well I never … what an absolutely fantastic, startling & profusely enlightening exposé of hard-boiled & stoic investigative reporting at its finest.

riveting & brilliant, this fervently bold bombshell is delivered with a classic Rusky dispensation, terse, frank as fuck, cold fact & point-blank wryness with a habit of delicious deadpan humour.

As enchanting as this ingredient is, the subject matter, events & characters are, often, brutal as fuck, with grim, desperate & tragic content. The marvel of endurance, humanity, resilience & ingenuity across an eclectic host of personalities, professions & geo-locations, is an enormously enriching read & makes for a very powerful piece of work.

It is also a rarity to have such vivid & verite “insider” reportage on modern Russia & elements of plebeian culture & street life. Expats & outsiders can, & have, delivered excellent work, but beyond Ukraine, the naturalist “on the cut” accountancy can be lacking or limited, whilst reporting truthfully on these subjects within Russia will almost definitely result in something very unsavoury eventually happening to the journo illuminating them.

It is this highly authenticated vantage that confirms this work as markedly distinguished, & makes it somewhat of an indispensable writing on the country.

The author is Elena Kostyuchenko, a Russian born Новая газета/Novaya Gazeta reporter (classic independent Russian newspaper that did hardcore investigative journalism inside Russia & still tries it’s best) who now lives & writes in exile. The book is a curious fragmentation of memoir, resurrected investigations that were done whilst living & reporting in Russia, & contemporary scribe & reporting on the region, as well as smaller tranche on Ukraine.

The book’s first major chapter begins with Elena embedded with the denizens of Hovrinskaya Hospital, a gigantic derelict hospital complex situated in Moscow which has since been demolished.

The jostling subcultures of diggers, ghosts, stalkers, guards, “suiciders”, Satanists, & tourists that haunt the structure, which was slowly sinking into the ground & was waterlogged on the lower levels, resembles something from a dystopian sci-fi or post-apoc “urban decay” novel.

teenagers plunging to their deaths down open elevator shafts whilst larking around are some of the extraordinary tales & insights from this menagerie of outcasts & social collateral.

“To give an example of “an excellent punch,” Slam tells the story of how hard he hit his girlfriend from Tver. “Her whole face swole up, the capillaries burst – just from one punch! Man, I haven’t been down to see her in a minute. She’s probably mad.”

Elena also embeds with the police department (it’s insane), prostitutes working makeshift highway pull-overs, & even the infamous Inernat, a kind of asylum, but one that has the inclination to consume & trap people who are mentally fit – & simply in what would be a temporary social crisis.

Small towns & villages, redundant hamlets in the middle-of-nowhere clustering around fatal rail routes, & disadvantaged ethnic communities clinging on to relics of persecuted traditions in remote & polluted tundra communities.

Throughout her travels & travails, including almost getting sexually assaulted, &, – god knows what else – in a forest by a weirdo taxi driver gone awry (“You got really lucky I’m not insane. You’re lucky. Not everyone would be this nice. You better learn that. Journalist.”), she observes human details of her subjects with enormous sensitivity.

The book has an acute travel & adventure aura as well, & conjures parables to great works such as Gao Xinjian’s seminal Soul Mountain.

“For the Taymyr, this is going to be like .. Chernobyl. For the Pyasina River and therefore the people who live around it. That’s just how it is.”

“There is no future. Those who worry about it are hypocrites. Think of the present. The present can change very fast, and suddenly, you can find yourself completely alone.”

a particularly striking chapter has Elena travel into isolated Russia to investigate industrial mass contamination by the conglomerate behemoth Nornickel. They are wilfully billowing tremendous volumes of poisonous pollution into the local river & water supply. The Russian state, & all it’s minions, are fiercely protecting the polluters operations & covering up for them.

It’s an enthralling & harrowing chapter, & it is brave investigative journalism at its most electric.

“They killed the lake, they killed the river, and now their flying around looking for you, those fuckers. Whatever you do, get those samples, get them to take them out of here. And you – write, write about how things are around here, what’s going on here right now, write about all of this.”

a critically commendable work of art & a unique introspection on this tragic, yet incredible, country.

“Yes, I was born here. You don’t get much choice about where to work. There’s nepotism, and really, it’s really bad, it’s actually one of our biggest problems, at the complex and everywhere else. A lot of the time, people get jobs that they’re simply not qualified for. They buy their diplomas, then somebody gives them a desk to sit at. The fact that they are responsible for other people’s lives doesn’t occur to them. They’re just working and doing their job. Then they go up the ladder. As a result our leadership is completely unqualified. It gets ridiculous: people don’t understand the processes, they don’t know how the equipment works.”

Elena Kostyuchenko, 2023, Vintage, 350-pages.