Yelena Kostyuchenko: “I won’t let Putin take my mother from me”

“It was impossible to prepare ourselves to accept that the fascists were us,” writes journalist Elena Kostyuchenko (Yaroslavl, Russia, 1987) on one of the final pages of El meu país estimat. Cròniques d’un país perdut, an exceptional work of journalism now available in Catalan thanks to Segona Perifèria. Kostyuchenko, a precocious and committed journalist, a disciple of the late Anna Politkovskaya and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Dmitry Muratov at Novaya Gazeta, delves into the world of those excluded from the system in Putin’s Russia and portrays them with a rawness and sensitivity that are deeply moving. Her reports shine a light in the darkness, giving voice to the voiceless—be they marginalized youth, roadside sex workers, mistreated Indigenous peoples of northern Siberia, orphans, or the mothers of Beslan who are still demanding justice.

And almost without realizing it, she describes her country’s drift into fascism—a drift that culminates in the outbreak of war and the invasion of Ukraine, a development she regrets not having foreseen. She threw herself into covering the war, and Putin marked her as a target: Russian soldiers were ordered to kill her. She went into exile, reluctantly, leaving her mother and sister behind in her (still beloved) Russia. She has survived a poisoning attempt and has had to cope with the pain and anger of knowing her mother has fallen victim to Putin’s propaganda. She talks about this in the interview we conduct at the newsroom. She arrives exhausted after a long journey (for safety reasons, she cannot say where she lives) and a packed schedule. Yet she gives herself completely in every answer; she closes her eyes, often needs to catch her breath, and chooses her words as if drawing them from a deep well of pain she carries within her and urgently needs to share with the world.

—How do you feel living in exile?
—Someone once told me that living in exile is like having an open fracture. And it’s true. It’s very hard, especially coming from Russia, because I used to share my fate with my readers; we had a common reality. That’s no longer the case. My mother lives in Russia, and so does my sister. My mother is seventy-seven, turning seventy-eight next month. I don’t know how much time we have left together. In theory, I should be living near her now, spending lots of time with her, but instead we maybe see each other once a year, twice if we’re lucky. We meet in third countries, but it’s not easy for her or for me. I’ve also met incredible people I would never have known if not for exile. I’ve learned a lot. I’ve paid a very high price, but even so, I’ve learned a lot.

—Do you speak with your mother and sister every day?
—Yes, every day. Of course. My mother lives in Yaroslavl, and my sister in Moscow. She works with what’s left of Novaya Gazeta. When the full-scale invasion began, she moved from the photography department to investigations, and now she’s a researcher. I’m very proud of her.

—But they can’t publish anything.
—They don’t have a media license, can’t publish any issues, the website is blocked… But still, they find ways to get information to readers. They do it through Telegram and PDF versions, which is wild. People literally print out the PDFs on paper.

—Like in a dictatorship.
—Yes. I mean, it’s like samizdat in Soviet times, when people used to print texts themselves. That’s what people do in Russia when they want to read Novaya Gazeta.

—How has your communication with your mother changed since going into exile?
—The early days of the full-scale invasion were really tough. I was in Ukraine, reporting, and she would call me to tell me what she was seeing and feeling—because she thought she knew more than I did. Once, she phoned me after I had spent the whole day in a morgue in Mykolaiv. I saw the bodies of two sisters, one lying on top of the other. The little one was three years old, the older one seventeen. Russian artillery had killed them… [she pauses, takes a deep breath]. That same day, she called and said again that the war was justified. And I did something very ugly, something I can’t forgive myself for: I copied all the photos I had from the morgue on my phone and sent them to her. She replied with something about “necessary collateral damage,” or some similar nonsense. And that’s when I thought I had to cut communication with her. That she was no longer my mother…

—She spoke like the voice of the Russian government…
—Yes, exactly. Those days, she sounded like the television. She just repeated phrases from TV all the time. I thought, “I can’t take this anymore.” But then I started to think. I can break off communication, sure, but… do I really want to lose my mother because of Putin? Do I want him to be the one who takes her from me? No. So I kept talking to her. At first, I yelled a lot. A whole lot. And then I realized that it was also my fault—I didn’t want to listen to her. Why did I yell every time she opened her mouth? I started to listen to her. And that helped. She started to listen to me too. And one day she called and said she no longer believed the war was justified, that it had to stop as soon as possible. She asked me, “You wanted me to understand, right? Well, now I understand. What can I do to stop this war?” And that… that is a very hard question.

—A difficult question to answer…
—Yes. And this new knowledge, what she has learned, has left her much more alone. Because she can’t talk about it with her friends or neighbors. She doesn’t trust them enough. Her life has clearly become more complicated. One day I asked her: “If you could go back, would you rather not know everything you know now?” And she said no, she preferred to know. Now we talk every day. And I talk to my sister too. The conditions she works under are unimaginable. She can’t plan anything beyond the next day; she risks being arrested at any moment. So she lives day to day… We don’t make many plans these days.

—You describe this book as chronicles of a lost country. Do you think Russia is lost?
—I think it’s lost its way, lost its sense of itself. And I’ve lost it too. It’s a play on words, but I think it’s true.

—You had to flee because of your work as a war reporter.
—Yes, I left my country to cover the war, but at that moment I didn’t realize I was actually leaving it for good.

—You were never able to return.
—Exactly. And I didn’t know it then.

—One day you were warned that the Russian army wanted to kill you.
—Well, it was like… [she laughs bitterly, sighs] There’s a Russian joke that goes: a man goes to the dentist and says, “I want you to pull out this tooth.” And the dentist replies, “One hundred dollars.” The man says, “A hundred dollars for five minutes of work?” And the dentist says, “Well, I can pull it out very slowly.” [She laughs again.] So for me, I had to understand things very slowly… I left Russia with a single bag: a helmet, a bulletproof vest, a sweater from my mother “just in case,” a pair of trousers, socks, and notebooks. Nothing else. I started writing reports. And in the second week, after I had sent my second article to Novaya Gazeta, news came out that parliament had passed a law making it a crime—punishable by up to fifteen years in prison—to publish any information that contradicted the official version of the Ministry of Defense. And I thought: shit. What worried me most then was whether they would publish my piece. If they hadn’t, I would have quit. I called them, and they said they were still thinking about it. A few hours later, they called me back and asked if I agreed to have it published. I said yes. And my mother says that was the turning point. She said: “If you loved me more than your job, you would have said no and come home.”

—Wow.
—But it wasn’t really a choice. If you’ve worked as a journalist your whole life, if you go to a country that has been attacked by your own, if you see people being killed by your people—you can’t stay silent. I couldn’t. So I said yes. We published the report. And I understood that from that moment on, if I went back to Russia, I’d probably be imprisoned. And I accepted that. Some of my friends were already in prison. I knew I could survive it. I kept working: I went to Mykolaiv, I went to Kherson, which was occupied at the time. Then I wanted to go to Mariupol, which was still resisting. The day before I was supposed to take the road to Mariupol, a colleague called me and said his sources had confirmed that the military checkpoints had information about me, my photo, and orders not to detain or arrest me—but to kill me.

—What did you feel?
—I felt a lot of anger, because I wanted to go to Mariupol. I knew something was happening there. I knew the city was being destroyed, and its people too. That it was the scene of a large-scale crime. I stayed one more day at the hotel, trying to find another route to get there. Not the main one—another one. But at that point, there was only one possible route, and only occasionally. And I realized I didn’t have a chance [she sighs, it’s hard for her to speak]. I thought about going anyway. But I don’t drive, and I became aware that I would have to go in someone else’s car. And that if I got killed, the others wouldn’t be spared either.

—You would have put their lives at risk…
—I can risk my own life, if I choose to. But others’ lives? No. And I decided I couldn’t do it. I left Ukraine. My editor-in-chief, Muratov, asked me not to return to Russia immediately. He told me to wait a bit, that maybe the situation would calm down. And I thought, okay. And in fact, I had been wanting to write a book for a long time…

—For a long time?
—Yes. And with this war, I felt like the puzzle was coming together. That now I knew exactly what I wanted to say. I started writing it. Then I called Muratov again, and he told me it still wasn’t the right time. So I decided to join Meduza. They had an office in Berlin. I moved to Berlin, and we realized that I had to go back to Ukraine. I went to the consulate in Munich to apply for a visa. And on the way back, I started feeling sick.

—And you suspected they had tried to poison you.
—At first, I didn’t suspect anything. I thought I had covid again. The symptoms didn’t quite match, but you know how strange covid can be. I went to the doctor. For two and a half months they ran tests to figure out what was wrong, and in the end they told me I might have been poisoned, and they alerted the police. And from that moment on, I clearly understood that I couldn’t go back to Russia while Putin was in power, while these people were still in control. But I’m obsessed with the idea that I could do it.

—What do you mean?
—I mean that every second of my life I know I could buy a ticket and fly to Moscow right now.

—That must be incredibly hard.
—It’s insane. Completely.

—In the book you say that Russia has become a fascist state.
—I can tell you how I came to that conclusion. The first time I thought it was in 2013. The first law against the LGBTI community was passed, and the text stated that we were socially unequal compared to others. And you know how it works: dividing society into groups and declaring one of them inferior is part of the definition of fascism. And I thought: maybe we do have fascism. But then I tried to calm down and thought: well, it’s just our parliament—which, to be fair, we didn’t even truly elect. Can we say that the whole country is fascist just because a parliament that takes direct orders from Putin passes this law? Maybe not. But later on, when I did a report on a psychiatric institution, which I talk about in one chapter of the book…

—Which you describe as a concentration camp.
—Yes, and on the third day I realized that what I was writing was a report from a concentration camp. From that moment on, I could no longer deny that fascism existed. Still, I didn’t take the next step in my reasoning, because, knowing history, we know that fascism always ends in war. It’s not about peace or prosperity, it’s about fear and war. But I didn’t see this great war coming. Muratov did see it; he talked about it in his Nobel Peace Prize speech…

—So you were very surprised the day the war in Ukraine started.
—Yes, very. When Putin recognized the independence of the so-called People’s Republics of Luhansk and Donetsk, I wondered what he intended to do. I thought the whole thing was aimed at NATO, not Ukraine. I imagined he would send troops, like he had before, but this time openly, and then blackmail the world by saying: “If you don’t do what I want, I’ll push forward.” But I never thought he would bomb Kyiv.

—What did that mean to you?
—To me, as a Russian, it was unthinkable. To bomb Kyiv! Ukraine was our closest neighbor. Kyiv was, almost, a sacred city. The idea of Russian planes bombing it… I never would have imagined it. And I didn’t imagine it until I realized it was happening: during the first week of the war, I couldn’t believe it was real. I was already there, I was already working, I was seeing people. It felt like I was trapped in a continuous nightmare, a delusion. I kept expecting to wake up at any moment.

—You write in the book: “It was impossible to prepare ourselves to accept that the fascists were us.”
—It’s still very hard for me to acknowledge that fascism exists in Russia. My grandfather fought fascism [her voice breaks, she gets emotional]. I always thought that, since we had defeated it, that made us immune. But now I see that’s not true. No one is immune. No culture, no country. Look at what’s happening around the world: this shift toward authoritarianism, more and more authoritarian people in power… It’s frightening. I think Russia has started a very big wave, and we still don’t understand its consequences.

—And now we see Trump drawing closer to Putin.
—It’s a catastrophe. I was recently in the United States and I spoke with a lot of people. For me, it was very instructive to be there at this moment. To see how things are starting to change, how journalists are beginning to censor themselves…

—Do you see similarities with Russia?
—Yes. It’s like watching a new version of a bad movie you don’t want to see but end up watching anyway. And reactions I used to think were specific to Russia—our history, the Soviet trauma, the repression—I now see they aren’t unique. They’re the reactions of anyone who’s afraid.

—Despite all the pessimism, you manage to find light and life even in the darkest situations. How do you do it?
—I try to use the whole palette. Life is complicated, people are complicated. I don’t believe in good and evil. We’re a mixture of everything. And so is life. Even in the psychiatric institution, where the conditions are inhumane—where people have no rights, where they live and die there, where women are sterilized against their will—even there, people try to love each other. They share love stories. Because people need that. I do too.

—And you capture these people’s speech patterns to convey exactly how they express themselves, what they feel.
—Yes. My editor, Maksar Miklatov—whom I dedicate the book to—once told me that the best story is the one that isn’t told. Because that’s where the blind spot lies. And when I write, I think: what don’t I know? What am I completely unaware of? And since I’m just an ordinary person, I usually have the same blind spots as everyone else. So I go there. And I believe that to understand how a system works—whether it’s small or a whole country—you don’t need to speak to the people inside it, but to those who are outside of it. I approach those people. Often, I’m the first journalist who listens to them. The first who takes their words seriously. And I stay as long as they’ll let me.

—I remember a scene from the chapter on the Beslan school: TV cameramen avoided filming the protesting women, working with blank faces, focused only on their job. The role of the media is a big part of the problem.
—Yes, it is. And I think we journalists have failed our people in many ways.

—You include yourself in that?
—Absolutely. I, like many journalists in Russia, used to think that being a good journalist meant staying uninvolved, not touching anything, keeping yourself above it all. That if you got too close, you’d get stained. But I think that’s a mistake. Professional duty, which is hard enough to fulfill in Russia, doesn’t cancel out civil duty. And we, who knew things, could have seen fascism growing before others did. And we should have fought it—not just described it. Yes, I’ve failed too.

—But you did fight—you’re an LGBTI activist. You chose to do both: to report and to advocate.
—Not at first. When I became an activist, I wanted to keep both roles completely separate. I thought: “If I’m an LGBTI activist, I shouldn’t write about my own people. Let straight people do it—they can be objective too” [laughs]. I believed that nonsense. But then I realized that I could write about my people. And that being a lesbian doesn’t mean being unobjective. Getting involved doesn’t mean abandoning objectivity. It means no longer being passive. And today, in the world we live in, we cannot afford to be passive spectators. It’s not enough.

—You wanted to become a journalist after reading Anna Politkovskaya. And you ended up working with her. What did that mean to you?
—I can’t even describe it. She gave me everything. She gave me a profession. She gave me Novaya Gazeta. She gave me the life I live now. She completely changed my life, without even knowing it. And I deeply regret not being brave enough to go to her and say thank you. I always thought there would be time. That one day I’d be a good journalist and I could tell her: “Thank you. You don’t know it, but you’ve done something huge for me.” But I never got the chance. Our offices were very close. When she was in the newsroom, there was always a line of people waiting to talk to her. When she wasn’t there, I would go to her desk and leave apples. One time she caught me, and I just ran away. I was hired as a staff writer on April 1st, 2006. And on October 7th of that same year, she was murdered. I never got to tell her how grateful I was. But I hope I won’t make that mistake again. At Novaya Gazeta, I learned this: you never know how much time you have left, and if you love someone, if you hate someone, if you have anything to say—say it now.

—You write in the book: “When I’m afraid, I run forward.” Aren’t you afraid?
—Rarely. And when I am, I know it’s less than what many others feel. You can’t compare emotions, but you can ask others how they experience fear. And I understand that mine is smaller. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s biological. That’s why I hate it when people say: “You’re so brave…” Being brave isn’t about feeling little fear, it’s about overcoming it. And me—when I’m afraid, I keep doing what I do until I feel better.