The unique portrait of a country and a woman who refuses to be silenced. Jelena Kostjutschenko reported for many years on political repression in her homeland until her newspaper was shut down and she was forced into exile. Her book paints a vivid picture of Russia from the perspective of those who are brutally oppressed – village girls recruited for sex work, queer individuals in the provinces, patients and doctors in a Ukrainian maternity ward, or journalists like herself. In her gripping reports and personal essays, she takes a ruthless look behind Putin's propaganda and reveals a world that remains hidden from readers in Western Europe: the lived reality of the marginalized and excluded.

In March 2022, Jelena Kostjutschenko crossed the border into Ukraine as a reporter for Russia's last independent newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, to report on the war. Her mission: to ensure that Russians learned about the atrocities committed by Putin in their name. From her numerous reports over the past fifteen years, Jelena Kostjutschenko has selected thirteen for this book. She intertwines them with autobiographical essays written since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, creating a kaleidoscopic narrative about her homeland, which has become an increasingly authoritarian, homophobic state.

Kostjutschenko reports on the annexation of Crimea, the war in Donbass, and the besieged Ukrainian city of Mykolajiw. She tells the story of a queer couple living in the Russian hinterland, visits homeless children who have made a home in the ruins of an abandoned hospital in Moscow, accompanies a 24-hour shift at a Moscow police station, and gains access to a closed facility for the mentally ill that is shielded from the public. She also shares very personal stories.