When commitment to the truth can cost you your life

There are servile and cowardly journalists who sacrifice ethical rigor to obey their superiors or the dictates of the party in power that pays or feeds them (and tells them what to say) and there are journalists who try to do their job with honesty and rigor, who try to think and write skiing. And then there are journalists who are authentic heroes, who must work in ominously hostile contexts in which freedom of the press is threatened and vandalized daily, journalists who risk their lives if they dare to tell the truth or confront the abuses of the powerful (political leaders, mafias, businessmen) and explain reality.

This is the case of Yelena Kostiuchenko (Yaroslavl, Russia, 1987) and of all the journalists who have passed through the editorial office of New Gazette, a weekly founded in 1993 that has always been highly critical of Vladimir Putin's regime and was considered the last bastion of the free Russian press until it was closed in 2022 by government order for how it reported on the invasion of Ukraine. Kostiuchenko, who had to flee Russia under threat of death (on one occasion she was almost poisoned to death), lives in exile in Berlin.

While reading My beloved country. Chronicles of a lost country, the collection of chronicles, reports and autobiographical texts that La Segunda Periferia has just published in Catalan in a translation by the always reliable Miquel Cabal Guarro, the reader cannot help but think and hear that behind each and every one of Ielena Kostiuchenko's words lies an admirable and almost suicidal commitment to freedom and truth. After thinking this, the reader also thinks that the cowardly and servile journalists of the comfortable West are one of the most rotten parts of our system and that the good journalists here are, purely and simply, worthy professionals, and that it would be a shame if they were not.

Panoramic and detailed

On the whole, My beloved country The film has an impressive mosaic effect, both panoramic and detailed, capable of giving a global vision of Putin's Russia by focusing on those events that have been silenced or distorted by the official truth (ecological catastrophes caused by human greed and negligence and mass kidnappings by the Russian police...) and on those citizens who are marginalised, repressed, crushed or made to disappear by the system. The list of victims is abundant and varied. They range from homosexuals to members of ancient tribes absorbed and in the process of assimilation by the Russian empire, including mothers of victims of attacks, orphans, hopeless youth, prostitutes, ideological dissidents, human rights activists, those killed in combat who are not allowed to bury their loved ones... Courageous and involved, Kostiuchenko gives voice to all of them, and she does so with vivid, muscular and direct prose, full of sentences that combine information and expressiveness.

Complementing the gaze outward and towards others are the autobiographical texts, in which Kostiuchenko bares himself. They are uniquely memorable. For example, the text in which he tells of his devotion to Anna Politkovskaya (iconic journalist of the New Gazette, murdered in 2006) or the story (exciting romanticism and risky dissidence) in which she explains her lesbianism. Or, also, the text that crudely tells of the complicated relationship with her mother, a Russian nationalist who believes all the official propaganda. It is a text that Camus would have loved. Particularly chilling is the article that recounts the journalists of the New Gazette murdered over the years, whose photos presided over the editorial meeting room: goosebumps. My beloved country It is the book of a brave woman who writes very well and who is very clear about the role of journalism.