Anna Politkovskaya - A Russian Diary

FOREWORD

SCOTT SIMON

A NNA POLITKOVSKAYA COULD HAVE LEFT RUSSIAREMEMBER THAT as you read these journals. She was born in 1958 in New York, where her Ukrainian parents were Soviet diplomats at the United Nations. The U.S. embassy in Moscow considered her a citizen. She was entitled to an American passport.

With all of the resourcefulness that Anna Politkovskaya had relied on to survive in Chechnya and Ingushetia, she might have pulled a scarf over her short, soft gray hair, doffed the simple oval glasses by which she was so easily identified, left her apartment building by a back door, met a friend to guide her, and gone to the U.S. embassy. Or visited her sister, Elena Kudimova, in London (Russian officials were glad to see her go, knowing that next to nothing she said or wrote outside of Russia would ever be heard or read there), and just stayed. She could have flown to Berlin or New York to accept one more award for heroism. She could have gone to a conference on the Caucasus in Paris or Vienna, told stirring stories of her indisputable courage to astounded students at Columbia, Stanford, or Iowa State, signed up with a think tank in Washington or Cambridge, and never have to go back to Moscow.

Anna Politkovskaya could have lived in Manhattan, Palo Alto, or Santa Monica, with a car service waiting downstairs to whisk her away to expound on Russia's corruptions and treacheries from the safe confines of a television studio or college campus. She would have risked leaving her mother, who was battling cancer, and her twenty-six-year-old daughter and first grandchild. But she would be alivesurely what they would have preferred.

Family and friends had urged her to leave. Russian soldiers, police, oligarchs, criminal gangs, and the highest-ranking Russian politicians had explicitly threatened her life. When she grew violently ill after sipping a cup of tea on a flight into Beslan to negotiate during the school hostage crisis in 2004, she saw it was an attempt to silence her there and then. Alexander Litvinenko, the former KGB man who became a critic of Vladimir Putin, told her to leave Russia.

But Anna told David Hearst of Britain's Guardian newspaper in 2002, The more I think about it, the more I would be betraying these people if I walked away. The only thing to do is to take this to the bitter end, so that no one can say that when things became difficult, I ran away.

Those words would sound sanctimonious from almost anyone else.

AS THE DAUGHTER OF SOVIET DIPLOMATS, Anna grew up with books, magazines, and access to news that was banned for ordinary citizens; in fact, her parents, impressed by the free flow of ideas in the West, smuggled books in for her. When she studied journalism at Moscow State University, she risked writing her dissertation about the poet Marina Tsvetaeva, who had been banned by Stalin and eventually hanged herself.

She went to work for Izvestiya, the official house organ of the Supreme Soviet Central Committee. Pravda, the other best-known official daily (but in no sense a competitor) was the official voice of the Communist Party. Pravda means truth, Izvestiya means news, and the joke among Russians was, There is no news in Pravda and no truth in Izvestiya.

Within a few years Anna was able to meet the criteria for a job at the in-house magazine of Aeroflot, the state airline of the USSR. The journalism was probably trickier than what Americans associate with airline monthlies (creating a favorable impression of the grimy and treacherous Aeroflot fleet in the early 1980s would have tested Dostoevsky's imagination). But she also qualified for free plane tickets, which she used to explore the breadth of her own vast, dazzling country. She fell in love with the majestic immensity of Russia's variety and soul. She was appalled by the depth of its poverty and cruelty.

When the era of Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika began to bloom, Anna saw opportunities to do the kind of journalism she had known in the West. She became part of the founding group of Novaya Gazeta (New Newspaper). It was that newspaper that first sent her to Chechnya, where she would return thirty-nine times. At the heart of these journals is the anger and revulsion Anna Politkovskaya felt over what she witnessed there, over and over, and what that brutality disclosed about the system that ruled her country.

Americans may see the Russian war in Chechnya as a prolonged conflict stretching on for more than a decade, like the Soviet campaign in Afghanistan (or America's in Vietnam). But for Russians, there are two distinct wars. The first was declared by Boris Yeltsin, after local leaders split the Chechen-Ingush republic in two as the Soviet Union spun apart in 1991. Ingushetia joined the Russian Federation. Chechnya refused. Russian forces rolled in to Chechnya in 1994 (Czechoslovakia 1968 style, one is tempted to say) when Russia said that instability and civil war threatened peace in the region.

But by 1996, the ill-equipped Russian Army, which rained down expensive explosives on Chechens, but could not feed or shoe its soldiers, had to withdraw. Russian public opinion, appalled by the uselessness, cost, and visible brutality of the war, called on Yeltsin to sue for peace. Many in his government openly blamed the press for informing and inflaming the public. Anna Politkovskaya was prominent among those reporters who sent back vivid and infuriating stories of Russia's scorched-earth campaign of kidnappings, rapes, massacres, and the bombing of innocents. If such coverage caused the public to shut down the war in Chechnya, Anna believed it was an example of what a free press and an informed public in a democratic society should have the power to do.

Anna Politkovskaya strongly believed that Vladimir Putin and Russian security services had allowed the self-proclaimed Chechen terrorist Shamil Basaev to stage raids in Dagestan in 1999. This permitted Vladimir Putin to cite chaos and instability as a reason to send Russian forces back into Chechnya. I am less certain of that, and will leave Anna to make her own argument in these journals. But Putin had manifestly drawn lessons from the first failed Russian campaign in Chechnya: keep out reporters, and have no mercy. The killings, rapes, indiscriminate shellings, and torture of Chechens became more intenseand went almost unreported.

In October 2002, heavily armed terrorists professing allegiance to Chechen separatists (Shamil Basaev claimed credit for the plan) seized the Dubrovka theater in Moscow during a performance of Nord-Ost, a Russian musical. They took 912 people hostage. The terrorists said that all of the captured theatergoers would be killed unless the Russian government withdrew its forces from Chechnya.

Anna Politkovskaya, whose reporting from Chechnya had made her name known among the terrorists, was called in to try to negotiate some kind of agreement that would save the lives of the hostages. No agreement was reached. The Russian government quickly concluded, if it had ever thought otherwise, that none was possible. After just two and a half days, Russian special forces stormed the building. But first they laid down a cloud of what is still an unidentified gas.