Fascism can grow on every soil. Nobody is immune

“If you want to stay safe,” the journalist Elena Kostyuchenko writes in “I Love Russia: Reporting From a Lost Country,” “you must put a smile on your face.” She’s referring to the conditions in one of Russia’s hellish “internat” facilities for the disabled, but you get the sense that the sentiment could be applied to the country at large: The prerequisite to safety is the acceptance of the maddest of circumstances, and even that is no guarantee.


‘Fascism can grow on every soil. Nobody is immune.’
© Julia Tatarchenko
Kostyuchenko was assaulted and arrested repeatedly while spending nearly two decades reporting on the dire conditions for minority groups in Russia as well as on the country’s many imperial ventures. Then, in late 2022, she was warned that she needed to abandon her efforts to cover the fighting in Ukraine because the Russian government had ordered her assassination. Soon after, she moved to Germany, where she fell ill; doctors believe she was poisoned.


In “I Love Russia,” Kostyuchenko chronicles the state of Russian society under Putin’s authoritarianism, particularly the severe hardships faced by those living on its fringes: queer people, the Indigenous, the disabled, mothers grieving their murdered children. I spoke with Kostyuchenko via Zoom. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q. What do you hope people will learn by reading your book?
A. It’s easy now to think of Russians as aliens who have morals and values that are not like yours, but the truth is that we are very similar. Very ordinary people. But our country grew fascism inside its belly. It was growing slowly, but now it’s flourishing with war.

‘Fascism can grow on every soil. Nobody is immune.’
© Penguin Press
In my book, I tried to explain this growth — the bricks in the wall that was building. It was not fast. It took time, and was step-by-step. We were living in changing circumstances, and most were busy with the usual things, like surviving and taking care of their families. Even us who were doing our jobs as individual journalists did the same. We were describing the process of fascism growing inside our country, but we did nothing effective to prevent it. And I believe it’s very important — especially in the context of the global authoritarian turn — to know that fascism can grow on every soil. Nobody is immune. It’s actually bearable for a long time. You feel you can live with it, until you can’t.

Q. You write that Putin rose to power because people thought he was going to protect them. Why did they feel that way?

A. Putin was a nice contrast to [Boris] Yeltsin, who people looked at as a mad old drunk. Putin was young and saying the right words, like democratic values. Like we will make our country great again. But also, it was the moment that major terrorist attacks appeared in Russia and people felt threatened. The attacks weren’t investigated well enough, and there are signs that some of them — or all of them; we don’t know — were organized by security services. But people felt really threatened. Putin said there’s this wonderful opportunity to face the threat — you can just kill all the terrorists. And it’s how the second Chechen War began. In the context of war, people want to be united around some leader. People want to be together. So Putin was elected. And I believe he learned well. Every time his rating went down, Russia jumped into another war. And it worked.

Q. What are the warning signs of fascism?

A. In the beginning, people don’t trust high power, like the politicians they already have. And the difference of income and cost of living — it should be really huge. When people get used to being unequal, it’s a very bad thing — you don’t have a common reality. Then you feel helpless. You don’t feel that you can change anything. Some moral shifting — things that were moral before change meaning. Misogyny is key. Misogyny and oppressing some group of citizens — LGBT always works. The unification of culture; like when you have more than one nation on your land, then it has to be clear which nation is the main one. Some small conflict over territories would be great. Changing of history. Killing of independent journalists and activists. Concentration camps for disabled people. And then the big war.

Q. You’ve written about how Novaya Gazeta, the newspaper you worked for, was banned and the website was taken down. I often wonder about the wisdom of having all-digital media.

A. This was one of the main reasons why we did a printed copy all the time. A printed copy can be delivered in places where there’s no internet, and we wanted prisoners to be able to read us. It’s more difficult to change something in printed paper than to change something online. But our government is well trained for working with paper censorship.

This book will be launched in the United States. I want it to be published also in the Russian language for Russians. All major publishing houses in Russia — I sent them the book: We read it, we liked it very much, I really wish to publish it but we cannot, because according to legislation your book is a crime, and if we publish it we are responsible for the crime and we don’t want to be. We don’t want to go to prison.

And now [the news organization] Meduza established a publishing house, because I’m not the only one in that situation. And my book is going to be their first book. They know how to deliver a digital copy into Russian internet, but we don’t know how to deliver a printed copy. Because all the people who would be in the chain of delivery, if they got caught, they go to prison.

Q. Fascism is on the rise all over the world, and I can see echoes of what happened in Russia happening in the United States. What can I do?

A. What I would definitely do differently — and it was a trap I don’t want you to fall into — it’s this principle: Don’t get involved or you will lose your objectivity, all of us should be objective and professional and blah, blah, blah. I believe this whole principle — don’t get involved in things — was invented by people who had power and wanted to keep it because they don’t want media to be politically active. This is what we believe in, too — that the first thing we should do is professional duty. But professional duty is not enough. We all have not just professional duties, but also civil duties, and they’re not eliminated by professional duties. If you as a journalist know that your country goes in the wrong direction, you should alarm the rest.

Many educated Russians are very happy to believe that propaganda doesn’t affect them, that some stupid people are being affected by propaganda but we know things. When you feel that propaganda doesn’t affect you, you’re already under its influence.

I won’t shame myself for being an activist and a journalist. And I believe, of course, that I should be — we should all be — way more alarmed. If you see that things are going to hell, they are going to hell.

I Love Russia
Reporting From a Lost Country

By Elena Kostyuchenko. Translated by Bela Shayevich and Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse

Penguin Press. 363 pp. $30

Nick Hilden writes about the arts, travel, technology and health for numerous publications.