyuchenko laughs at this], that’s the point of security measures.
Two investigations are taking place: a police investigation in Berlin and another by Bellingcat journalists and The Insider [an investigative website that publishes in English and Russian]. Their teams have lots of experience investigating poisonings and have successfully investigated the poisonings of Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny and Russian-British journalist and activist Vladimir Kara-Murza, and my colleague, Dmitri Bikov. I hope both investigations will bring results sooner or later.
oD: The Russian title of your book is Moya lyubimaya strana, which was translated into ‘I Love Russia’ for English readers. Could you talk about your love for your country?
EK: The book is about the love I have for my country and how this love has changed during my lifetime and how it has changed me, not always in the best possible way.
I recently had an interesting conversation with my German friends, who told me that, in Germany, it's inappropriate to say you love your country. Because of the history they have, they decided it's not safe to love one’s country: you can love your family, your loved ones, your kids, your neighbours, your town – but not your country, because it's too dangerous.
We did the right things in the wrong order
I believe this feeling [of love] that we have for our country is being used by politicians to make us do or not do things. Putin says: ‘If you love Russia, you need to go and kill Ukrainians. If you love Russia, you need to be silent. If you love Russia, you need to obey.’ But that’s not what love demands. Love doesn't demand death, silence or lies. It demands life and truth, and a very precise look at the thing you love.
I talked with Dmitry Muratov, my former editor-in-chief at Novaya Gazeta, and he said: ‘What’s happening in Russia right now is that Putin and the people surrounding him are trying to become like the Church – people who claim they can communicate with God. They tell you that if you love your country, we will explain to you how and why you should feel things.’
oD: This is a recurring theme in your book. When you covered the 2020 Norilsk oil spill, people repeatedly tried to stop you from reporting on it, claiming you’d go against the interests of your country.
EK: Totally. It’s strange how ‘patriotism’ is almost a bad word in Russia now, because it's being used to make people do awful things. Right now, members of the Russian intelligentsia don’t like this word at all, they don't use it.
But I see nothing wrong about the feeling [of love for your country]. I believe that especially in difficult times, in the middle of disaster and catastrophe, you need to know exactly what you feel and why you feel it. That’s actually why I wrote this book.
oD: You said that this book shows how your love for your country has changed you. What do you mean?
EK: Love gives you a lot of hope. You hope for all the best for the people you love, for your country. And this hope makes you blind. This is a very dangerous thing. It gives you this kind of optimism. It's almost biological. Somehow you feel everything will turn out good. I was like that, and then Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine started.
When I was a kid and was reading history books, I always had a question I was too afraid to ask the teacher: why didn’t these people understand where it was all going? It's so obvious.
And then I found myself inside history… looking back, it is obvious. I reported on my country for 17 years? I wasn't just like classic Moscow journalists who never leave Moscow, I travelled a lot. I talked to so many people, I saw many different situations. Can I say that I didn't know that Russia had turned into a fascist country? I can’t because I spent two weeks inside a psycho-neurological internat (PNI), which is an institutional residential care facility that’s part of the whole system we have to keep [mentally ill and] disabled people isolated and outside of Russian society. I lived inside it and I knew it was a concentration camp and I knew that a concentration camp is quite an obvious sign of fascism.
In 2013, Russia passed an ‘anti-gay propaganda’ law that says LGBTIQ people are socially unequal to others. This looks like fascist world order. And did I know from the same history textbooks I read as a child that fascism always leads to war? Because it’s an extensive ideology. The idea is never to build a nice fascism inside your country. It spreads.
So somehow, I was looking but I didn't see. And it’s the same for many of my colleagues, and other people who were in the middle of political and social processes. Like we say in Russian: we didn't see the forest behind the trees.
oD: There’s an interesting yet sad moment in the book about how Russian TV changed your mother, and the gap that grew between you as a result. Do you think it’s possible to speak to Russians who believe what they see on TV and to make them see and understand what's happening in Ukraine?
EK: I believe that’s what we must do. We have to fight for the souls of our people. It's a tough fight because propaganda in Russia is very sophisticated, extremely well-funded and made by very smart and talented people. It achieves really great results because it’s very pervasive, and it changes not only people’s picture of the world, but their very perception of it, as well as their personality.
In the future, I hope the people who made this propaganda will be put on trial as war criminals. What they did to people like my mother is unimaginable.
Still, I’m not going to leave my mum behind, not going to give her to Putin because she's the most important person in my life. Despite all the differences we have, I don’t want to quit our relationship, because we love each other. And this love creates a connection stronger than anything. We keep talking every day, and it's tough. Sometimes we just scream at each other. Sometimes we talk and she says, ‘I can’t talk anymore’, or I say it. Either way, that’s ok. In a day or two, she says, ‘Let's talk again’ and we do.
It's like looking for someone in the forest at night, you go step-by-step. You can’t hear their voice, but you also hear so many other voices. Sometimes my mum speaks like a Russian TV anchor. I know her phrasings, how she chooses words, the way she thinks, but sometimes, she switches and starts to talk like someone else. I’m like: ‘Mum, are you quoting [Russian TV presenters and propagandists] Solovyov, Kiselyov or Simonyan’? And she's like: ‘No, I'm not quoting them.’ But she says exactly what they say, exactly the way they say it. And in that moment, it's important not to get mad at my mother, but to get mad at the people who put all these words and constructions into her mind.
There’s a view from people outside of Russia that those inside the country who are under the influence of this propaganda are very happy. But they're not: they don’t feel like they live in the real world and they’re terrified.
oD: My favourite chapter of your book, based on your reporting in an internat, is called, ‘It's been fascist a long time (open your eyes)’. Can you talk about what you saw in that place?
EK: Sure. So PNIs, or ‘psycho-neurological internats’, are similar to a system of concentration camps, state-founded and state-run. Today, 177,000 Russians are living in these facilities. Thirty thousand of them are kids. These are people who have neurological or psychiatric diagnoses and whose relatives refuse or are unable to take care of them, so the state is caring for them. They don’t have any human rights.
PNIs were invented by Stalin after the Second World War: we had lots of mentally ill people and Soviet streets had to be the best streets in the world, with only ‘nice-looking’ people walking them. So we took people with mental illnesses and neurological diagnoses to the internats. This system is still alive. It survived the fall of the Soviet Union, Yeltsin and Putin. Who knows how long it will exist for?
In the PNIs, people can’t choose what they eat, how long their hair is. For any kind of disobedience – if they don't like things and talk about it – they can be medicated and isolated. Some people live in isolated cells for their whole life. And they don't even let them out to go to the toilet, they have buckets in their cell. They sterilise women without asking them how they feel about it. I saw the face of my state [inside these PNIs] and it was awful.
When I was thinking about getting into one of these facilities I got in touch with some volunteers and NGO people who were working inside. They called them ‘concentration camps’ and I didn't believe them. I thought they were just exaggerating things to draw attention, like activists sometimes do. Once I was inside, I realised that they had been trying to spare me and hadn’t told me everything. Me and my photographer lived inside one of these facilities for two weeks, and we still didn’t understand even close to all of what was happening there.
oD: What do you think people who opposed the regime should have done to prevent Russia from invading Ukraine?
EK: Well, we needed to change [who was in] power. All these past-tense constructions don’t work in the real world, but I can try speaking for myself.
Somehow I fell into this trap, which I believe is quite common here in the West, too, of believing that journalists shouldn't get involved in politics or they will lose their bright, shining objectivity. There was a period of my life, three years, when I decided I wouldn’t write about LGBTQ issues because I'm a lesbian and that means I'm not objective. I thought that straight people should write about these issues! It seems mad, in retrospect.
There is another perception that journalists are special people, that we are the ‘fourth estate’ and all this bullshit, and that if you perform your professional duty as a journalist it’s enough. But it’s not. Your professional duty as a journalist doesn't take away your civil duty. Was I informed that Putin had stayed in power for way too long, that he was changing the constitution, that he was abusing human rights, that our state was starting to become a fascist state? Yes, I was. And what did I do? I described how fascism was flourishing in my country, and I described it really well [she laughs]. It's not enough!
This is how I finish my book. I’ve realised a lot of things in the last two years. One of the toughest things to realise was that… I can’t say we did the wrong things. As my girlfriend says: we did the right things in the wrong order.
Many of my friends were building nice independent theatres, performing wonderful art, setting up educational projects. It was all so important and so beautiful. But these were bubbles, which, on 24 February 2022, just disappeared. People weren't aware of this beforehand; they believed they were building a real future Russia and that their bubbles would get bigger and bigger and then join each other, until at some point you’d wake up in a new country and basically there wouldn’t be any room for Putin, because he belongs to the old Russia, while we had built a new one. When the invasion started, all these bubbles disappeared.
Love doesn't demand death, silence or lies. It demands life and truth, and a very precise look at the thing you love
For me, it was quite painful to realise that Novaya Gazeta, which I love more than anything – it's my family, my home – was also a bubble. And we failed to prevent the war or bring long-lasting change to Russia.
I believe what we had to do is to fight for democracy. It sounds stupid, but it's true. We had to fight to be able to elect a president, to elect deputies, to have an independent court system, to have normal laws. [We needed] to do all this political stuff, which is quite boring. But it's what our life depends on. I can’t say I totally neglected it – I worked on elections, took part in protests. But it obviously wasn't enough.
oD: Your work, and your book, are based on on the ground reporting in Russia, mainly on social issues. After the invasion, you also went to Ukraine. None of this seems possible right now. What do you want to write about next?
EK: It’s a tough question, I keep asking myself that. For the kind of reporter I am, a field reporter, there is plenty to do.
But usually, it's in quite dangerous places and you need to be healthy and to be able to rely on your body when you work in these places. And I can’t rely on my body now. I hope that by the end of the year, I will be better.
Elena Kostyuchenko's I Love Russia: Reporting from a Lost Country is set to be published on 19 October 2023.
