ANNA POLITKOVSKAYA, SYMBOL OF FREE JOURNALISM

Anna Politkovskaya

Today, The Grandma is relaxing at home. She has decided to do nothing except to read and rest. She has been very interested in reread the works of one of the most important and critic journalists of the last decades, Anna Stepanovna Politkovskaya, the Russian journalist, writer, and human rights activist who reported on political events in Russia.

Anna Politkovskaya was born on a day like today in 1958 and today she would celebrate her62nd birthday but she was murdered in 2006. A critic and honest voice, an independent journalist she has become a constant disturb for the political power and powerful deep and dark forces, especially since she reported on the Second Chechen War.

The Grandma, who admires of Anna Politkovskaya and her works, thinks that the best way to pay homage to her is talking about her life, her career, her struggle against corrupt policy and the most important, remembering her and her way of understanding free journalism.

Anna Stepanovna Politkovskaya, in Russian  Анна Степановна Политковская (30 August 1958-7 October 2006) was a Russian journalist, writer, and human rights activist who reported on political events in Russia, in particular, the Second Chechen War (1999–2005).

It was her reporting from Chechnya that made Politkovskaya's national and international reputation. For seven years she refused to give up reporting on the war despite numerous acts of intimidation and violence.

Politkovskaya was arrested by Russian military forces in Chechnya and subjected to a mock execution.

She was poisoned while flying from Moscow via Rostov-on-Don to help resolve the 2004 Beslan school hostage crisis, and had to turn back, requiring careful medical treatment in Moscow to restore her health.

More information: Radio Free Europe-Radio Liberty

Her post-1999 articles about conditions in Chechnya were turned into books several times; Russian readers' main access to her investigations and publications was through Novaya Gazeta, a Russian newspaper known for its often-critical investigative coverage of Russian political and social affairs.

From 2000 onwards, she received numerous international awards for her work. In 2004, she published Vladimir Putin's Russia, a personal account of Russia for a Western readership.

On 7 October 2006, she was murdered in the elevator of her block of flats, an assassination that attracted international attention.

In June 2014, five men were sentenced to prison for the murder, but it is still unclear who ordered or paid for the contract killing. 

A Dirty War by Anna Politkovskaya

Politkovskaya was born Anna Mazepa in New York City in 1958, the daughter of Stepan F. Mazepa from Kostobobriv, Ukraine. Some sources say that her birth name was actually Hanna Mazeppa. Other sources state that she was born in Chernihiv region of Ukraine. Her parents, Soviet diplomats at the United Nations, were Ukrainian.

Politkovskaya spent most of her childhood in Moscow; she graduated from Moscow State University's school of journalism in 1980. While there, she defended a thesis about the poetry of Marina Tsvetaeva and married fellow student Alexander Politkovsky. They had two children, Vera and Ilya.

At first Alexander was better known, joining TV journalist Vladislav Listyev as one of the hosts on the late-night TV programme Vzglyad. Apart from her childhood years, Politkovskaya spent no more than a few weeks outside Russia at any one time, even when her life came under threat. She was a U.S. citizen and had a U.S. passport, although she never relinquished her Russian citizenship.

Politkovskaya worked for Izvestia from 1982 to 1993 as a reporter and editor of the emergencies and accidents section. From 1994 to 1999, she worked as the assistant chief editor of Obshchaya Gazeta, headed by Yegor Yakovlev, where she wrote frequently about social problems, particularly the plight of refugees.

From June 1999 to 2006, she wrote columns for the biweekly Novaya Gazeta, a newspaper with strong investigative reporting that was critical of the new post-Soviet regime from the outset. She published several award-winning books about Chechnya, life in Russia, and Russia under Vladimir Putin, including Putin's Russia.

Politkovskaya won a number of awards for her work. She used each of these occasions to urge greater concern and responsibility by Western governments that, after the 11 September attacks on the United States, welcomed Putin's contribution to their War on Terror. She talked to officials, the military and the police and also frequently visited hospitals and refugee camps in Chechnya and in neighbouring Ingushetia to interview those injured and uprooted by the renewed fighting. 

More information: English Pen

In numerous articles critical of the war in Chechnya and the pro-Russian regime there, Politkovskaya described alleged abuses committed by Russian military forces, Chechen rebels, and the Russian-backed administration led by Akhmad Kadyrov and his son Ramzan Kadyrov. She also chronicled human rights abuses and policy failures elsewhere in the North Caucasus.

In one characteristic instance in 1999, she not only wrote about the plight of an ethnically-mixed old peoples' home under bombardment in Grozny, but helped to secure the safe evacuation of its elderly inhabitants with the aid of her newspaper and public support.

Her articles, many of which form the basis of A Dirty War (2001) and A Small Corner of Hell (2003), depict a conflict that brutalised both Chechen fighters and conscript soldiers in the federal army, and created hell for the civilians caught between them. 

Anna Politkovskaya

As Politkovskaya reported, the order supposedly restored under the Kadyrovs became a regime of endemic torture, abduction, and murder, by either the new Chechen authorities or the various federal forces based in Chechnya.

One of her last investigations was into the alleged mass poisoning of Chechen schoolchildren by a strong and unknown chemical substance which incapacitated them for many months.

After Politkovskaya became widely known in the West, she was commissioned to write Vladimir Putin's Russia, later subtitled Life in a Failing Democracy, a broader account of her views and experiences after former KGB lieutenant colonel Vladimir Putin became Boris Yeltsin's Prime Minister, and then succeeded him as President of Russia.

In May 2007, Random House posthumously published Politkovskaya's A Russian Diary, containing extracts from her notebook and other writings. Subtitled A Journalist's Final Account of Life, Corruption, and Death in Putin's Russia, the book gives her account of the period from December 2003 to August 2005, including what she described as the death of Russian parliamentary democracy, the Beslan school hostage crisis, and the winter and summer of discontent from January to August 2005. Because she was murdered while translation was being completed, final editing had to go ahead without her help, wrote translator Arch Tait in a note to the book.

Who killed Anna and who lay beyond her killer remains unknown, wrote Jon Snow, the main news anchor for the United Kingdom's Channel 4 in his foreword to the book's UK edition. Her murder robbed too many of us of absolutely vital sources of information and contact, he concluded, Yet it may, ultimately, be seen to have at least helped prepare the way for the unmasking of the dark forces at the heart of Russia's current being. I must confess that I finished reading A Russian Diary feeling that it should be taken up and dropped from the air in vast quantities throughout the length and breadth of Mother Russia, for all her people to read." 

More information: The Guardian

Politkovskaya was closely involved in attempts to negotiate the release of hostages in the Moscow theatre hostage crisis of 2002. When the Beslan school hostage crisis erupted in the North Caucasus in early September 2004, Politkovskaya attempted to fly there to act as a mediator, but was taken off the plane, acutely ill due to an attempted poisoning, in Rostov-on-Don.

In Moscow, Politkovskaya was not invited to press conferences or gatherings that Kremlin officials might attend, in case the organisers were suspected of harbouring sympathies toward her. Despite this, many top officials allegedly talked to her when she was writing articles or conducting investigations. According to one of her articles, they did talk to her, but only when they weren't likely to be observed: outside in crowds, or in houses that they approached by different routes, like spies. She also claimed that the Kremlin tried to block her access to information and discredit her.

After Politkovskaya's murder, Vyacheslav Izmailov, her colleague at Novaya Gazeta -a military man who had helped negotiate the release of dozens of hostages in Chechnya before 1999- said that he knew of at least nine previous occasions when Politkovskaya had faced death, commenting Frontline soldiers do not usually go into battle so often and survive.

Anna Politkovskaya

Politkovskaya herself did not deny being afraid, but felt responsible and concerned for her informants. She often received death threats as a result of her work, including being threatened with rape and experiencing a mock execution after being arrested by the military in Chechnya.

Upon leaving the camp, Politkovskaya was detained, interrogated, beaten, and humiliated by Russian troops: the young officers tortured me, skillfully hitting my sore spots. They looked through my children's pictures, making a point of saying what they would like to do to the kids. This went on for about three hours. She was subjected to a mock execution using a BM-21 Grad multiple-launch rocket system, then poisoned with a cup of tea that made her vomit. Her tape records were confiscated.

After the mock execution, the Russian lieutenant colonel said to her: Here's the banya. Take off your clothes. Seeing that his words had no effect, he got very angry: A real lieutenant colonel is courting you, and you say no, you militant bitch.

In 2006, the European Court of Human Rights found the Russian Federation responsible for the forced disappearance of a suspected Ingush militant, Khadzhi-Murat Yandiyev. Colonel-General Alexander Baranov, the commander of the Russian Caucasus deployment mentioned by Politkovskaya's camp guide as the one who ordered captured militants to be kept in the pits, was filmed as he ordered Yandiyev to be executed.

While flying south in September 2004 to help negotiate with those who had taken over a thousand hostages in a school in Beslan (North Ossetia), Politkovskaya fell violently ill and lost consciousness after drinking tea given to her by an Aeroflot flight attendant. She had reportedly been poisoned, with some accusing the former Soviet secret police poison facility.

More information: CNN

Politkovskaya was found dead in the lift, in her block of flats in central Moscow on 7 October 2006. She had been shot twice in the chest, once in the shoulder, and once in the head at point-blank range.

The assassination had happened on Vladimir Putin's birthday, and two days after Ramzan Kadyrov's 30th birthday celebrations, raising suspicions that one or both were served up by the contract hit. There was widespread international reaction to the assassination.

The funeral was held on 10 October 2006 at the Troyekurovskoye Cemetery in the outskirts of Moscow. Before Politkovskaya was buried, more than one thousand mourners filed past her coffin to pay their last respects.

Dozens of Politkovskaya's colleagues, public figures, and admirers of her work gathered at the cemetery. No high-ranking Russian officials could be seen at the ceremony. Politkovskaya was buried near her father, who had died shortly before her.

In May 2007, a large posthumous collection of Anna's articles, entitled With Good Reason, was published by Novaya Gazeta and launched at the Gorbachev Foundation in Moscow. The event came soon after the birth of Anna's namesake grandchild: Vera's daughter was named Anna in honour of her grandmother.

A few months later, 10 men were detained on suspicion of various degrees of involvement in Politkovskaya's murder. Four of them were brought before the Moscow District Military Court in October 2008.

More information: The Moscow Times

People sometimes pay with their lives

for saying aloud what they think.

In fact, one can even get killed for giving me information.

I am not the only one in danger.

I have examples that prove it.

Anna Politkovskaya