Yelena Kostiutchenko was only 17 years old when she started writing for the investigative newspaper Novaya Gazeta. At the age of 26, she traveled to Donbass, and became the first journalist to prove that Russia’s army was fighting in Ukraine in 2015 – which the authorities denied. She did it by persistently tracking down a truckload of dead Russian soldiers.
“I also thought a lot about the relatives of the soldiers who died there,” she says, recalling in particular a woman in southern Russia who lost her brother.
Unemployment was high, and in order to earn money, people were forced to either work for the industries of northern Russia or enlist. The woman’s brother did it, ended up in Donbass and died. The sister tried to find out what happened to him, but suddenly fell silent, and Jelena Kostiutchenko wondered why.
— She said: “I loved two things in life, my brother and my homeland. My brother is dead. If I were to accuse my home country of murdering him, I would lose that too.” Then I realized that I had to write this book.
“We are targets”
Kostiuchenko is compared to both investigative journalist Anna Politovskaya and Nobel laureate Svetlana Aleksievich, and during our conversation it is clear why. She constantly sees the individuals in the big events – and they are the ones she follows in “My beloved country”, where a harsh, poor and largely hidden Russia comes to the fore.
She herself also grew up in poor conditions and started working as early as 9 years old, both singing and scrubbing floors. But at the age of 14, she read the now-murdered journalist Anna Politovskaja in Novaya Gazeta, which changed her life.
— I thought I was pretty well informed. But I realized that I knew nothing at all about my country, that I had been lied to, and that I had believed the lies.
When she herself started at Novaya Gazeta, she shyly put apples on Politovskaya’s desk to show her appreciation. Later that year, the colleague was murdered. And the reality for Russian journalists has only gotten tougher, according to Kostiutchenko.
“Our work has been criminalized and it feels like we are targets,” she says.
“I write from places where you really need to be able to trust your physical condition. So now I can’t travel for work and it affects my identity, because that’s how I lived for years,” says the Russian journalist Yelena Kostiutchenko. Became poisoned
For Yelena Kostiuchenko, the situation became truly dangerous while covering the full-scale war in Ukraine. She says that she revealed how Russian soldiers kidnapped and tortured 44 Ukrainian civilians.
When she was about to travel on to Mariupol, she was told that they were planning to kill her at the Russian border control. She went to Berlin – where she suffered from shortness of breath and dizziness. Her face was swollen, she had blood in her urine and bad liver values. The doctors said she had been poisoned, she says. Jelena Kostiuchenko looks dull, but feels better now. At the same time, the road to recovery is long.
— I get tired easily, and can work three, four, sometimes five hours a day. It pisses me off, because I used to work a lot and want to.
The security situation forces her to constantly move, to Jelena Kostiutchenko’s sorrow. She misses Russia every second.
— It’s like someone you love is suffering and makes others suffer, then you want to help.
“The fascists are us”
As a child, Yelena Kostiutchenko pretended that she defeated the fascists. But in adulthood she was struck by the painful realization: “the fascists are us”. She first noticed it when the anti-gay laws were passed in 2015. Yelena Kostiutchenko protested with LGBTQ activists in the streets – and was met by people beating them, throwing rotten eggs and feces.
— The anti-gay law asserts that we LGBTQI are socially inferior to other people. It was a wake-up call. Dividing people into different categories with different rights is a fascist way of thinking.
Even more clearly, she thinks that fascism was manifested in the state-funded institutions that she reported from 2021, where the inmates were deprived of their basic rights – simply because they had neurological or psychiatric diagnoses.
But if one were to trace a clear turning point, Yelena Kostiutchenko mentions the terrorist act in Beslan in 2004, when Chechen terrorists took an entire school hostage. The Russian special forces prioritized killing the perpetrators over saving the children, she claims. Over 330 people died, of which 186 were children.
— It was the moment when Putin realized that he can do anything, without consequences. Russian society was forced to face terrible truths: to kill an enemy, our state can kill children. It doesn’t even see it as a high price.
Nightmare without end
Immediately after the storming of Beslan, Putin canceled the election of the governors of the regions. He decided to stop playing democracy, notes Jelena Kostiutchenko.
— He didn’t have to do it anymore.
If Russia wins against Ukraine, she predicts disastrous consequences.
— Fascism is an expansive ideology. Then it’s only a matter of time until the next war starts, and then the next one again. It will be a never ending nightmare.
“During my childhood in the Russia of the 90s, there were extremely hard times. A lot of crime, poverty, hunger. When I was five, my mother explained that during the Soviet era people were kind and we had food, but when we became Russia, everything changed. It was the first time I started thinking about my country as a subject,” says Russian Yelena Kostiutchenko.