The muzzling of independent Russian media, including the newspaper Novaya Gazeta, is part of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decades-long campaign against journalists, the free press, and freedom of expression. In Righting Wrongs, my forthcoming book about human rights heroes, I profile Novaya Gazeta cofounder Anna Politkovskaya, whose work and life remain both an inspiration and a cautionary tale for current times.
I'm not plugging my book here. On International Women’s Day, I wanted to take a moment to remember Politkovskaya and share her important story for the light she continues to shed on current events. Politkovskaya also symbolizes the many, many Russians who have opposed Putin and his violence, some of whom have paid the ultimate price.
If you feel moved by her story or want to do something for the Ukrainian people, please support groups like PEN International, Reporters without Borders, and the International Rescue Committee, which supports ALL refugees.
The daughter of Ukrainian diplomats, Politkovskaya was born in New York in 1958. She had sharp features and a pixie haircut, as if she couldn’t spare a moment for styling. Far from a born reporter, Politkovskaya’s early writing was for the Soviet state airline, where she earned not only a salary, but free tickets to explore the country.
Her travels coincided with a period of perestroika, or restructuring, the Soviet government’s loosening of controls on politics, speech, and the economy in the mid-1980s. Still, reporting was fraught with danger. The Soviet Union jailed reporters who wrote critical stories. Writers, human rights advocates, and other dissidents could be sent to prison or even vanish.
Politkovskaya took a job with Izvestiya, which means “news” in Russian, the official publication of the Supreme Soviet Central Committee. The only other legal paper was Pravda, or “truth,” published by the Communist Party.
As Russians often joked, “There’s no news in Pravda and no truth in Izvestiya.”
The 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall signaled the end of the Soviet Union. Many former Soviet regions, including Ukraine, started breaking away. But at the time, much of the news focused on a region called Chechnya. For centuries, Chechnya had sometimes worked with and sometimes battled the Russian empire. During the Bolshevik Revolution, Chechen fighters backed the Communists and were rewarded when Chechnya became an autonomous republic within the Soviet Union, one of several allowed to teach in their native language.
Josef Stalin, the Soviet dictator from 1927 to 1952, deported millions of Chechens from their homes in 1944, believing wrongly that many had supported the invading German army. When the Chechens declared independence in 1991, few could say quite how a government or the economy would work.
For Russia, struggling to remake its economy, Chechen independence was a threat. Chechnya is oil-rich. If the Chechens left, so might other provinces with lucrative natural resources. The Kremlin rushed to proclaim independence unconstitutional, then blockaded the province from receiving food and other basic supplies.
In 1994, Russian troops poured into Chechnya, but met with stiff opposition, including from former Soviet military officers who were Chechen and had switched sides. Russian artillery pounded cities like Grozny, the capital. High-rises looked like a giant had ripped out large chunks. Survivors saved what little they could in wheelbarrows. The images are eerily like what we are seeing now from Ukrainian cities like Kharkiv and Mariupol.
For their part, the Chechens seemed almost eager to attack Russian civilians. In 1995, Chechen militants took about 1,500 people hostage at a hospital in Budyonnovsk, in Russia's southern Stavropol region. Ultimately, 129 people died after a botched Russian commando raid.
Poorly equipped and fed (as they are now), the Russian military withdrew from Chechnya in 1996. The Chechens began fighting among themselves. By the end of 1997, various warlords battled over control and money. Two years later, with Vladimir Putin as president, Russia unleashed a ferocious campaign meant to force Chechnya back under Moscow’s control.
In 1999, Politkovskaya began traveling to Chechnya for the newspaper she’d helped found, Novaya Gazeta (“new newspaper”). With its Muslim majority, extensive oil reserves, history of opposing Russian rule, and brutal history, Chechnya seemed to crystallize all of the hope and dangers of the moment.
Unlike reporters who seem to flock to wars, Politkovskaya said she was “afraid of everything that shoots.” Yet she was determined to cover the war from the point of view of those trapped in the violence. Her reporting was vivid. Even her own newspaper “cut out the toughest parts,” she said, for fear of losing readers.
“People call the newspaper and send letters with one and the same question,” she once wrote. “Why are you writing about this? Why are you scaring us? Why do we need to know this? For one simple reason: as contemporaries of this war, we will be held responsible for it. The classic Soviet excuse of not being there and not taking part in anything personally won’t work.”
Her compassion included the Russian soldiers sent to fight a war they knew nothing about and were dying for—just like the situation of many of the conscripts dying in Ukraine.
Politkovskaya's eye was on the human, always.
“Here are the helicopters, going for another round,” she wrote in A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya. “They fly so low that you can see the gunners’ hands and faces. Some say that they can even see their eyes. But this is fear talking. The main thing is their legs, dangling carelessly in the open hatches. As if they didn’t come to kill, but to let their tired feet get some fresh air. Their feet are big and scary, and the soles almost seem to touch our faces. The barrels of their guns are squeezed between their thighs. We’re frightened, but we all want to see our killers.”
WOW. That last bit--an obscene honesty, a brutal clarity of vision, the eye that cannot NOT see--is Politkovskaya's core. She cannot NOT see.
She also wrote ALL THE TIME. So many books and articles and speeches. She was absolutely possessed by the injustice, the suffering—and the seeming indifference of the world.
The Russian state knew Politkovskaya had unique access & credibility. In 2002, Chechen rebels seized 912 hostages in a Moscow theater during a performance of a musical. They asked Politkovskaya to negotiate a peaceful resolution, which failed horribly. Russian special forces stormed the building after laying down a cloud of gas. Thirty-three Chechens and 130 hostages died. Putin used the siege to crackdown on press freedom, meaning that reporting was harder than ever.
Yet Politkovskaya never stopped. “The world capitals flash before my eyes as I campaign for support,” she once wrote.” This spring I’ve been in Amsterdam, Paris, Geneva, Manila, Bonn, Hamburg...Everywhere they invite me to make a speech about ‘the situation in Chechnya,’ but there are zero results.”
And of course despots and killers like Putin cannot stand this. They cannot stand someone, especially a woman, who will not shut up. This radical, relentless seeing is their Kryptonite.
Politkovskaya's days were numbered and she knew it.
On October 7, 2006, neighbors found Politkovskaya shot twice in the elevator of her apartment block. She’d been working on a story about torture by Chechen security force members working with the Russians. Later, Russian police seized her notes, computer, and photographs. At the time of her death, she had two children and was about to become a grandmother.
After a lot of wrangling, in 2014, a Russian court sentenced several men for her murder. However, rights groups pointed out that the people who ordered and planned it remain free, part of a broader trend of impunity for those who kill Putin’s critics.
Novaya Gazeta is still publishing, though with the knowledge that any day they’ll be forced to close. Last year, the editor, Dmitry Muratov, won the Nobel Prize along with Filipina journalist Maria Ressa.
Finally, here's the lovely portrait of Politkovskaya that appears in Righting Wrongs. Politkovskaya should always have the last word.
BOOK NEWS
Stay tuned for news about the September re-release of The Bond Trilogy: The Bond, The Hive Queen, and (for the first time!) The Mother’s Wheel. I have the new covers and they are AWESOME (I’ll announce a cover reveal soon). The books will also have a new interior design and (wowza) new content. If you are interested in receiving an eARC of any of the books in exchange for an early review, please contact me!
#Ukraine
I want to finish with something beautiful.
Thanks for reading! Without the support of readers like you, I wouldn't enjoy doing what I do nearly as much.