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3203 SE Woodstock Blvd, Portland, OR 97202, USA

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Award-winning journalist Elena Kostyuchenko will speak about everyday life in pre-war Russia and how Russia found itself on its current catastrophic path. Why is Moscow not Russia? How do traditional values turn into traditional violence? Why does the trauma of helplessness unite Russians? How has Stalin’s system of concentration camps persisted to our days? How does the Russian state edit human memory? 

Elena Kostyuchenko is Russia’s leading investigative and war reporter. Kostyuchenko was born in Yaroslavl, Russia in 1987. She began working as a journalist when she was fourteen and spent seventeen years reporting for Novaya Gazeta, Russia’s last major independent newspaper, until it was shut down in the spring of 2022 in response to her reporting from Ukraine. Kostyuchenko is the author of two books published in Russian, Unwanted on Probation and We Have to Live Here, and is the recipient of the European Press Prize, the Gerd Bucerius Award, and the Paul Klebnikov Prize. Her new book, I Love Russia: Reporting from a Lost Country  (Penguin Press, 2023), has been tagged “essential read” by The New Yorker and  named among the best books of the year by Time magazine and The New Yorker. Since 2022, Kostyuchenko has been living in Berlin.

“Elena Kostyuchenko is an important guide to the twenty-first century. She exemplifies all the reportorial virtues, from physical courage through careful prose. The Russia she recounts here is the Russia we need to understand.” —Timothy Snyder.

The event is sponsored by the Russian department.  It is free and open to the public.

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