The Novaya Gazeta journalist offers brilliant, immersive bulletins from her homeland but doesn’t explain its return to totalitarian rule
. She was on a train to Berlin when the symptoms started: a severe headache, sweating, stomach pain. And a curious smell of rotten fruit. The illness continued. Kostyuchenko’s fingers ballooned; she felt exhausted and weak.
The culprit was not hard to guess: the Russian state and its shadowy spy agencies. Kostyuchenko is a celebrated Russian journalist, now 36 years old, who works foras “the best newspaper on earth”. A provincial kid who grew up in the Moscow region, she discovered journalism at the age of 14 through the writings of Anna Politkovskaya. At 17, she joined the paper. It became her intellectual home, and a thorn in the side of Putin’s regime. “We were a cult, a family,” she writes.
Her writing is reportage at its brave and luminous best. The Russian authorities try to stymie her activities; someone dumps green dye on her head. In 2020, she flies to the remote Arctic mining city of Norilsk to investigate the latest environmental disaster. She treks across the tundra with a group of Greenpeace activists, collecting samples from a polluted river, and dodging pursuers from the FSB, the Kremlin’s secret police.
Her experiences in Ukraine are recounted in a few impressionistic pages. Kostyuchenko heads south, where Russian troops have seized the city of Kherson and are advancing towards Mykolaiv. She interviews a driver who rescued staff from an orphanage. Twenty-five kilometres after setting off, Russian soldiers opened fire on his Mercedes van. Three female passengers are killed. Another is wounded in the shoulder.
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