Elena Kostyuchenko is a Russian journalist. As an impoverished teenager helping to support a single mother in the town of Yaroslav, Elena read one of Anna Politkovskaia’s articles about Chechnya in Novaia Gazeta; she decided she would grow up to be that kind of a journalist. She moved to Moscow on her own at the age of 15, and Novaia Gazeta took her on as an intern two years later. When Politkovskaia was killed in 2006, Elena had just turned nineteen. She kept reporting, although the newspaper had barely any money to pay its reporters. She lived on almost nothing; she was assaulted and arrested various times. Several of her colleagues were killed, and she’s always known she could be next.
