Copyright 2006 Carolyn Gage

Published off our backs women’s newsjournal, vol. 37, no. 2/3, 2008,
Washington, DC.

Anna Politkovskaya: A Meditation in Courage

Anna Politkovskaya was murdered last week—executed, actually. Someone followed
her into the elevator of her apartment building in Moscow, shot her four times: twice in
the chest, once in the shoulder, and a final shot to the head. The pistol, its serial
number filed off, was left next to the body, the sign of a contract killing.

Politkovskaya was a Russian journalist whose fearless, behind-the-scenes coverage of

the Chechen war had exposed human-rights abuses in Russia’s southern province of
Chechnya, where tens of thousands have been killed during two Kremlin campaigns.
She documented not only the brutality of the conflict, but also the massive corruption
and moral corrosion that was occurring at all levels and on both sides. She was not
afraid to name names, and, on at least one occasion, to print the official’s phone
number, inviting her readers to register their disgust personally.

In the months before her murder, she had been focusing on the Moscow-backed,
Chechen Prime Minister Ramsan Kadyrov. In fact, just two days before her murder, on
Kadyrov’s thirtieth birthday, she made him the subject of her last radio interview. The
date was significant because it marked the day Kadyrov met the age eligibility
requirement to stand for the post of president. Politkovskaya was well-aware of this fact
and of his aspirations when she chose to accuse him of torture.

Right now I have two photographs on my desk. I am conducting an

investigation about torture today in Kadyrov’s prisons, today and
yesterday. These are people who were abducted by the Kadyrovtsi
[members of Kadyrov’s personal militia] for completely inexplicable
reasons and who died… (Politkovskaya/ RFE)

At this point, the interviewer suggested that perhaps these were individual cases,
representing only a small percentage of abuses. Politkovskaya responded in no
uncertain terms:

I’d like to call attention to the fact that we talk about “individual cases” only
because these people aren’t our loved ones – it’s not my son, my brother,
my husband. The photographs that I’m telling you about, these were
bodies that had been horribly tortured. You can’t reduce this to a small
percentage—it’s an enormous percentage. (Politkovskaya/ RFE)

Politkovskaya was as unequivocal regarding the Chechen prime minister:

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 Kadyrov is the Stalin of our times. This is true for the Chechen people.
He’s a coward armed to the teeth and surrounded by security guards…
Personally I have only one dream for Kadyrov’s birthday: I dream of him
someday sitting in the dock, in a trial that meets the strictest legal
standards, with all of his crimes listed and investigated. (Politkovskaya/
RFE)

Was Politkovskaya’s assassination a response to this broadcast? Certainly she had

been aware of the danger. Kadyrov had publicly vowed to murder her. According to her,
“He actually said during a meeting of his government that Politkovskaya was a
condemned woman.” (Hearst) But journalism is a dangerous profession in Russia.
Twenty-three journalists had been killed there between 1996 and 2005, many in
Chechnya, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. At least twelve have been
murdered in contract-style killings since Putin came to power. (AP)

Her unfinished, final article was published a week after her murder by the biweekly,
independent Novaya Gazeta, her paper for the last seven years. The story included
testimony from a Chechen torture victim and still photos from a video, which, according
to the paper, said showed Chechen security forces beating two young men, apparently
to death.

The mystery is not so much that Politkovskaya was killed, but where she found the
courage to continue working in the face of so much danger. After all, she had been
receiving death threats since 1999, when she first began documenting human rights
abuses in Chechnya. (WiPC) Members of her family had been threatened. A few
months before her murder, unknown assailants tried unsuccessfully to break into a car
her daughter, Vera, was driving. As the obituary in the Guardian comments,

She had already used up several of her nine lives as a reporter. She had
been locked in a hole in the ground by Russian troops and threatened with
rape, kidnapped, and poisoned by the FSB [former KGB] on the first flight
to Rostov after the Beslan school siege in 2004… Her husband left her.
Her son pleaded with her to stop. Her neighbors, cowed by the attentions
of the FSB in an upmarket street in central Moscow, shunned her. (Hearst)

Who was this woman Anna Politkovskaya? Where did she find her courage? Was she
super-human, immune to threats of torture and death?

Certainly, she could have chosen a different life. Born in 1958 in New York, the
daughter of United Nations diplomats from the Ukraine, she had a privileged
background and dual citizenry. After graduating from Moscow University in 1980, she
wrote for the national daily Izvestia before switching to the smaller, independent
presses. She had a husband and two children. Never envisioning herself as a war
correspondent, Politkovskaya stated, “I was interested in reviving Russia’s pre-
revolutionary tradition of writing about our social problems. That led me to writing about

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the seven million refugees in our country. When the war started, it was that that led me
down to Chechnya.” (Hearst)

Her first book, A Dirty War: A Russian Reporter in Chechnya, published in 1999, told
horrifying anecdotes of human rights abuses perpetrated by the Russian military. This
was followed three years later by A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya,
where Politkovskaya continued to put a human face on the horrors of war. Her latest
book, Putin’s War: Life in a Failing Democracy, was published last year. According to
The New York Times, it was “a searing portrait of a country in disarray and of the man
at its helm.”

But professional drive cannot explain the courage of Politkovskaya. There must have
been something more, something deeper.

There are some clues in her account of the Moscow theatre hostage crisis in 2003,
when renegade, Chechen hostage-takers, requested her as a negotiator. They had
seized a theatre and were holding 850 people hostage. Unlike the sparse and
impersonal accounts of her torture in 2000, this report is surprisingly subjective:

Doctor Roshal went with me. I do not remember how we made our way to
the front door. I felt very scared… “I am Politkovskaya, I am
Politkovskaya,” I yell. Slowly I climb the stairs on the right. The doctor says
he knows where to go. The lobby upstairs is very quiet, dark and scary. “I
am Politkovskaya,” I yell again. At last, I see a man… He shows no signs
of aggression toward me, but he is very hostile toward the doctor. I
wonder why. To be on the safe side, I try to defuse a situation that is
getting very tense.

“So, doctor, you are trying to make a name for yourself?” the masked man
keeps mumbling. But the doctor is seventy years old. He has already
achieved so much in his life that he does not have to think of making a
name for himself. His career is quite accomplished.

That is what I try to point out, and a heated exchange of words follows. I
understand that I need to cool it off or else. I have an idea of what “or else”
means.

The masked man steps aside and keeps mumbling, “Why did you have to
point out that you treated Chechen children, doctor? You, doctor, single
out Chechen children. Do you mean to say that we are a species apart,
that we are not human?”

This is a familiar tune. I have to interfere because I cannot stand this any
longer. “All people are the same. They have the same skin, bones and
blood,” I say.

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 Suddenly this simple thought has a peace-making effect. My legs turn to
water and I ask for permission to sit down on the only chair in the middle
of the lobby… I stop shaking for a while. (Politkovskaya)

Ultimately, the only thing that she was able to negotiate was permission to bring some
water and juice to the hostages who had neither eaten nor drunk in two days. Early the
next morning, Russian special forces stormed and gassed the theatre, killing forty-two
of the hostage-takers and 129 hostages.

But what her account demonstrates is that, shaking and barely able to stand, she was
human and terrified. At the same time, she could not ignore the verbal harassment of
her companion on this dangerous and humanitarian mission. In what might seem to
others a minor point under the circumstances, she is scrupulous about setting the
record straight, and in doing so, recovers her spiritual poise. Her focus is on the
suffering of those caught in the middle of the conflict, the hostages—and especially the
children. But her sympathy for the hostages does not keep her from quoting with
empathy her captors’ words, “You never give our children any food during mopping
operations, so let yours suffer, too.” (Politkovskaya)

That was the power and the genius of Potlitkovskaya—her ability to hold onto the larger
context of governments, political parties, military campaigns, while at the same time
focusing on the often-contradictory details of individual experience and accountability. It
was this focus on the immediate suffering, the outrage of the moment, that was the
hallmark of her journalism—and possibly the secret behind her tremendous courage.

References:

Associated Press. “Russian Reporter Killed in Moscow.” Globeandmail.com 7 October

2006
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20061007.wrussian-
journo1007/BNStory/International/home

Hearst, David. “Anna Politkovskaya: Crusading Russian Journalist Famed for her
Exposés of Corruption and the Chechen War.” The Guardian 9 October 2006
http://www.guardian.co.uk/russia/article/0,,1890838,00.html

Maineville, Michael. “The Silencing of Anna Politkovskaya.” Spiegel Online 13 October

2006
http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,442392,00.html

Politkovskaya, Anna. “Inside a Moscow Theater with the Chechen Rebels.” International
Women’s Media Foundation,
http://www.iwmf.org/features/anna

Politkovakay, Anna, interviewed by RFE/RL. “Russia: Anna Politkovskaya’s Last

Interview.” Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty 9 October 2006 <

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 http://www.rferl.org/featuresarticle/2006/10/fc088b08-0cbd-4800-b2ff-
f00f5494fa5e.html>

Smith, Becky. “Independent Journalism Has Been Killed in Russia.” The Guardian 11
October 2006
http://www.guardian.co.uk/russia/article/0,,1896806,00.html

Writers in Prison Committee, International PEN. “International PEN Statement on the

Murder of Russian Writer and Journalist, Anna Politkovskaya.” International
Freedom of Expression Exchange 7 October 2006
http://www.ifex.org/en/content/view/full/78140