Russia: A Country Without a Conscience?

What three writers taught me about Russia, Chechnya, and the cost of telling the truth

I’ve read three books on contemporary Russia over the past couple of months. Two are recently published collections of articles by Russian journalists: I Love Russia by Elena Kostyuchenko and The Essential Anna Politkovskaya; the other is a 2003 journalistic travelogue, Black Earth, by American author Andrew Meier. It has been fascinating to read the three authors’ coverage of Chechnya. While they all obviously cover some of the same ground, the three authors’ styles are very different, and each adds details that help to enhance the reader’s understanding of the conflicts.

I’ll review each book in the order in which I read them, then sum up at the end.

Black Earth: Russia After the Fall, Andrew Meier, Harper Perennial, 2003

“Tell me,” Viktor said, fixing his eyes on mine. “Because I can’t understand it. But you must know. Can a country survive without a conscience?”

Viktor is the father of Andrew Sazykin, a young soldier, aged just twenty, who was killed on what the Russians refer to as the Sixth of August, the day that Chechen rebels took back Grozny from the Russians in 1996. The prologue opens with the story of the parents’ journey through the courts, which the author had been following for over five years.

Meier lived in Russia throughout the 1990s and served as a staff correspondent for Time in Moscow for six years. His book is based on his reporting throughout those years and collates stories from different regions of the country as he travels its length and breadth.

He begins in Moscow, where he captures the chaos and hedonism of the 90s perfectly. I learned that hailing a car is known as ‘voting’, and that the Mercedes 600 series were known as shestsoty (from the Russian for six hundred). We go from there to Chechnya in 2000, during the second war. It was unusual for a Western journalist to be granted access to the region. The story of the massacre at Aldi was very moving.

My favourite part of the book was Meier’s trip up the Yenisei River on a cruise ship to Dudinka and thence to Norilsk, a closed mining city above the Arctic Circle. Foreigners are allowed in only with permission from the FSB. The boat trip itself was interesting to read about because of the characters Meier had conversations with, including fellow American traveller Jim Conboy, a 73-year-old from Massachusetts. Norilsk itself, though — what a place! It inspired me to look up video footage and photos to get a better feel for the place and learn more about its history. Remarkable.

Meier then follows in Chekhov’s footsteps to Sakhalin, an island off the east coast of Russia.

I arrived on Sakhalin thinking Russia would be like Germany or Japan after the war. But it turned out to be more like Germany or Japan during the war.

Life on the island sounds challenging, though not as challenging as in Norilsk. There’s a big alcohol problem on Sakhalin, though probably not any worse than in remote towns and villages in Siberia.

From Sakhalin we’re back to St Petersburg, where Meier gets a sit-down with ‘alleged’ Mafia boss Kumarin, who claims that he’s a legit St Petersburg businessman. It’s an interesting conversation.

We also learn of Galina Starovoitova’s murder in 1998. She was a State Duma Deputy and human rights campaigner in Petersburg. Kumarin, who changed his name to Barsukov, was later named in court as the man who ordered the killing, but this was never proven. He did, however, receive a jail sentence in 2009 for racketeering.

Meier then takes us full circle, returning to Moscow, where he interviews Lieutenant Colonel Viktor Kabastky, commander of the Petersburg unit of the OMON, the Russian riot police. The OMON had been posted to Chechnya and were ‘alleged’ participants in the Aldi massacre. Again, it’s an insightful conversation.

The book is well written and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I’d be very interested in reading a follow-up from this author on recent events in Russia. My copy of the book closes with an interview with Meier, conducted by Travis Elborough in 2004, one year after the book’s initial publication, as well as Meier’s comments on the Beslan siege of September 2004.

Thanks to Brock Covington for putting this excellent book on my radar.

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The Essential Anna Politkovskaya, Vintage Classics, 2026

First of all, thank you to Henry Eliot for bringing this book to my attention in a weekly post. The book was published to mark twenty years since Politkovskaya’s murder on 7 October 2006.

If you’ve been following my Substack for any length of time, you’ll know that Russia has my heart. Literature, poetry, music, history, politics. I’ve read a few biographies of Putin and I think all of them mentioned Anna Politkovskaya’s murder in the stairwell of her apartment block as she headed home with bags of groceries. The date is significant: 7 October is Putin’s birthday. Some reporters claim that she was killed by the Chechens as a birthday present for Putin. She was 48 years old.

Politkovskaya was an investigative journalist for the newspaper Novaya Gazeta. She wrote articles on human rights violations, state corruption and both Chechen wars. She’d become a thorn in the side of the Putin regime, doing what good reporters are supposed to do: writing the truth and holding politicians and state officials to account.

The book contains a series of Anna’s articles, translated into English by John Crowfoot and Arch Tait. Articles have been selected from three of Politkovskaya’s books, A Dirty War (2001), Putin’s Russia (Harvill Press, 2004) and Nothing But the Truth (Vintage, 2011), with an afterword by Svetlana Alexievich.

Dear Anna,

I want to tell you about our lives without you. Where are we now? At what point in history? One thing is clear: not where we ever wanted to be. In the more than ten years you have not been with us, we could have already been living in another country, turned from the Gulag Empire into a normal European state, as many of our neighbours have done. But, as Stolypin famously put it, ‘In Russia, every ten years everything changes, and nothing changes in 200 years.’ I am sick and tired of this quote, but it contains so much despair that is so familiar to us that I want to repeat it.

— Svetlana Alexievich

This was the first time that I had read any of Politkovskaya’s reporting, and I was riveted from start to finish. There are many articles about Chechnya. Politkovskaya writes very much from a humanitarian point of view. For example, in one of the first articles in the book, she writes about her efforts to have residents of an old people’s home in Grozny moved to safety. Her newspaper is raising funds to assist, but she faces obstacle after obstacle.

That line of Putin’s about wiping out the bandits after they’re cornered ‘in the shithouse’ was one of his populist moments. He was appointed Prime Minister in 1999 and, during a press briefing, used prison slang to gain popular support. It worked.²

Other articles include reporting on Beslan, where a siege of a school began on 1 September 2004 in the North Caucasus by a multi-national gang of thugs who were demanding an end to the war. Almost 1,500 people were held hostage: children, parents and teachers. 334 people were killed, including 186 children.

Attempts were made to prevent Politkovskaya from boarding the plane in Moscow, but the captain of another plane recognised her and personally welcomed her on board. She was poisoned on the plane and taken to hospital immediately upon landing at Rostov-on-Don. She didn’t make it to Beslan.

The siege was grossly mishandled, resulting in many more deaths. Officials were more concerned with keeping their jobs than rescuing hostages:

The deaths of hostages could always be blamed on the terrorists, whereas falling foul of Putin would be political suicide […] Let us state unambiguously that all the Russian government representatives in Beslan at that time were more concerned to work out what Putin wanted than to work out a way of resolving the monstrous situation in the school.³

In another chapter, Politkovskaya reports on the theatre siege at a performance of Nord-Ost at the Dubrovka Theatre in Moscow in 2002. Chechens seized the theatre and held 952 hostages. Politkovskaya was permitted to enter and negotiate with the leader of the siege.

Politkovskaya’s reporting ultimately got her killed. If you have not read any of the other collections of translations listed above, this one should definitely be on your list.

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I Love Russia: Reporting from a Lost Country, Elena Kostyuchenko, The Bodley Head, 2023

Elena Kostyuchenko is a Russian journalist who, like her idol Anna Politkovskaya, worked for Novaya Gazeta. The book is a series of Kostyuchenko’s articles, originally published in Novaya Gazeta and translated by Bela Shayevich and Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse.

Kostyuchenko was born in 1987 and was just four when the USSR collapsed. She begins by writing of her childhood from that age, about how her mama would tell her that things had been better before, when she’d had a well-paid job as a chemist. Now she worked as a cleaner and washed nappies at pre-school.

Obviously her background is very different to Politkovskaya’s and that comes across in her articles. Her writing style feels younger, less journalistic and more bloggy. I was utterly spellbound by her article about the HZB, a derelict hospital where the Moscow kids hang out. It was full of slang that inspired me, as a Russian speaker, to buy the book in the original language just so I could read the Russian slang for myself. It was an excellent learning experience!

The generational rift between mother and daughter features throughout the text. It’s an interesting glimpse into what must still be going on in Russia: between those who lived before and those born after the Soviet Union's collapse. For example, Kostyuchenko shares a dialogue she had with her mother about Ukraine. The first line is her mother’s:

“Because your newspaper is anti-Russian. That must be why.”
“Do you really think that I’m anti-Russian?”
“They’ll start shouting that everybody has to jump up and down, and call anybody who doesn’t a moskal!* So people jump up and down!”
“So what? It’s cold there. They’re just keeping warm.”
“So what?! Doesn’t that hurt your feelings?”
“I don’t care what the people are shouting in Kyiv.”
“See? You don’t care. To you, it’s a foreign country. But I still remember when Kyiv was ours.”

*Moskal is a Ukrainian pejorative originally referring to Russian soldiers or officials and now to all Russians.⁴

In Rust, Kostyuchenko travels to the closed mining city of Norilsk above the Arctic Circle, where she reports on a cover-up of a chemical spill. She’s there in summer, when the sun doesn’t set for three months. It’s excellent investigative journalism and tied in nicely with the Norilsk chapter in Andrew Meier’s Black Earth.

In The Last Helicopters, Kostyuchenko writes about the Nganasan people at Ust-Avam in the Krasnoyarsk Krai. She reports that only around 700 remain and that they are the northernmost people on the continent. Alcoholism and suicide are big problems for the population.

In the final chapter, Novaya and I (We Were a Cult), she writes about the Putin regime’s revoking Novaya Gazeta’s publishing licence in 2022. Kostyuchenko had achieved her life’s goal of being made a staff writer in 2006.

The author fled to Germany, where she survived a suspected poisoning in 2022, and now lives in exile in the USA. She is an activist for gay rights, for which she was beaten and hospitalised at a Pride parade in Moscow in 2011.

Kostyuchenko was awarded the 2024 Pushkin House Book Prize and made the list of best books of the year 2023 by The New Yorker and Time.

The last chapter ends with these words, which I can’t help but choke up while reading:

The motto for Novaya Gazeta was “Same Letters, New Words.”
How much does the word weigh?
(sometimes, an entire living life)
Can the word stand up to armed tyranny?
(no)
Can the word stop a war?
(no)
Can the word save a country?
(no)
Can the word save the person who says it?
It saved me.
But just me.⁵

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Which book should I read?

Reading these three books in such a relatively short space of time, what struck me was how much the Chechnya story is enhanced by reading three authors’ reporting side by side. Meier goes in as a Westerner, which perhaps allowed him to ask questions that insiders couldn’t. Politkovskaya did ask the questions and was killed for it. She passed the baton to Kostyuchenko, of a younger generation, who has been beaten, allegedly poisoned, and forced to flee her country. Hers is the view of a post-Soviet journalist who has witnessed the slow shutdown of Russia's free press, which we’re still witnessing today. Reading the three books together feels like a long conversation over twenty years. In Meier’s prologue, a grieving father asks, ‘Can a country survive without a conscience?’ Politkovskaya was that conscience; Kostyuchenko inherited it and carried it into exile—Same letters, new words. She now writes for Meduza, a Riga-based independent outlet that publishes in Russian and English.

If I were going to read only one book, it would be Kostyuchenko’s, but read all three if you can. They’re all worthy of your time and attention.

1. I am a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.

2. «Если поймаем в туалете, замочим в сортире» (Yesli poimayem v tualete, zamochim v sortire)

Said at a press conference in Astana on 24 September 1999, the full statement was: “I am tired of answering these questions. Russian aircraft are only attacking terrorist strongholds. We will pursue them everywhere. Excuse my saying so, if we catch them in the toilet, we’ll whack them in the outhouse.” Academia.edu

3. Anna Politkovskaya, The Essential Anna Politkovskaya, ed. and trans. John Crowfoot and Arch Tait, (London: Vintage Classics, 2009), 210.

4. Elena Kostyuchenko, I Love Russia, (London: The Bodley Head, 2023), 171.

5. I Love Russia, 349–350