Workers' Liberty

By Stan Crooke

“Because of Which Article?” reads one of the headlines in the current issue of the Russian bi-weekly newspaper Novaya Gazeta.

The newspaper’s readership do not need to read the accompanying article to understand the meaning of the question: Because of which pieces of journalism was Novaya Gazeta journalist Anna Politkovskaya murdered in Moscow on 7 October?

It was Politkovsyaka’s coverage of the second Chechen war, dating from 1999, which made her Russia’s most prominent critical journalist and also, for the same reason, an internationally known figure.

Politkovskaya’s articles about Chechnya, based on repeated visits to the war-torn republic, detailed the daily brutality of the Russian occupying forces and the consequent disintegration of Chechen society.

Her articles also criticised the Chechen rebel forces and, in particular, the foreign “jihadi” fighters who turned up in Chechnya, as well as dealing with the impact of the war on Russian society itself.

Of course she made enemies along the way. Her opponents finally caught up with her when Polikovskaya was shot dead in the lift in her Moscow apartment block. The killer left a gun and four bullets at the scene, as a sign that it had been a contract killing.

Politkovskaya came from the old Soviet elite. The daughter of a Ukrainian diplomat, she was born in New York in 1958 and was brought up in the United States. In 1980 she graduated in journalism at Moscow University and began working for Izvestia.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the consequent collapse of state control of all media, Politkovskaya successively worked for Megapolis Express, Obshchaya Gazeta and, from 1999 onwards, Novaya Gazeta. She also wrote articles for the Guardian and the Observer in the UK.

Selections of her articles were published in three books: A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya (2000), A Dirty War: A Russian Reporter in Chechnya (2001), and Putin’s Russia (2004).

In one sense, Politkovskaya was not an investigative journalist. She did not uncover carefully concealed state secrets. The brutality of the Chechen war was a daily, public and visible reality.

What Politkovskaya did was to report on a war which most other Russian journalists were too frightened to write about — either out of fear for their careers, or out of fear for their lives. She exposed something that was there for all to see, but which other journalists chose to shut their eyes to.

Her articles about the war in Chechnya earned her the hatred of the authorities in Russia and the hatred of the pro-Moscow ‘authorities’ in Chechnya. Ramsan Kadyrov (the pro-Moscow Chechen Prime Minister, and son of a murdered Chechen president), in particular, was reported to have repeatedly vowed that he would have Politkovskaya killed.

(In the last months of her life Politkovskaya’s main focus had been on the activities of Kadyrov and his private army in Chechnya. She claimed to have material directly linking him with kidnappings, torture and murders. Some of the material was due to be published in Novaya Gazeta last Monday. Instead, the paper carried her obituary.)

Politkovskaya had repeatedly come close to death before her murder last Saturday. Every visit she made to Chechnya placed her life at risk. On one occasion she was arrested by Russian troops, held in a pit for three days, and then subjected to a mock execution.

In 2001 she temporarily fled Russia for Vienna, in order to escape the murder plans of a Russian army officer who had served in Chechnya. In 2004, at the time of the Beslan school siege, she was apparently poisoned and ended up in intensive care. A few months before her murder her daughter was attacked, in a case of mistaken identity, whilst driving her mother’s car.

Putin did not issue a statement condemning the murder. This is the same Putin, as one contributor to the Novaya Gazeta electronic book of condolences pointed out, who is the first off the mark to condemn the slaying of a banker or a bent businessman.

Politkovskaya is the thirteenth Russian journalist to have been murdered since Putin came to power. She is the third Novaya Gazeta journalist to have been murdered in the last 15 years. She is the 42nd Russian journalist to have been murdered since 1992. Russia is now the third most dangerous place in the world for journalists (after Iraq and Algeria).

The Russian Prosecutor’s Office has promised a full-scale investigation into the murder. The International Federation of Journalists has called for the Russian government to have a full and “transparent” investigation. But, as other Russian journalists have already commented, this simply means that the state authorities behind Politkovskaya’s murder will be investigated by themselves.