We spoke with journalist, LGBT activist, and writer Elena Kostyuchenko. Elena travelled to Ukraine on the second day of the full-scale Russian invasion and spent five weeks on the front lines. It was Elena’s investigation that had confirmed the presence of Russian troops in the Donbas back in 2014. Over her 17 years at Novaya Gazeta, Elena produced an unprecedented number of journalistic pieces on highly complex and taboo topics that few dared to cover.
In this interview, we discuss Elena’s new book I Love Russia (published in Italy and the US, but currently impossible to publish in Russia) and the things she experienced and witnessed during her five weeks in wartime Ukraine: Ukrainians welcoming her into their homes, surviving artillery shelling alongside them. This text contains many heavy passages as Elena describes people she has seen killed and the torture inflicted by the Russian system of group homes for disabled adults, but it is also a crucial interview about her beloved country’s descent into fascism.
Interview by Daria Serenko
Transcribed by Lilya Safronova
Edited by F. Serebrennikova
Cover photo: Olga Izakson/The Symbol
After all you’ve been through, how do you describe yourself and your background? How would you introduce yourself to someone new?
My name is Elena Kostyuchenko, I’m 35 years old, and I worked for Novaya Gazeta for 17 years as a reporter and investigative journalist. The last pieces I was able to do as a journalist were reports from the war in Ukraine. I managed to enter the country on the second day of the invasion and spent five weeks there. I reported from the Polish [and EU] border, from Lviv, which is near there; and from Odesa, Mykolaiv, and Kherson, which was occupied at the time. I managed to cross the front line twice during my work. After that, I left Ukraine and wrote a book called I Love Russia. The book is about love for your country: how it changes over your lifetime, and how it changes you (not always for the better).
Is it the love or the country that changes?
Both. This book is autofiction; it includes parts where I write about myself. It was the first time I wrote about myself because, throughout my life, I’ve been focused on other people, my protagonists. But I realized that if I wanted to talk about what has been happening in Russia over the past 17 years, it would be a bit dishonest to exclude myself from this story. The book contains essays about me and articles I wrote for Novaya Gazeta. It turned into a story about our country gradually descending into fascism, and us not noticing. Or, if we noticed, we didn’t want to admit it. My book has been published in Italian [and English] and is forthcoming in other languages, but so far we haven’t found a publisher for it in Russia, and perhaps we never will. All the publishers I contacted turned the book down, because it contains grounds to charge them with two crimes.
“Discrediting the army” and “fake news”?
“Fake news” and “LGBT propaganda.”
After finishing your book, were you able to embrace an identity as not just a journalist, but a writer as well? Did it change anything for you?
I’m doing my best to claim that identity, but it’s not easy. It’s one thing to think with your head; it’s another to feel with your heart. And of course, I know in my head that anyone who writes a book is a writer, but I feel like an imposter. I see “writers” as those bearded men from Russian class in school, or great women writers like [Svetlana] Alexievich, Samanta Schweblin… It’s getting late, and I’m struggling to remember names. You’re up there, too.
I’m up there with the bearded men?!
Oh yeah. [Ludmilla] Petrushevskaya as well… My memory’s gone to shit. I’ve been struggling with my identity this past year and a half. Everything I’ve been doing for the last 17 years, all of my work (hard work, and I thought I did pretty well)—it turns out it couldn’t stop anything. There’s a disconnect between what I think and what I feel. I know in my head that no single person can prevent an impending war…
Or fascism.
Or fascism, yeah. But over the past seventeen years I was operating in very difficult conditions. It’s not easy being a journalist in Russia; I had to sacrifice a lot, endure a lot, but I always had a very clear sense of purpose. I knew what I was doing and what the goal was. And when the full-scale invasion started, when all this fucking hell broke loose, I realized that… rather, I began to feel like those seventeen years of my life and work were worthless. I’m probably not being very fair on myself, but that’s how I feel.
What about your choice to travel to the front lines, even back in 2014—does that also feel worthless?
That was in 2015 and 2016. These feelings only emerged after I returned from the war last spring. When I left, of course, I was only thinking about how to get into Ukraine, how to do my job, how to tell the other Russians what our country is perpetrating in our name. The first few days felt completely unreal. It was my first time experiencing this kind of intense derealization—I didn’t feel like part of reality, like I was awake and this was actually happening. It felt like a dream, a fever dream or some kind of sickness that I would wake up from any minute now, and find out that none of it was true. Only after I had spent a week in Ukraine working did I reconnect with reality. And it was awful.
Are you sure you’re okay talking about the war and what you went through?
Oh yeah.
I want to understand how you managed to stay grounded. Derealization probably dulls the fear of death and stuff like that. Were you scared?
No, that’s hard for me in general. I rarely feel fear, and when I do, it’s much less than what other people experience. I think that’s innate. I know that about myself, and it’s not very convenient in everyday life, because I have to calculate potential risks in my head, and that takes a lot of energy. But I’ve learned to use it in my work, and it’s particularly helpful in a war zone, because I can usually keep a clear head and avoid an adrenaline crash—I don’t get that physiological fear reaction. It’s convenient.
And dangerous.
Yes, convenient and dangerous. So no, I wasn’t scared. There was one moment that got me scared. Sometimes I get this sense, this distinct feeling, that I might die right now. When we were leaving occupied Kherson, the Russian checkpoint officers wouldn’t let our car through. There were two roads from Kherson to Mykolaiv, one of which went through Chornobaivka. My driver and I got through two Russian checkpoints, but at the second one we were told, “You can keep going, but the third one will shoot your car.” We were like, “But it’s a civilian car.” They replied, “They’re ordered to shoot at any cars leaving the city.” I asked, “Even civilian ones?” And they said, “Even civilian ones.” We drove into a nearby village, talked to the locals to see if there were any alternate routes through the fields, but they told us that soldiers were everywhere, shooting anything that moved. So we drove back to Kherson and tried the other road, through Stanislav. We got past the first two checkpoints, but at the third one, a soldier told us, “I’m not letting you through.” There were a lot of cars parked nearby that they had also stopped from getting out of the city, mostly carrying women and children. We drove back to a village and then slipped out behind that soldier’s back. At that instant, I knew that if he were to turn around, our car would be shot. But he didn’t—he was distracted by the other drivers. We made it to the next checkpoint, and they asked us, “They really let you through?” We were like, “Yeah, they made an exception for us.” And they let us pass too. And right then I thought, “All right, I made it out alive.”
How many times have you been in war zones over the years?
Quite a lot. I worked in Donbas on both sides of the front line, I worked in Ukraine just now, and I’ve also been in non-military hot spots like Venezuela, Hong Kong, Colombia… I was in Zhanaozen during the street battles that broke out after the police shot workers. I was on duty during the revolution in Egypt, the Arab Spring, and they had street fighting, too. But from my experience, there’s a huge difference between street fighting, no matter how brutal, and the use of artillery and airstrikes.
Have you been under artillery fire?
I have, several times. In 2022, when I was working in Mykolaiv, the city was constantly being shelled by Russian artillery. My neighborhood had constant strikes. Once, a shell hit the apartment building next door. Like literally, the next one on my block. I usually avoid staying in hotels during these trips, because hotels regularly report their guests’ names to the police, and I don’t need that kind of attention. So, I stayed in apartments owned by Ukrainians. My girlfriend helped me with the bookings: she would look for accommodations and people willing to help while I was still on the road.
Did the people you stayed with know you were a Russian journalist?
Of course, everyone knew I was a Russian journalist, and they helped me from the moment I crossed the border. In Mykolaiv, I stayed with Aunt Mila, the aunt of a friend of mine. She’s an elderly woman who has difficulty walking, so she decided not to go down to the basement during the artillery shelling. Plus, there’s always rumors about people getting buried in basements and suffocating to death. That does happen occasionally, but your chances of survival are still much higher in a basement than in an apartment. I couldn’t convince Aunt Mila to go down to the basement. The TV kept talking about the “two-wall rule” without specifying that that means two retaining walls. The kind of walls you get in old Soviet apartment buildings—shells will go right through. But Aunt Mila believed the TV, so we hid in her bathroom during the shelling. She was stressing out, frightened, and started complaining about Putin, praising Zelensky, and talking about her relatives in Russia, who she kept reaching out to, but their conversations devolved into shouting matches. She was always feeding me her cooking, and her pickles were the best I’ve ever had.
We were sitting there, with shells falling nearby, so close we could hear the explosions, and I said to her, “Aunt Mila, could you please tell me your pickle recipe?”
“You’re a fan of pickles?”
“Of course, you know I love your pickles!”
And she began telling me the recipe in detail, and I kept asking clarifying questions. We talked about pickles for about twenty minutes, which was truly a blessing.
I crossed the border the night of February 25th. The war started the night of the 23rd. The night of the 24th, I tried to cross, but wasn’t allowed in because, of course, they had immediately banned Russian citizens from entering Ukraine. The guards were polite and said they knew of Novaya Gazeta and understood my intentions, but they had orders to follow. They stopped a bus that was taking refugees out of Ukraine and asked the driver to take me. The driver initially refused, saying there was no room, but the border guard said, “Is that so? I guess we’d better inspect the whole bus and see what’s up with the seating. We’ve got to be decent people, even during a war.” So anyway, the driver gave in, and I spend a bit of time with the women and children on the bus who were fleeing the war. I got off at the nearest city, then Novaya Gazeta asked the Ukrainian authorities to make an exception for me and let me into the country, which they did, and I’m very grateful for it. The next evening at the border crossing, I was allowed through, and saw that the road leading to the border was split by a wire fence into two lanes: my side was completely empty, while several thousand people had gathered on the other side.
People escaping the war zone?
Yeah, women and children, just standing out in the open, with no food or water, for hours on end. The wait at that point was two days. I saw a woman with a newborn baby, probably less than a month old, just sitting on the road, huddled around the baby with her own body to keep it warm. It was freezing cold.
The sanctions had started, so my credit card stopped working, and my phone didn’t work because roaming deals with the invader had been cancelled. So I was left without a phone signal or money, in the dark and the cold, with very a heavy bag holding a bulletproof vest and helmet. I hoped that I could catch a ride, but in the first days of the war, no one was stopping, at least not near the border. I was just standing there, smoking and wondering what to do next, when I noticed a man smoking nearby. I approached him and asked if he could let me use his phone hotspot to contact my editors. He asked where the editors were. I said, in Moscow. He had just dropped his wife and son off in that line, said his farewells, and was heading back to the front. But he shared his hotspot with me. I contacted my editors and said that I wouldn’t be available for a while until I got ahold of a Ukrainian SIM card and some money, and that I was trying to get to Lviv. The man told me that, to get to Lviv, I would need to travel 25 kilometers to the next town. “You’ll have to go on foot.” “Maybe a car will stop,” I suggested, but he said that no cars were stopping anymore.
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How many hours did you walk?
All night. The man was like, “Well, let’s do it, then,” and he took my bag, slung it over his shoulder, and set off. He had left his wife and child with the family car and was walking back because the line was several thousand people and cars long, and it was warmer to wait in a car. He bought me food along the way. There were two gas stations, the only places around where you could buy food or water, and each had a two-hour line. They let kids inside to warm up, but everyone else had to leave once they made their purchase. So we waited in one of those lines for him to buy me a hot dog and coffee, where we were joined by another man who had dropped off his wife and son. The three of us walked together that night.
Did you talk to him, too?
I did. The two of them told me about themselves and joked about who had the better, more fun job. One of them was a manager at a hot spring spa, and the other was a mechanic at a mobile amusement park. He travelled around Ukraine setting up rides for kids to go on.
Did they ask about your job?
They did. They could tell that I was very anxious. Well, more than anxious, I was… They could tell that something was wrong, that I was in shock, that I was worried about being a Russian there. But they reassured me, fed me, joked with me, and carried my bag. We walked and walked while they told me about their families, their cities, which ones were in the war zone and which ones weren’t. We walked the whole night. Eventually, we reached a village where a volunteer found us a ride to Lviv.
Elena, this next question might seem stupid, but I think it’s important. You’ve mentioned visiting so many dangerous places, hot spots, war zones. Why do you value going there? Even as a journalist, you can choose whether or not to visit them. It’s not just your job—you choose to go there.
Well, not all my work is like that. I’ve been working for seventeen years, and I do all kinds of coverage, for example, police violence, torture, crime, invisible communities as I call them (sex workers, desomorphine users, etc.). So I’ve covered all kinds of stuff, not just that. But I report from war zones because I’m good at it.
I’m good at it because I don’t lose my head, I’m not afraid of blood, and because I’m a girl. People never take girls seriously, which makes it much easier for us to operate in situations like a war. During a war, you’d better not scare people. Because if you scare them, they’ll shoot.
So no one was afraid of you?
No. I don’t look all that imposing. But as far as all that time I spent in the Donbas, and this invasion, this war—I had no choice but to go, because it was my country waging the war. I needed to know what my country was doing in my name. If it’s killing people in my name, I need to know who it’s killing and how, and to tell everyone else about it.
I was very taken as a kid—I think many Russians are—with war and the culture around it. I knew that my grandfather served [in World War II], and I would read books about the war, some of which were vastly different from the others. So I thought it was important to see war for myself, and once I did, I realized it was all bullshit. War has no meaning; it’s just dirt and chaos. I think you get the best depictions of war in Alexievich’s work, obviously, and Kurt Vonnegut’s, and Natal’ya Vorozhbit’s play Bad Roads—that’s quite an honest and accurate piece of war writing, in my opinion.
You spent five weeks on the front lines. As long as you’re comfortable sharing, I think it’s so critical to hear what happened to you during that those five weeks, how you feel now, and how you’re recovering. What supported you through this experience?
On the front lines, you don’t think about… Well, at least I didn’t think much when I was at war. I was mostly focused on work. On how to capture, see, hear, and record as much as possible. I had an audio recorder and an iPhone. My editorial team bought it for me so I could take pictures and video when I was travelling alone. I spoke with people, recorded their stories, took tons of photographs, shot videos, and passed it all along for publication. Novaya Gazeta has a strict rule that you can’t work in a war zone for longer than two weeks. The editorial team was founded by people who had worked in war zones, so there was never any disconnect between the senior editors and the correspondents sent into the field. After two weeks, you need to be replaced, because, firstly, you get exhausted and start making mistakes, and any mistake can be fatal. Plus, making a mistake as a journalist means spreading misinformation. That has to be avoided at all costs in wartime, because misinformation typically escalates the conflict. That’s the first reason. The second is that you begin to develop a false sense of security, which is very dangerous. You start thinking that since you haven’t been killed in the past two weeks, you won’t get killed ever, and you can go on working—but that’s not true. Basically, your mind starts to slowly deteriorate.
I always stuck to the two-week rule when I worked in hot spots before. But this time, I couldn’t be replaced, because the editors managed to make arrangements for me, but not for anyone else. So I stayed for five weeks—and by the time I left, I was in a very bad state. I mean, very bad. I already knew that my newspaper had been shut down, and all my war-related articles had been removed from Novaya Gazeta by the order of the Prosecutor General’s Office. I knew I wouldn’t be going home anytime soon. When I was in Odesa, the law on “fake news” was just being passed, which declared any information contradicting the Ministry of Defense’s narrative a crime. And the Ministry of Defense’s story was a complete lie. I realized that if I kept writing, I would become a criminal in the eyes of the state. And at that moment… My mom always tells me, “You could have made a different choice.” But for me, there was no choice.
I’m an existentialist. I don’t believe in the concept of choice. I believe that we, like plants, are constantly moving towards the light or away from it. At least, that’s true of me. All the work I’d done up to that point, the trust that readers had placed in me throughout the years, and especially during my time at war—I’m so grateful for that trust. I’ll never forget the trust of the Ukrainians, who shared their stories with me. I’ll never forget the all dead people I saw…
Did you see a lot of dead people?
Yes. I saw a lot. You can’t be in a country your own country is destroying and not bear witness to that. Well, I guess you can, but then I would have ceased to be me. I couldn’t have chosen that—so that’s why I stayed and kept going.
So you already knew you wouldn’t return while you were there?
I didn’t know, exactly. I had planned to return, try to keep working, and see what would happen. Plus I was so angry, like, “Bring it on! What are they gonna do, lock me up? I have friends who’ve been in prison, and they’re fine.” And I thought they might not imprison me, since they had hands full. The level of repression in those first months wasn’t like it is now, when they’re sending an elderly man to prison for a couple social media comments or arresting Svetlana Petriychuk and Zhenya Berkovich based on a play (though I think it was actually for her poetry). Back then, I thought they might not jail me. Look, okay, I was just being stupid! And here you are asking me all these smart questions, as though I’m a reasonable person.
I thought, “They don’t need the bad publicity. If they jail me, it’ll be a big court case, a lot of attention—they’re not interested in that. Even in prison, I’ll keep documenting whatever I see. And they really don’t want me writing about the insides of Russia’s prisons. So if they imprison me, I’d just keep doing my work from jail.”
Those were my naive, idealistic plans at the time.
So the five weeks pass. You’re in bad shape.
Right. I’m in bad shape, leaving Ukraine. Actually, that’s not the whole story. I might add… Never mind, I can’t tell you on record. I’m leaving Ukraine, and [Dmitry] Muratov, my editor-in-chief, says to me: “You can’t go back to Russia right now.” The issue wasn’t just prison anymore, it was my physical safety. And that’s it. I left, and I had lice, which it took me two months to get rid of, because my hair is so long. Lice from the trenches are hard to get rid of—they’re awfully tough—like, so fucking hard. These aren’t the usual lice you catch in school; these are big, nasty creatures. I also got mumps there. There are lots of infections in war zones because of the terrible sanitation, the overcrowding, and the inability to maintain proper hygiene. Finding a shower is a whole ordeal.
Were you able to shower?
Oh yeah, I always managed somehow. Afterwards, I was helped by friends in Europe, who would literally pass me along to one another during my first months back from the war.
Did you have a therapist?
I’ve been in therapy the whole time, even on the front line. My therapist is a real heroine; without her, I…
The interview is interrupted by a phone call.
“Mom, I’ll call you back in about an hour.”
“Are you still working?”
“Yeah, Mommy, I’m still working.”
“Is everything okay?”
“Yeah, everything’s fine. I love you.”
[Inaudible reply.]
“I’m not cheerful, because I’ve been working non-stop today. I got up really early and I’m still working. I’ll call you back later, okay?”
“Alright, take care.”
“Alright, love you. Bye.”
Aww, cute! “Mommy!” Sorry I’m taking so long.
No, no, no, it’s fine. My mom’s always like, “Stop telling everyone about this. Stop giving interviews. How much longer are you going to keep this up? You’ve suffered enough…”
Anyway, the whole time I was at the front, my therapist was guiding me. She’s a true hero, and she’s been with me for probably six years now. She was by my side for all that shit, helping me wade my way through.
So you were actually calling her from the war zone?
Yeah, I would find signal and talk to her. It was a huge support for me. I also talked to my girlfriend, my editor, Muratov, and my mom. Talking to my mom was hard, because, on the one hand, I really needed to hear her voice. But on the other hand, my mom watches [propaganda shows on] TV, and she’d call me at the front to tell me what I was “really” seeing. I asked her not to, but she kept going. Not that I didn’t put my fucking foot in it, too; at one point, I just lost snapped at her. I had spent the entire day at the Mykolaiv forensic office looking at bodies.
Why were you doing that?
Because that’s what war looks like.
Did you need to write about the bodies? Why did you go there?
Well, the forensic office is where they bring the bodies from the city and the surrounding areas, which gives you a more accurate picture of the number of deaths. It’s more reliable than the statistics usually provided by the Ministry of Defense or the city administration. Every dead person has a name. Well, almost every dead person—it also depends on where and how they died. There are many unidentified bodies in the morgues, for example, in Kherson, where I worked later on. For instance, during the first shelling of Ukraine, a military barracks where conscripts were sleeping was hit, and they burned alive. If you’ve ever seen someone who’s been burned alive, you realize just how difficult it is to figure out their identity.
There’s the forensic office at the end of the second week of the war. Ukraine’s morgues weren’t built to handle that many bodies, because normally, not that many people die there. There was nowhere to put them, so they were just lying around—they cleared out a huge garage for them. Two rooms, about 20 square meters each, filled with bodies. Some were just lying on the ground in the courtyard. There were also two rooms with temperature control, what they called “the refrigerators,” and there, the bodies were stacked in layers. One of the piles was made of two girls, two half-sisters—Veronika Biryukova and Arina Butym. Veronika was 17, Arina was 3. And I saw them. I don’t know, when you see a 3-year-old child who’s been killed lying on top of her dead sister… I can’t even say what I felt, because I didn’t feel anything, really. When I’m on assignment, I prepare myself beforehand to not engage emotionally and just gather information. I only engage emotionally when I’m writing the article. It’s important to feel everything then, because if you don’t, there’s no way honest writing will happen, and the reader won’t feel anything if you as the writer don’t. So I’m looking at these girls, and I notice that there’s an attendant next to me, showing me around. He was trying to rush me past that room, like he didn’t want me to see the bodies. But I could tell that he was walking fast on purpose, and I stopped. I could tell by the way he looked at them that he knew them. I asked him, “Do you know them?” He said, “Yeah. I’m their godfather; I baptized them. I was working when they brought them in, so I did the identification. And I cannot tell you what I felt.”
I spent a lot of time there. The official investigation was already underway, gathering evidence for the Hague, so each body was being examined and documented by investigators. I watched them at their work, which involved the following: they’d pull a body out of the garage into the yard. You could tell it had been in there for a while, because the skin had changed color. Say the person’s face was gone, and there was just a deep lengthwise gash where the face should’ve been. The people documenting the death would have to figure out what kind of injury caused it, and to do that, they needed to know which skull bones were broken and which weren’t. So, they’d stick their hand into the gash and start feeling around. And I’m just standing there watching, because that’s my job—watching everything. Then I would go talk to people who came to pick up their relatives’ bodies. I spoke with the father of those two girls. I also talked to a woman who said:
“My mom died, and I’m so glad she died on March 7th and not March 8th, because on the 8th, her building was bombed, and she would have had a terribly painful and frightening death inside. But as it was, she just dropped dead of fright on the bathroom floor during an artillery attack. And that’s a much better death than if she had died 24 hours later, so I’m really glad my mom died on the first day.”
I left the morgue to go keep documenting and investigating. Russian soldiers had shot up a minibus that was carrying women—caretakers at an orphanage—to a shelter in the village of Antonivka. They opened fire on the minibus, and three women died. So, I was going around gathering information on what happened: taking photos, talking to the women’s coworkers, attempting to talk to their relatives, who wouldn’t talk. Not because I was Russian, but because they couldn’t speak at all. Not everyone can talk after losing a loved one. Then, I made it back home, had about two hours to shower and eat before the shelling would probably start back up. And that’s when my mom called to keep saying…
“Well, actually,” here’s what’s really happening in Ukraine?
Yeah, “here’s what’s really happening.” And I said, “Look, let’s not go there today. Please. I can’t take it.” And she said, “No, you’re only on one side of the front line, you’re not understanding things properly. Let me tell you what your fellow journalists at Channel One caught on camera today!” And I just started screaming at her, and then I did something really awful, which I’m still ashamed of: I took all the photos saved on my phone, the ones from the Ukrainian forensic office, and I sent them to her. And she sent me this god-awful answer three paragraphs long. It wasn’t even the content that was awful; it was the rationalizing tone. My mom is the kind of person who planted 60 tomato plants in her garden when she had too many seedlings, because she couldn’t bring herself to kill a single seed that sprouts. She’s the one who saves every little bird with a broken wing. In the 90s, when we weren’t just poor but starving, we didn’t always have enough food, she took in a sick girl from an orphanage, and then a boy from another orphanage who had no future. She’s an incredibly kind and intelligent person. When I realized what they did to her—all the propaganda, the lies, the targeted fucking information influencing—I just… I have so much beef with Russian propagandists, so much. I hope their lives suck. I need them to answer for what they did to my mom, for what they did to my fellow Russians. Of course I’m also triggered that they call themselves journalists, but that’s fucking whatever. The problem is their actions… I sure hope they’ll be held responsible for them.
So that’s how my field assignment went.
You must have given a lot of interviews about your field work. When you find yourself retelling this story for the hundred millionth time, is that retraumatizing? How does remembering and narrating it make you feel?
It’s painful to remember, but not retraumatizing, I don’t think. Honestly, I think the past year has crushed me so completely that I can’t be retraumatized anymore—I have no fucks left to give. Plus, it’s good to talk about this kind of stuff, because, as anthropologist Svetlana Adonyeva has said, once a story is told, that means it’s over. I actually have it much easier as a journalist than do other people who experienced or witnessed these things. Journalism, if you’re doing it right and successfully writing articles, won’t pollute the [emotional] environment, at least in my experience. You witness a lot, but once you write it down, it turns into an article. The article is its own separate entity—the copyeditor, the proofreader, the managing editor all work on it—and once it’s published, it separates completely from you, and the mental space it was occupying gets freed up again. The story has an end; it’s just words on a page, at least for the journalist. I mean, the people dying still happened, but your personal experience, what you went through, that ends up as the article. That’s what lets journalists keep going for so many years. Once the article is out, you recuperate for a few days, and then you’re ready to write the next story. I haven’t written many light pieces.
Try not to laugh at this next question! Does it ever hit you, even a little, that you’re a great journalist? Do you ever manage to own how good you are?
It’s easier for me with journalism because there exist external metrics of success. I’ve won several international awards, and many Russian awards as well. That’s extra validation, but it doesn’t define me. What really matters is that people read my work.
You probably get a lot of direct feedback, right?
Yeah, I always read people’s replies to my articles. Whether that’s messages, comments—I read them all, because I really care about how people read my work. That’s how I judge if I did my job. Did they understand what I wrote? How did they interpret it? What do they feel about it? And yeah, I know that some of the pieces I’ve done are no small feat. Take, for example, my article on “psycho-neurological institutions” (PNIs), Russia’s residential facilities for adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities. It was read by 700,000 people. When I wrote that piece, when I finished it and sent it to Novaya Gazeta, Muratov said it was really good, but that maybe 50,000 people max would read it—bit ended up reaching 700,000. Another thing I’m really proud of is that the piece was turned into a play by director Katya Polovtseva, actress Nelli Uvarova, and her team. They presented it at various venues in Moscow, including the Russian Academic Youth Theatre. And I know that for a lot of people, that text was truly transformative, a turning point.
That’s why I feel a deeply responsible for so many political issues. For example, even before the war, I knew that fascism existed in Russia. Take the law about “LGBT propaganda,” which has this phrase about [same-gender relationships not] being “equally valuable to society.” That’s fascist speak, to divide people into categories and say that some of them are not “equally valuable to society.”
Or when the Russian state sponsors a system of concentration camps (the PNIs, that is), segregating people based on their abilities and sending them to live and die stripped of all human rights—like, holy shit! I spent two weeks in one of these concentration camps. Before I went, I had talked with different people who were familiar with the issue, and some of the things they told me, I thought, “Maybe they’re exaggerating, or just repeating rumors, and rumors tend to be scarier than reality.” So when they called the PNIs “concentration camps,” I thought it was, well…
A little creative license?
Well, not creative license. I know activists don’t like journalists, but journalists don’t really like activists either, because activists have to make everything sound more intense to get people’s attention—say, by calling a place a “concentration camp.” But when I got there, I realized that it was a legit concentration camp, and that the people who’d told me about the homes hadn’t told me the half of it. Even what I saw in my two weeks there was just the tip of the iceberg. My presence kept the staff in check, kept them from doing certain things. Some things they hid, or tried to cover up. Like, that they sterilize the women. As if they were spaying fucking cats. Russia has a law that allows for the sterilization of legally incompetent women (which is already fucked up), but only if a judge rules in favor. The PNIs sterilize them even without a court decision. The director just writes a letter saying, “So-and-so is legally incompetent, and I want her sterilized.” And they do it. How is that even possible? Or they force them to get abortions. They rape them. They beat them. They pump people full of drugs for any expression of discontent. I mean, you can’t even tell them, “Fuck off.” If you do, either they’ll inject you with something, or send you to a harsher unit, or they’ll throw you in a psychiatric hospital where you’ll get injected every day. And this is the reality that 177,000 Russians live—live and die—in. Including 21,000 children.
So you published an article about the system that 700,000 people read—did that prompt any kind of thoroughgoing reform? It seems hard to just ignore.
No. The director of the institution I visited was fired, but not right away. First, he got a chance to mend his ways, and when he didn’t, they fired him. I know that there are volunteers working hard to change the situation in that specific facility, but things are changing very slowly. Two of the three women I wrote about getting sterilized were moved into assisted living homes. They managed to get Sveta Skaznyova and her friend Yulia Zhigulskaya out. Sveta is a poet who was considered “non-verbal.” Well, not non-verbal—her fucking file said she was in a “vegetative state.” And she was writing poems! It blows my mind that you can still write poetry in that state, in that situation, with no one to talk to because they think you’re a vegetable and they literally write “vegetable” in your file. Nyuta Federmesser helped her and Yulia move to a hospice in Porechye. That’s not ideal either, it’s not a real home, but it’s a whole lot better than a concentration camp. The government recently codified “assisted living” as an alternative to institutionalization, but there’s no law providing for shared guardianship, and without that, assisted living is basically impossible. [Editor’s note: PNI residents are currently considered legal wards of their institution.] So it’s not a functional law. Sure, it’s a step forward, but how many more steps will it take?
When I first wrote and published everything, I was still doing okay-ish. I mean, I’ve always had all these random intense trauma reactions. A friend who I’m really grateful to, Asya Kazantseva, came to visit and told me, “Research says”—that’s Asya for you—“you have to walk a lot after trauma.” And we went walking. We walked around the neighborhood for five hours, and I really did feel better. But then [non-profit director] Katya Tarantsenko was going back to visit that PNI, and she was like, “Come with me! You can see your friends.” So I went with her, and nothing had changed. So yeah, once again, my heart and my mind were at odds.
I know in my mind that no, one article won’t tear down the system of concentration camps. It’s not like you write a really good article and then bam—the concentration camps’ walls just fall down.
But it’s one thing to know that intellectually, and another to… I gave so much of myself making this work, and it cost me a lot. You go visit, and it’s all still the same: the same people you know and care about, in the same torture chamber, still with no rights. And you’re going to hang out with them for a couple of hours, and then leave, and nothing will change.
There was a girl with Down syndrome there, well, a young woman. Kind of incredibly, kids with Down syndrome can’t grow without love. If they don’t feel loved, if they don’t feel valued, they don’t grow. Their height and weight gets stuck at the level of a three- or four-year-old. So anyway, there was this girl who was 19, but looked like a three-year-old, and she and I became super tight. Super tight. I was always working when I was there, from early in the morning to late at night, but sometimes I’d take a break and go visit her, sit her on my lap, and we’d play. Her file said she couldn’t walk, but she did knew how. She taught herself, which is no easy task. But she didn’t have any shoes, because her file said she couldn’t walk. So I would help her walk, and we’d go out into the hallway and walk back and forth. Sometimes she cheated: she knew that I could pick her up, so she’d take a few steps and plop down as if to say, “Pick me up!” The second time I visited, it was summer, and they let me take her out to into this little courtyard. They have a courtyard where people take walks, and it’s just 124 steps long.
Like prisons have.
Yeah. So I took her around the yard in a wheelchair, and then that was it. I handed her over and left. That’s when it really hit me hard. I couldn’t function for several months.
To be honest, hearing your stories, I don’t understand how you manage to function usually. Everyone has different capacities to bear different burdens, but I don’t know how I could bear what you’re describing.
I thought about moving her out of the institution, but given my lifestyle… I was having problems with the secret police even before the war. When I know that I could be arrested or killed any day, I can’t allow myself to take care of anyone else. Even when I got my cat, I made arrangements with my sister and mom that if something happens to me, they’d take care of my cat. My life isn’t only mine; it doesn’t only affect me, it affects all my loved ones. Like, imagine what a shitshow it is to be my mom. Once people tried to kidnap my sister because of my work. My mom, for example, says that if I really loved her…
You’d quit your job?
Yeah, that I wouldn’t have this lifestyle. She says, “You can’t not see how your life affects me and your sister.” I do see. And yeah, I guess I choose to live this way. I do try to take care of my loved ones, but what else can I do for my mom? She’s far away. Well, I found her a helper for her garden. My mom is 76 and it’s hard for her to do certain things. This wonderful lady Lena, a country woman, a gardener, now goes over to help. She’s very kind to my mom, which makes me happy, and they do their gardening together. So, that’s how I care for her.
Hearing your story, I feel like it’s so important that you, the person narrating and doing and writing all this, are a woman. And you are a woman with a feminist perspective that impacts your writing. Not everyone might realize that at first glance. Yes, you’re the famous journalist Elena Kostyuchenko, but you’re also a feminist and LGBT activist… Do you have anything to say about your feminist perspective? Does it help with your writing? Can you feel it there?
Yes, of course. Being a woman lets me work the way I work and write the way I write. Being a woman means being vulnerable. Being a gay woman means being doubly vulnerable. And this experience of vulnerability is very important.
To be able to describe other people’s experiences?
To be able to describe other people’s experiences, to feel and share their pain, to feel how vicious and meaningless violence is, to see that it’s fucking everywhere. I do think that that knowledge enables women to be gentle. I’m not always as gentle as I could be, actually. Journalism requires being gentle, but only up to a certain point. I’m not gentle with my readers; I don’t think you need to protect them. I protect my subjects, and I try not to be cruel unnecessarily—but I’m still cruel at times.
I’m really glad I’m a woman, and I’m doubly glad I’m a lesbian. I think I lucked the fuck out. I seriously thank God every day. He sure went all out on me.
Also, like many women, I’ve learned to extract secondary benefits from patriarchy, like the fact that no one takes me seriously.
You have a very… gentle appearance, too.
Yeah. I’m short; I have a soft, high voice, and blue eyes—quite the cutie. It’s true. It helps me get into places where men wouldn’t be allowed. Plus, I think people generally trust women more, and they trust us with things they wouldn’t tell men about themselves.
There was one time when I was working in Kushchevka [Krasnodar Region], where a gang had basically controlled the area for 20 years. There were mass murders, gang rapes, and the government turned a blind eye because there was no government; the gang was the government. People in office were affiliated with them, very closely so: it later turned out that even the Prosecutor General’s Office had members. The boss was at Medvedev’s inauguration. Crazy, right? The gang’s leaders had already legitimized themselves as United Russia deputies at the local level, and they were planning to run for federal office. And they would have succeeded. They were arrested because they killed 12 people at once, including four children. And even that might have been overlooked had not a Channel One news crew happened to be in the area filming for [the missing-persons TV show] Wait for Me, and a hotel receptionist told them there had been a murder in building next door. They decided to film a story, and it was picked up by the nationwide show Vesti (without full knowledge of the situation). More journalists came to investigate and ended up uncovering a 20-year reign of terror.
There had also been gang rapes of girls and young women—schoolgirls, college students. Everyone knew it had been happening, everyone talked about it, but I didn’t know how to get in contact with the survivors themselves. I didn’t want to go through the cops. So, I just went to this vocational school, waited for the end of class, and when the girls came out into the hallway, I just got up in the middle of the hall and announced, “Hello, I’m Elena Kostyuchenko. I’m a journalist at Novaya Gazeta. I know you’ve been through terrible things, and I have, too—I’ve been sexually assaulted twice. Let me tell you what happened.” I just stood there in the hall and told them what had happened to me. And then I said, “I’m staying at such-and-such hotel, and if any of you want to tell me your story, I’d be happy to listen.” And they came to me. That specific experience of being a woman, it connects us in many ways. And if you’re not afraid to be vulnerable, people will be vulnerable with you, and that’s what really helps me in my work.
Thank you. One last question… or prompt, really. I was just thinking, it’s so important that we reach activists who are in Russia right now, having this experience of total vulnerability and feeling alone. If you want, you can speak directly to those readers, imagine they exist—which they do. So if you have any words of support for them, or anything else, I think it would be great to end our interview with that.
I can’t imagine how hard it must be for you. I truly can’t. It’s unimaginable, what has become of our country, the country we love. It’s unimaginable the repression that now faces anyone who raises their head, raises their voice. It’s unimaginable what propaganda has done to our loved ones. And the most unimaginable thing of all is the war that’s taking place. And the fact that in these monstrous conditions, you’re not just staying true to yourselves, staying safe, and taking care of your loved ones—you’re fighting back against war, fascism, and dictatorship. That’s… I don’t like the word “heroism,” so I don’t know how to say it. You are incredible; you are great. I am so grateful to you. Every day I’m grateful for the work you do and the lives you lead.
Especially this last year, I have felt helpless so often. Because it can feel like you’re putting in an effort, a huge effort, only for nothing to change. But actually, that’s not true. When we put in effort, changes do happen; we just can’t always observe them. Piece by piece, those efforts are building us a future, building our loved ones a future, building our country a future. We have one another, and that matters a lot. We need to remember that we have one another. Even if there’s no one physically at your side to vent to, we are not alone. And this bullshit is not fucking forever. This bullshit will end. I hope we all live to see it end, and even have energy left over to deal with the aftermath, because there will be an aftermath. We’ll need to live very long lives.
I really hope that one day I’ll meet and get to know every one of you, and just talk and cry it out together. I really wish I were by your side in Russia, and I feel terrible that I can’t be there.
