NOTE: I read this book in Russian, the original version published by Meduza.

I have long been a reader of Elena Kostyuchenko, so many of the articles in the book were already familiar to me. I think Elena's journalistic work is unique to modern Russia. No one else does what she does. This book is a great illustration of that. 

Do not be fooled by the title: it was originally published as "My ******* country", a title that in Russian easily reads as "My

fucking

country", but turns out to be "My beloved country", and this is exactly the tension in the book and the articles. The attention to all the dark, complicated, painful topics in 21st-century Russia can come from deep, burning hatred or deep, painful love, and here it is the second. 

Throughout the book, you pick up on the everyday disregard for human life, decency, and reason, that permeates life in Russia - it has culminated in the terrible war Russia is continuing to wage in Ukraine. But it started earlier - in the hospitals, in the abandoned buildings, in the disregard for Northern peoples. Kostyuchenko's documentation is to me, as a Russian, heartbreaking - but absolutely necessary.