“I decided to collect the voices of Russians and Ukrainians on the ground, to document everything, so that tomorrow my children can know history as it was, not narrated by propaganda. And so that if there are trials in the future, these testimonies can serve truth and justice.” We met Katerina Gordeeva on a Saturday morning while she was in Italy, a country where she would like to live because, she explained, she loves sunshine and good food. The winner of the 2024 Anna Politkovkskaya prize, she is one of Russia's most influential independent journalists. It is an authority she earned in the field, first as a reporter for Russian national TV covering the wars in Chechnya, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and now as a documentary filmmaker. She was born in 1977 in Rostov-on-Don (in the south, near the Ukrainian border), she is Catholic but comes from a Jewish family. Half of her family lives in Ukraine, the other half in Russia.

“I always had memories of the buses and minibuses that connect Rostov tp Doneck, Lugansk, Mariupol' and Melitopol'. The peculiarities of vocabulary and pronunciation in Rostov are very similar to those who live in eastern Ukraine. Over many years of proximity we have mixed: the inhabitants of Cossack villages and farmsteads, of neighboring villages have intermarried with each other, combined their agricultural productions, and have had children. Today half of my family lives in Kiev, the city Moscow declared war on.” She and her husband, however, moved to Riga, Latvia, 10 years ago. “In 2014, after the Russian annexation of Crimea, I realized that the government propaganda was too strong. I could not fight it, I could not continue to work for them, and I could not save my children from that lie. So we left the Russian Federation. It was a painful choice, because we left behind family and so many cherished things. Like the foundation that helps cancer children that I had been following for years.”

However, she never stopped working for the Russian people and for Russian speakers. “Even though my country seems to have gone crazy, as if it is experiencing a collective amnesia and people seem to be just silent in the face of war, I want them to still be able to hear a voice in Russian trying to tell them what is actually happening.” This is why she continues to do interviews and reports on her Youtube channel, and also why she recently published Oltre la soglia del dolore [Beyond the Threshold of Pain], a collection of twenty-four Ukrainian and Russian stories recounting the tragedy of war. From both sides, without censorship. As Dmitry Muratov, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and editor-in-chief of Novaja Gazeta, wrote in the preface, “Katerina Gordeeva has become a one-person alternative to a colossal propaganda machine.”

During her reporting, Katerina has met so many people, all physically or mentally scarred by the ongoing conflict. Like Danila, who was wounded in the leg, or Rita, who married a Korean and decided that she would never return to Ukraine and it would matter little whether the Russians took her or she remained in Ukrainian hands. “She had studied as a pediatric ENT. In the midst of the confusion of war she found herself in the blood, stitching up limbs torn off by bomb blasts, and wondering if this is what she studied for, if this is what she has to live for.” And then there are those who are convinced that Russia was right to arrive in the Donbass ten years ago, others who have no more tears (“crying is a luxury no one wants to indulge in”), mothers who would just like to disappear after the news of their sons' deaths at the front, young widows. “I shot many videos of these interviews, but the voices of those people haunted me and I chose to put them on paper as well. While there is little room for independent journalism in Russia today, there are still people.”

Like little Katja. “I was talking to her mother, a seamstress whose husband, a bricklayer, was at the front. We were talking about the war, and the woman was speaking about the dead, the amputees, the fear of the future. I do not know how long we were there. Suddenly that little girl, who had just been watching Peppa Pig, began throwing little punches at her mother begging her to stop talking about these things. ‘What should we talk about, Katja?’, I asked her with the obscene hope of the adult who thinks that children, in their purity, know everything and better, straight from God. ‘About the good,’ she replied. ‘The good?’ ‘Yes.’ Then she tightened her shoulders and asked her mother to take her in her arms and let her go to sleep.” Katerina dwelt on this search for goodness, also in our interview. “I deeply love Russia and when I see demonstrations against my country I cry. I cry because we are on the wrong side of history and I know I will never do enough to stop it. Hate is such an easy feeling, though. But joy… is like childbirth. I have four children, I know what the pain of childbirth is like. But the joy that comes afterwards is something that cannot be measured. I am talking about Christian joy, the kind that St. Paul talks about, the kind that comes from the certainty that evil will not have the last word. Our Christian faith tells us this, I would like to live for this and for my children to live for this.”

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Recently, she explained, the family watched “The Zone of Interest.” The film recounts the story of a Nazi commander and his family. They live next to the Auschwitz concentration camp and, as the crematoria burn Jews, they spend a seemingly perfect existence, deliberately blind to the horror unfolding before them. “We chose not to live in the comfort zone. I was shocked when I realized that my fellow citizens were willing to look the other way, to bury their heads under the ground, in order to preserve a supposed normality. Not all of them, of course, because I cannot keep silent, for example, about the extraordinary human action of families who bent over backwards to accommodate Ukrainian refugees in their homes, in Rostov or in temporary reception centers.” She does not want to make predictions for the future or about the course of the war. “They would be a lie; no one knows what will happen.” I then asked her what is there, beyond the threshold of pain. “Beyond the threshold of pain is life. And, as a Ukrainian refugee told me, perhaps a higher level of mercy.”