Take My Grief Away

Someday people will learn history by reading Katerina Gordeeva’s books. Not the history of war, but rather the history of people at war. How fragile a human being is, how shamefully and frighteningly fragile. Read this book. Don’t put it off until you’ll supposedly be strong enough and ready for the reading. If you put it off, you’ll find yourself defenseless in the face of evil. * Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and author of Chernobyl Prayer *
Since the onset of the war in Ukraine, Katerina Gordeeva has become a one-person alternative to a huge government propaganda machine [in Russia]. The storylines and people collected in this book are staggering. Tragedies, the journey of the Ukrainian people from incomprehension to fury, via rage… A wound that is now permanent. How can one live with that? And what about hope? Is hope now gone forever? And what if you cannot change anything? Rainer Werner Fassbinder once noted that even if you can’t change anything, that doesn’t remove your duty to document everything. What Gordeeva documents changes the world, too. You’re now about to experience that for yourself. * Dmitry Muratov, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize *

Katerina Gordeeva is an award-winning Russian independent journalist. Until 2012, she worked as a TV reporter for the federal television channel NTV. During her time at NTV, she reported from the frontlines of Chechnya, Afghanistan, and Iraq as a war correspondent. She later resigned from the channel due to a disagreement with the channel’s programming agenda. Katerina left Moscow out of protest in 2014, after Russia’s annexation of Crimea and seizure of part of Eastern Ukraine.

In 2020, she created her own YouTube channel, which today has more than 1.3 million subscribers. To make her documentary film Humans At War, Katerina Gordeeva travelled to dozens of refugee shelters in both Europe and Russia. She collected first-person accounts by interviewing people with opposing views about their experiences and how the war had drastically changed their lives. This three-hour testimonial film has been viewed by more than 2.5 million people.

In the summer of 2022, Gordeeva was named as one of the top 10 most influential independent journalists in Russia. She is a five-time winner of the Redcollegia Award, an independent prize that recognizes the work of journalists doing ground-breaking work despite government pressure. Gordeeva was awarded the Anna Politkovskaya International Journalism Prize in August 2022, an award that honors her commitment to independent journalism.

In September 2022, the Russian government named Gordeeva a ‘foreign agent’, a title that is often compared to the term ‘enemy of people’, which was used in the Soviet Union during the Stalin era.

Katerina’s daily work continues to demonstrate her tremendous devotion to unbiased journalism during these very challenging times.

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