I NEVER MET THE JOURNALIST ANNA POLITKOVSKAYA. WHEN I covered the First Chechen War, she was in Moscow toiling for a small-time newspaper. By the time the second war rolled around, I had left for Afghanistan and environs. That is when Anna began reporting on the horrors of Chechnya, a career-changing experience that turned her against Vladimir Putin. She soon became the most angry and acid public critic of Putin in all of Russia.
“Putin has, by chance, gotten hold of enormous power and has used it to catastrophic effect,” she once wrote. “I dislike him because he does not like people. He despises us. He sees us as a means to his ends, a means for the achievement and retention of personal power, no more than that. Accordingly, he believes he can do anything he likes with us, play with us as he sees fit, destroy us if he wishes. We are nobody, while he whom chance has enabled to clamber to the top is today czar and God. In Russia we have had leaders with this outlook before. It led to tragedy, to bloodshed on a vast scale, to civil wars.”
My introduction to Anna was Putin’s Russia, her gritty 2004 account of life under the Russian leader. It is a defense of the defenseless, and its powerful language is rich in detail and often moving. She was blessed with unerring intuition and stuck to writing about what she actually saw. Anna was self-possessed, but not self-impressed.
That was all the more remarkable in view of her celebrity abroad and the admiration showered upon her by some of the most hard-bitten Western correspondents in Moscow. Time magazine’s talented war correspondent Yuri Zarakhovich in 2003 wrote that Anna “made her name by writing detailed, accurate and vivid reports on the plight of the civilian population in Chechnya…. She tells stories of people who are taken from their homes at night and never come back; about extra-judicial executions; about the hungry refugees in cold and damp camps.”
A year later, James Meek, a talented reporter with the British newspaper Guardian, described her as “one of the bravest of Russia’s many brave journalists.”
“Her seriousness is not just her frown, her severe glasses and full head of gray hair,” he wrote. “It’s the tension, anger and impatience in her whole body, making clear that her sense of the continual injustice being perpetrated in her homeland never leaves her, that she can’t shut it out in a way almost all British journalists, even the campaigning, radical kind, can.”
In her coda to Putin’s Russia, Anna made this plea: “We cannot just sit back and watch a political winter close in on Russia for several more decades. We want to go on living in freedom. We want our children to be free and our grandchildren to be born free. That is why we long for a thaw in the immediate future, but we alone can change Russia’s political climate.”
The West wasn’t going to help, she continued: “All we hear from the outside world is ‘al-Qaeda, al-Qaeda,’ a wretched mantra for shuffling off responsibility for all the bloody tragedies yet to come, a primitive chant with which to lull a society desiring nothing more than to be lulled back to sleep.”
Anna pushed journalistic boundaries in a way that would be frowned upon in the West: She repeatedly crossed the line between journalist and active participant in events she covered. Trying to resolve the Nord-Ost hostage standoff was an example of that. She thought that playing dual roles was a shrewd strategy.
It was not something I could see myself doing—negotiating with terrorists—but Anna’s style did lead her to a more profound understanding of the play of events and personalities than virtually anyone else I read in Russia.
It also earned her a following among the multitude of Russia’s downtrodden and powerless, who saw in Anna someone who would listen and, more important, write something. When she arrived in the office each morning, she often was greeted by a pile of mail and a line of people out the door, all hopeful that she could help them obtain justice.
The aftermath of an explosion in a nine-story apartment building on Guryanova Street in southeast Moscow on September 9, 1999. In a two-week period in August and September, explosions killed nearly three hundred people in four Russian apartment buildings, leading Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to blame Chechen terrorists and order an all-out war in Chechnya. Putin’s popularity rating soared.
(Tatiana Makeyeva/AP)
Nikolai Khokhlov in South Korea in 1964, while serving as an anti-insurgency adviser to the Seoul government. Khokhlov defected from the KGB in 1954 rather than carry out the assassination of an anti-Soviet leader in Frankfurt. Three years later, the Soviets attempted to murder him with a nuclear-activated form of thallium. He went on to become a professor of psychology at California State University, San Bernardino.
(Courtesy of Tatjana Khokhlov)
Vladimir Putin during a March 2008 meeting of his security council. After his rise from nowhere to be named by Boris Yeltsin as his successor, Putin won election as president in 2000, largely based on his hard-line stand in Chechnya.
(Vladimir Rodionov/AP/RIA Novosti, Presidential Press Service)
In October 2002, terrorists took over a Moscow theater that was staging the musical Nord-Ost. To end the three-day siege, Russian security forces used a mysterious opiate gas that was intended to—and, together with a subsequent shootout, did—kill all the terrorists, but also took the lives of 129 of the 800 or so hostages. Here, a security officer carries a body out of the theater, with the bodies of other hostages in the foreground.
(Dmitry Lovetsky/AP)
Irina Fadeeva and her fifteen-year-old son, Yaroslav. Yaroslav died at Nord-Ost.
(Courtesy of Irina Fadeeva)
Elena Baranovskaya with her husband, former military intelligence officer Sergei Baranovsky, and her twenty-year-old son, Andrei Nikishin. Both the men died at Nord-Ost.
(Courtesy of Elena Baranovskaya)
Ilya Lysak, a bass player in the Nord-Ost orchestra and an old family friend of Anna Politkovskaya’s. He survived the hostage-taking.
(Courtesy of Vera Politkovskaya)
New York native Paul Klebnikov, editor of Forbes Russia. He was murdered in Moscow in 2004.
(Courtesy of Forbes)
Anna Politkovskaya. She became one of Putin’s harshest critics in her writings in Novaya Gazeta and in books published in English in the West.
(Colleen Piano/REX USA LTD.)
Anna Politkovskaya and her daughter, Vera. In the hours before her murder, Anna was helping the pregnant Vera to shop for a basin for her apartment. When the baby was born a few months later, Vera named her Anna.
(Courtesy of Politkovskaya Family Archive)
From left to right, Alexander Litvinenko, Boris Berezovsky, Akhmed Zakayev, and Yuri Felshtinsky at Berezovsky’s sixtieth birthday party in January 2006.
(Courtesy of Yuri Felshtinsky)
Alexander Litvinenko and his seven-year-old son, Anatoly, at the Queens Leisure Centre in Blackpool, England, in 2001.
(Courtesy of Marina Litvinenko)
Marina Litvinenko.
(Courtesy of Marina Litvinenko)
Alexander Litvinenko and Anna Politkovskaya in London, in or around 2003. Litvinenko regarded Anna as a close friend and was broken up over her assassination. According to her family, she looked at Litvinenko as a source and no more.
(Courtesy of Marina Litvinenko)
Andrei Lugovoi at a news conference on November 1, 2007—the one-year anniversary of the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko. Great Britain had charged Lugovoi with Litvinenko’s murder. Lugovoi accused Britain of covering up its own involvement in the death and ran successfully for a seat in the Russian parliament.
(Sergey Ponomarev/AP)
Dmitri Medvedev, a long-time Putin subordinate from St. Petersburg and Putin’s chosen successor, as Putin walks to the stage to accept the leadership of the ruling United Russia political party on April 15, 2008. This post gave Putin an additional platform, on top of the prime ministership, with which to continue to wield power in Russia.
(Dmitry Lovetsky/AP)
In a 2001 story, she berated the wife of a Canadian diplomat who, driving a big Ford Explorer, crashed into the car of a Russian woman. The victim suffered a concussion and broken bones, but because of diplomatic immunity, the Canadian didn’t have to reimburse the Russian’s medical bills. Anna unearthed international conventions that she said should force the Canadians to pay up and told Russian authorities that if they did not believe her, they should come to her office and she would show them.
Nina Lavurda’s story was especially sad. She was desperate to retrieve the remains of her son, Paul, whose body had been abandoned on the battlefield after he was killed in action in Chechnya. The military was unresponsive to her pleas until Anna stepped in. Finally, the mother was presented with his skull for burial; no other body parts could be found.
“Paul Lavurda had been deserted on the battlefield and then forgotten,” Anna wrote. “Nobody cared that his body was lying there, or that he had a family awaiting his return. What happened after his death is typical of the army, a disgraceful episode that stands for an ethos in which a human is nothing, in which no one watches over the troops, and there is no sense of responsibility toward the families.”
Anna was born in 1958 in New York, where her father was an interpreter for diplomats at the United Nations. Four years later, the family returned to Russia. Anna grew up as a member of the privileged nomenklatura, the Communist Party equivalent of the West’s upper middle class, with access to hard-to-obtain Western goods and education at select schools.
Her readiness to challenge authority was apparent at an early age. In class, Anna’s best friends cringed each time she shot up to correct something the teacher had said. But she was the top student at School 33, and in her final year she was elected chapter head of the elite Club for International Friendship, part of the Communist Party youth group Komsomol.
She was a journalism student at Moscow State University, the Harvard of the Soviet Union, when she began dating her future husband, Alexander Politkovsky. Their relationship puzzled her friends. He was five years older, prematurely gray, and from a wholly different world: While Anna and her friends were society girls, Alexander was the son of artists and a habitué of Moscow’s dissident crowd. She was a serious thinker; he was a charming rogue with the gift of gab and a taste for drink. Over beers after Anna’s death, he described to me an ideal day: fly-fishing at a brook (the sound of the line hitting the water—“tuk, tuk, tuk”), a flask of whiskey in his breast pocket, a nap on the grass. That was the good-time Alexander.
To Anna, he was a beguiling exotic. One friend recalled her behaving like a schoolgirl around him, asking Alexander to hold her hand and to embrace her. On summer vacation at a Black Sea resort, she could be found each morning in her hotel room with wads of paper strewn across the floor. They were false starts on another daily letter to Alexander.
The two married after twenty-year-old Anna discovered she was pregnant. Her upper-crust parents were so incensed at her choice of a husband (who showed up for the wedding toting a half-finished bottle of vodka inside a bag) that they cut Anna off financially. At first, the newlyweds and their infant son, Ilya, survived on Alexander’s slim earnings as a novice journalist and Anna’s pay for scrubbing floors at a tailor shop. (She lost the job after the tailor tired of her “telling them how to work, how to treat people, how to treat her, a university [student],” said a friend, Elena Morozova.)
As graduation neared, Anna chose a literary outcast as the subject for her senior thesis. Marina Tsvetayeva was a great Soviet poet whose work ranged over the human cost of the Bolshevik revolution, her crushing loneliness, and her sexuality, including hints at lesbianism. Her life was tragic: Her poems were suppressed by Stalin’s government, her White Russian husband was arrested and executed, and Tsvetayeva hanged herself at the age of forty-eight, in 1941. The poet was a controversial choice for a thesis at a Russian university. But Anna was mesmerized and would not be deterred.
At home, life was tense. Anna and Alexander argued constantly. Before long, a second child was born—a girl, Vera. Alexander had earned a toehold in television, but his wages were modest and the couple was just scraping by. Then everything changed. It was the mid-1980s, and Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost, or openness, unshackled the Russian press. Alexander became a roving correspondent for a TV news show called Vsglyad, or “Outlook”—a loose version of America’s 60 Minutes. The weekly program electrified the country by daring to challenge the official Kremlin version of events, and it made him an instant celebrity.
In 1990, Anna and her family allowed a Russian filmmaker and crew to share their apartment for six weeks. The resulting documentary, entitled A Taste of Freedom, is mainly about Alexander and the risks he took as a TV journalist challenging the system. But it also provides revealing glimpses of everyday life with the Politkovskys. Alexander, dressed down in trademark denim jacket and red plaid cap crowning his long, wavy hair, plays to the camera. Doe-eyed Anna is coquettish and vulnerable as the housewife.
Her sister Elena told me that Anna was “a crazy mom, very involved with her children,” and that is evident in the film. In one scene, daughter Vera is playing the violin, accompanied on piano by Anna, who insisted that both her children learn music from an early age. (Anna’s friends laughed at their memories of arriving at the door to her apartment and hearing her loud, exasperated voice from inside, “That note isn’t right. Play it right.” It was Anna the perfectionist, but also Anna the realist. On camera, she says that if anything happened to her, Ilya and Vera could earn a living on their own, even if that meant “playing in some restaurant.”)
As the documentary unfolds, Anna is at turns frightened out of her wits about Alexander’s safety while he is on a perilous assignment and chafing that she is stuck at home with domestic chores. Sometimes the dangers follow him to their apartment. Soviets not happy with his reporting leave threats on the family answering machine, including this one from a male caller: “Think about your children. You have two of them, I think.”
Questioned by the filmmaker, Marina Goldovskaya, Anna declares, not entirely convincingly, that she has learned to live with the fear. “I can’t cry twenty-four hours a day,” she says. Should her husband be imprisoned, she adds, friends have invited her and the children to live with them in the countryside far away from Moscow.
As his television career flourished, Alexander began drinking more heavily. Part of it was the lifestyle that came with his fame; when he and Anna were at a party or a restaurant, people rushed to shake his hand and toast him with celebratory rounds of vodka. But she detested his liking for alcohol, especially when nights on the town ended with him being quite drunk, and she felt it was poisoning their marriage.
Anna also fretted over her career ambitions. She had begun writing feature stories for a small newspaper, work that she found less than satisfying. She wanted a career in television like her husband. But he was doing everything he could to block her way, she told friends. In fact, the main problem with their marriage was that neither she nor Alexander was willing or able to play a supporting role to the other, not for any extended period, anyway. Both wanted to be Number 1.
The making of the documentary revealed a preoccupation with her appearance on camera. She was nearly blind without her spectacles, but if she wore them during the filming, no one would notice her best feature—her large dark eyes. What should I do, she wondered aloud. She ended up appearing without eyeglasses throughout the film.
In 1995, she and her husband were shaken by the murders of two friends in Moscow. The television superstar Vlad Listyev, to whom Alexander was especially close, died after being shot outside his house by unidentified assailants, in March. Five months later, the second friend, a forty-six-year-old banker named Ivan Kivelidi who drove around town in a Cadillac and a cowboy hat, went into convulsions in his office, and died. Police said the culprit was a highly lethal poison, either smeared on his telephone or poured into his tea.
Anna’s halting career as a writer began to brighten three years later, when she joined the staff of Obshchaya Gazeta, an independent weekly of note. Her editor was Yegor Yakovlev, the legendary father of the bold newspaper reportage that had erupted under perestroika. The sixty-nine-year-old Yakovlev soon expressed his confidence in Anna by offering her a prized assignment—to accompany him on a trip to Chechnya.
It is hard to overstate Chechnya’s extraordinary place in the Russian soul, firmly lodged there after centuries of writing by novelists and poets—Mikhail Lermontov, Alexander Pushkin, and Lev Tolstoy, among others—who romanticized that disorderly southern region. By the 1990s, it was also a seductive place for war correspondents from around the world, and Anna would be no exception. After her first trip there, Chechnya became “a dragon in her blood,” said Elena Morozova. “She didn’t want to live without it.”
Anna did not immediately return to Chechnya. She found a new job at a scrappy biweekly called Novaya Gazeta. At first, she contributed general-interest pieces, including a call for emergency measures to control the march of AIDS in Russia, and a tirade against Russia’s forty million “slaves to tobacco” and their “aggressive and contemptuous” attitude toward nonsmokers.
The hectoring tone of the tobacco commentary illustrated Anna’s lifelong habit of lecturing to people. She told boys whom she heard cursing in public that they were “infringing on my rights. I don’t want to hear that language.” When the boys responded with the equivalent of “Go to hell,” friends pulled her away before the confrontation could worsen. Elena Morozova recalled the sermonizing that three drunks had to endure after asking for money. “I know that if I give you money, you’ll just buy vodka,” Anna told them. “And look how [awful] you look.” Elena decided that her friend had a messiah complex.
Another companion, Yevgenia Albats, remarked on Anna’s stubbornness. Friends often accused Yevgenia of unwillingness to compromise, “but next to Anna, I am the most compromising person on the planet,” she said.
But Anna also was a stickler for ethical behavior. After the Nord-Ost hostage tragedy, she bonded with the survivor group Nord-Ostsi. She was especially close to Elena Baranovskaya, who had lost her son and husband in the shoot-out and gassing that ended the theater standoff. Anna arrived at Elena’s apartment one day to find the survivor group waiting with a cake and a gift of dishes, in honor of Anna’s birthday. Sorry, said Anna, she could not accept the dishes. Gifts were off-limits for journalists, strictly unprofessional. One of the men nonetheless slipped the dishes into the trunk of Anna’s car. A few days later, Anna telephoned Elena: “I’m coming by with the dishes.”
In August 1999, more than a thousand Chechen militants crossed into the neighboring Russian republic of Dagestan to support a small Islamic uprising. Russian forces pushed back, forcing the Chechens’ commander, Shamil Basayev, to retreat. Then came the bombings of the four apartment buildings in Moscow and elsewhere, and the launching of the Second Chechen War by Russia’s new president, Vladimir Putin. Anna’s editor at Novaya Gazeta dispatched her to the war-torn region.
She made no pretense at objectivity. She seemed to see nothing heroic on either side, and focused almost exclusively on casualties of the war—innocent civilians whose lives were destroyed, hapless Russian soldiers flung into deadly combat. In one of her earliest dispatches, about a man named Vakha who had been blown up in a minefield, she wrote: “Now dead, Vakha lies on a field again, but this time fearlessly, with his wounded face looking up and his hands spread wider than they’ve ever been in his life. The left hand is about ten yards from his black jacket, which has been torn to pieces. The right hand is a bit closer, about five steps away. And Vakha’s legs are quite a problem: They disappear, most likely turning to dust at the time of the explosion and flying away with the wind.”
Her husband, Alexander, told Anna that he was not pleased with her absences and the danger she was facing. But after all the years of living in his shadow, she had no intention of stopping. Within a year, in her mid-forties, Anna hit her stride as a war correspondent, distinguished not only for her unapologetic irony and sarcasm, but also for a willingness to go to places where few others dared venture. Her career became forever intertwined with the callousness of the Chechen war and the conduct of Putin, its chief prosecutor.
At turns she sympathized with and castigated the Chechen leadership. She wrote increasingly accusatory stories about the Chechen prime minister, Ramzan Kadyrov, whose political career was launched after his pro-Moscow father, Akhmad, was killed in a bombing by Chechen opponents. While Anna thought Akhmad was brutal, she thought worse of Ramzan, whom she called “psychopathic and extremely stupid,” the “deranged” leader of a torture-and-murder paramilitary force. She ridiculed his loyalty to Putin. “What kind of qualifications do you need to be a favorite of Putin?” Anna wrote. “To have ground Chechnya beneath your heel, and forced the entire republic to pay you tribute like an Asiatic bey, is evidently a plus.”
Her salary wasn’t much, and her newspaper’s circulation wasn’t large. But its readers were passionate, especially the dwindling number of liberals who admired Anna for writing regularly on painful subjects that most of the population seemed happy to ignore. And she relished the attention that came her way. Even official Russia—especially agencies dealing with foreign policy and security in Chechnya and the Caucasus as a whole—read what she wrote and took it seriously. As she became known as an expert on Chechnya, “she started liking it,” her brother-in-law said.
Outside the country, Anna was a journalistic celebrity. Her articles—and, eventually, four books that were largely expansions of her reporting—attracted speaking invitations from around the world. She visited the United States, France, Norway, and Great Britain, and over three years collected almost $100,000 in prize money from organizations that supported human rights, press freedom, and achievements in reporting.
With the money—no small sum, even in booming Moscow—she at last was able to establish a comfortable life for herself and her family. Above all, she wanted Vera to have a place of her own, and so Anna gave her apartment to her daughter and bought another for herself in a lively neighborhood of cafés, within strolling distance of the historic Mayakovski Theater. Anna looked at Vera as a wisp of a girl, different from her son, the sturdy Ilya. He exhibited the discipline, steeliness, and ambition of his mother, and had become director of an advertising company. I thought Anna underestimated her daughter. It was true that Vera inherited her father’s artistic gifts and devil-may-care manner, but I also sensed in her a tough inner strength and street smarts.
Anna’s marriage to Alexander, under increasing strain, finally collapsed. As her fame had grown, his had gone into a steep decline. He could not attract commercial support for the kind of programs that suited his talent. In the familiar tradition of broadcast journalism everywhere, others had risen in his place. But Anna had learned from his natural talent and absorbed his appetite for risk, and then taken both to new levels.
The two never officially divorced, although Alexander made only sporadic appearances in her life. Anna complained to friends that he was distant from the children; she was especially angry at him for not sharing the costs of their son’s wedding reception in 2003, which Anna arranged (including a traditional troika with three white horses). When I last saw Alexander, in late 2007, he had taken a second wife, a woman twenty-three years his junior, and was making short documentaries in his own small studio, while mentoring the occasional young journalist.
Anna was often called fearless, but she was the first to say she was not. “I’m afraid a lot during every trip [to Chechnya],” she told a Polish journalist. “But, if I wanted to live without fear and risk, I would become a teacher or a housewife.”
The dangers that she faced because of her fiery articles were quite real. She was imprisoned for four harrowing days by a Russian military unit while in Chechnya to investigate accounts of civilians being brutalized in a concentration camp. Anna said her captors tortured her, but she declined to describe “the details of the interrogations, because they are utterly obscene.” One officer put her through a mock execution and threatened to rape her in a bathhouse. Another officer, identified as an FSB agent, intervened, and she was confined to a bunker until her release.
Anna received multiple threats after writing that a Russian Interior Ministry officer named Sergei “Cadet” Lapin had tortured a prisoner who then vanished. Lapin said he was coming to Moscow to kill her, while an anonymous letter to her newspaper warned that a sniper would be sent to exact revenge. Anna’s editor ordered her to stay home and police assigned four officers to guard her. When a fresh set of threats erupted after she appeared in a televised interview, Anna took temporary refuge in Vienna. Soon her children were calling to report that a woman of Anna’s approximate age, height, and hair color had been murdered in front of her apartment house. They were sure the killer had mistaken the victim for their mother. As for Lapin, he was later convicted in the case Anna had exposed, and sentenced to ten years in prison.
Ramzan Kadyrov, the Chechen prime minister, whom she had accused of atrocities and called an imbecile, also threatened to kill her. Many Chechens seemed to think the pro-Putin Kadyrov was serious, according to Anna. But she discounted his threat. He wouldn’t risk harming her because he would be too obvious a suspect, she reasoned. “The people in Chechnya are afraid for me, and I find that very touching,” Anna wrote. “They fear for me more than I fear for myself, and that is how I survive.” In fact, she did not believe that the greatest risk to her lay in Chechnya; more danger lay elsewhere.
In 2004, Chechen terrorists seized an elementary school in Beslan, in the southern Russian region of North Ossetia. They took some 1,200 children, parents, and teachers hostage and strapped explosives to the interior of the sweltering building. Anna, in Moscow, took matters into her own hands. She telephoned Akhmed Zakayev, the European representative of rebel Chechen leader Aslan Maskhadov, and urged that the latter go quickly to the school and negotiate for the children’s immediate release. Zakayev (who was a friend of Alexander Litvinenko and lived across the street from him, in London) told her that he would get in touch with the rebel commander and try to make that happen.
Along with a mob of other journalists, Anna rushed to a Moscow airport to catch a flight to Beslan, but none could be had. Then a young man approached and identified himself as an airport employee. “Are you Anna Politkovskaya?” he said. “We very much respect your newspaper. We are going to let you on this flight,” referring to a departure to Rostov, from which she could drive to Beslan. According to Anna’s account, he said that someone from the FSB had directed him to put her on the flight.
On board, Anna asked for a cup of tea. Within minutes of drinking it, she became extremely ill. She later recalled that aircraft crew members “beat me on the face and asked me, cried to me, ‘Please don’t die. Don’t die.’” An unconscious Anna was hospitalized in Rostov and given emergency care. A nurse later told her she was “almost hopeless” when brought in. “My dear, they tried to poison you,” the nurse said. Doctors who treated her later in Moscow confirmed that her symptoms were consistent with poisoning. But the substance that nearly killed her was never identified.
Anna was irritated at her own carelessness. How vain to think that airport personnel would recognize her so readily. She should have had second thoughts when they let her on the plane without demanding a passport or any other document. The thought that something was wrong had never crossed her mind.
She never made it to Beslan, where bedlam broke out after a three-day standoff. Shooting and explosions erupted as children began to pour out of the schoolhouse and terrorists tried to make their escape. In the end, some 330 children and adults were killed.
Anna’s commitment to Chechnya made those close to her anxious about her well-being. Dima Muratov, her editor, wondered if it was time she turned to topics right in Moscow. At one point, he ordered her to stop going to Chechnya, but she went anyway.
Many family and friends thought she was in grave danger and regularly pleaded with her to stay home. Elena Baranovskaya, the Nord-Ost mother who now was Anna’s friend, said she and others in the Nord-Ostsi survivors’ group were aghast at the Chechnya articles. “Why are you writing this stuff?” Elena asked. “It’s so dangerous.” Anna’s curt response was, “Well, don’t read it.”
But she let down her guard in a conversation with Alexander Litvinenko in London. She told the onetime KGB officer that she feared entering her apartment building—every time she stood in its dimly lit entryway, she thought someone might be lurking in the shadows. He gave her tips on how to safely enter the building, but said the only sure way to be safe was to leave Russia.
It was the same advice she got from her brother-in-law, Yuri Kudimov, himself an ex–KGB officer and now a wealthy banker in Moscow. “You live in a country where someone could be shot because of a thousand-dollar debt,” he told Anna. “Think about that,” he said.
You’re right, Anna replied, but I’m not ready to give up my job. “I’ve got to do it because I like it,” she said, “but it’s also how I make my money.”
Yuri thought that Anna should at least have a sure way to get out of the country—just in case. The wisest course, he argued, was to take advantage of her birthright and obtain an American passport. With Anna’s consent, he prevailed on U.S.-based friends from his KGB days to collect the necessary documentation from New York archives. The U.S. embassy in Moscow issued the passport, but she showed no inclination to put it to immediate use.
Her friendship with Yuri puzzled me at first. As an undercover KGB agent, he had traveled the globe in the guise of a journalist. His wife, Elena—Anna’s older sister—had accompanied him. One would think that Anna would be bothered by his service in an agency she hated, and surely displeased that her sister had married him. But the matter was not that simple.
Anna and Yuri had been friends for a quarter century, ever since he began dating her sister. There is a charming story of how he impersonated a visiting Canadian to enable Anna to save face at her high school. Elena, already a university student, came home one day to find her sister “at the point of breaking.” Anna had agreed to organize a school assembly with a foreign student as guest of honor. She had found a Cuban boy to fill the role, but at the last minute he had canceled. Now Anna’s prestige was on the line.
Elena called Yuri, her strapping twenty-one-year-old boyfriend. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll be the foreigner.”
The following day, Anna stood before the assembly. We have a Canadian guest, she told the students. Yuri stood. He was wearing a borrowed denim jacket and T-shirt, with a pack of Philip Morris cigarettes stuffed in the front pocket—his best effort to look like a Westerner. Using what he later called “bad Russian” (he didn’t think his English would pass muster), he proceeded to describe life in Canada. He talked about Canadian literature and politics, and handed out cigarettes to some of the boys. He was an absolute hit, and Anna was showered with praise. Her English teacher was the only skeptic, suggesting that next time it would be more “ideologically correct” to invite a Communist brother from Poland or Czechoslovakia.
Some time later, a fellow student visited Anna at home. There was Yuri, sitting in the kitchen with Elena. “What is the Canadian doing here?” the bewildered schoolmate asked. No one had yet caught on to the ruse. Indeed, an amusing rumor quickly reached Yuri’s ear—his girlfriend Elena was defying custom by dating a Westerner.
Anna and Elena traveled different paths as young women. While Anna chose to marry the freewheeling Alexander who shocked her parents, Elena chose Yuri, by all accounts a decent if straightlaced fellow who appeared to be going places. The two young men, both army veterans, were already friends when they began courting the sisters. But when KGB agents separately approached them after graduation and offered attractive pay and benefits to enlist, Yuri signed up and Alexander said no. The couples very soon ran in separate circles, though they never lost touch with each other.
When I met Elena at a chic Japanese café in Moscow, I had to remind myself that she was Anna’s sister, so pronounced was the contrast in their appearances. Anna was bookishly attractive and a conservative dresser. Elena was glamorous, statuesque in a skintight black top and pants, easy to imagine as the jet-setting wife of a secret agent.
After Anna was poisoned on her way to the schoolhouse in Beslan, it was Yuri’s money that paid for a charter plane to whisk her back to Moscow. A cynic could attribute that and other deeds—such as arranging for a U.S. passport—to Yuri’s understandable desire to please his wife by helping his sister-in-law. Yet I sensed a genuine bond between Anna and Yuri that had survived for years. Perhaps their relationship is best understood as one more piece of evidence that Russia is full of contradictions.
Despite her newspaper’s limited audience, Anna’s reporting had an impact within Russia. Her exposés of official malfeasance sometimes generated enough public outrage to force a response by the government. She caused prosecutions to be launched and participated in some of the trials that followed. Anna’s readiness to be a peacemaker in moments of crisis, typified by her attempt to negotiate the release of the Nord-Ost hostages, forced state-controlled television to acknowledge her existence.
The Kremlin did its best to get in her way. Except for news events such as Nord-Ost, Anna was essentially barred from Russian television. “I am a pariah,” Anna wrote.
Yet Putin did not respond publicly to her slashing attacks on him and his policies. Nor were there punitive actions directed at Anna personally. She traveled unhindered in and out of Chechnya. Her Russian passport was never seized, even as she went abroad to excoriate Putin and meet with his critics in London—Oleg Gordievsky, the 1980s KGB defector; Akhmed Zakayev, the Chechen opposition representative abroad; and Litvinenko. Fabricated criminal charges were a favored tactic to punish “enemies” of the Russian state, but none were ever lodged against Anna. Indeed, she said that she could meet and interview almost any top official, as long as the encounter was kept secret.
Putin’s public silence was attributable to his media savvy. He knew that television and radio were what really mattered inside Russia; he had been elected twice largely due to the heavy propaganda hand that the state wielded over the airwaves. Relatively few Russians read newspapers, and most of those who did bought the major dailies. Anna’s employer, Novaya Gazeta, was no threat to him. Putin seemed to have written off Novaya Gazeta as a grudgingly tolerated relic, like Russia’s only remaining independent radio station, Echo Moskvy.
None of this is to suggest that the threats against Anna’s life ever lessened. After her poisoning, she wrote: “If you want to go on working as a journalist, it’s total servility to Putin. Otherwise, it can be death, the bullet, poison or trial—whatever our special services, Putin’s guard dogs, see fit.”
“I know this is all going to end badly,” she told one friend. To another, she said, “I know I am not going to die in my bed.” While handing Anna a journalistic award for courage, Mariane Pearl, the widow of slain Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, could “feel that this woman knew she was going to die. Everybody in the audience could.”
Anna began telling her daughter, Vera, where she kept important personal papers, such as financial records. “I’m putting this document here,” Anna said. “If I’m not here, remember it is here.”
She almost certainly realized that she had crossed an invisible line, the boundary in Russia beyond which it is acceptable to murder someone. Sergei Lapin (no relation to “Cadet,” the police lieutenant in Chechnya who threatened Anna) was deputy chief prosecutor of Moscow until 2006. He knows about the boundary and how murder happens in the segment of Russian society Anna reported on.
No smart political leader or businessman outright orders a killing. He doesn’t have to. When a threat of any kind appears on the horizon, his organization understands that it must be dealt with. The responsibility to do so falls to underlings “whose job, to say it softly, is to make sure the business develops smoothly,” said Lapin.
“Everyone does his job. They understand they want to do a certain deal. Then they see that it isn’t working. They say, ‘We tried to negotiate, it didn’t work. So that’s it.’ Rarely the head of the organization will say explicitly that he wants someone killed. But [his deputies know] the deal needs to get done. The head finds out ex post facto.”
Vera tried to shrug off what her mother was saying. “One could hardly believe this would really happen,” she said. Still, Vera and her brother and their father, Alexander, tried to think of ways to persuade Anna to take fewer risks. It seemed an impossible task.
Then, in early 2006, the daughter discovered she was pregnant. The father was a young man she was dating. Vera would not marry him, but she would have the child, she announced. That gave Anna pause. She was going to be a grandmother. Her two children recalled a pledge Anna made that she would lead a quieter life if one of them produced a grandchild. “She never simply promised,” Vera said. “It meant she really would.”
Later in the year, there was reason to think Vera’s optimism was well placed. Anna told a friend that she was thinking of quitting journalism altogether and becoming a stay-in-Moscow grandmother. At an August 30 dinner celebrating her forty-eighth birthday, Anna expressed delight about the impending birth. The hostess sensed that her friend wanted to “return to a normal life,” meaning no more trips to Chechnya.
On October 5, Radio Liberty asked Anna to comment on the thirtieth birthday of Ramzan Kadyrov, now the prime minister of Chechnya. Anna savaged him as usual, calling the pro-Putin ruler the “Stalin of our times” who tortured and murdered fellow Chechens to stay in power. He was a likely candidate for a revenge killing, she warned, adding: “I don’t wish death on anyone, but as far as this particular person is concerned, I think he should take serious care of his security.”
Early on the afternoon of October 7, mother and daughter separately left Anna’s house to shop. Both were on the lookout for a bathroom basin large enough to bathe the baby. Each time Vera came across a basin that might work, she used her cell phone to alert her mother, and Anna did the same. Their hunt for the right basin bordered on the comic: They soon realized they were crossing each other’s tracks, sometimes visiting the same shops only minutes apart.
Later in the day, Vera told her mother to go home and rest. Despite her public persona of invincibility, Anna had not fully recovered from the effects of the poisoning two years earlier en route to Beslan. More than once, the children had had to summon an ambulance when her symptoms worsened.
Around four-thirty p.m., Vera called Anna at home, but there was no answer. Then her cell phone rang. It was Ilya. He also had telephoned their mother’s apartment and got no answer. Thoughts of the poisoning arose.
“You are close. Why don’t you go check?” Vera suggested.
Ten minutes later, her brother called back.
“They killed Mama,” he said.
A man in a baseball cap had secreted himself inside Anna’s apartment building. When she stepped out of the elevator on her floor, he was waiting. He stood before her and fired four shots point-blank. Three bullets tore into her chest and the fourth penetrated her head. The force of the shots slammed her back into the elevator car, where a neighbor found her body. The murder weapon, a 9-millimeter Makarov semi-automatic pistol with its serial number scratched out, was left at the scene.
Vera didn’t believe it, couldn’t believe it.
Anna’s friend from childhood Elena Morozova was in her car when an acquaintance called and told her to turn on the radio. “We’ve got this bit of tragic news,” the announcer said. “Anna Politkovskaya was killed near the entrance to her house.”
Elena telephoned Masha Khaykina, another of Anna’s close friends from school days. “They’ve killed Anka,” she said.
Masha screamed.
In London, Alexander Litvinenko’s wife told him, “Oi, Alexander, I have terrible news for you. They shot Anya.” He began pacing “like a wounded animal.”
Vladimir Putin was at a party in honor of his fifty-fourth birthday. A guest conveyed the news of Anna’s assassination. He issued no immediate statement.
Asked about her death three days later, in Germany, Putin famously replied that it was a pity but that her “influence on the country’s political life…was minimal.”
By one expert’s measure, Anna’s killing was out of the ordinary. Oleg Panfilov, with whom I worked in Tajikistan in 1992, directs a Moscow center that defends press rights in the former Soviet states. He said twenty-six reporters were killed in the former Soviet Union in 2006, the last year for which he had complete statistics. But he believed that only one—Anna—probably died for what she wrote. The other deaths likely could be attributed to personal disputes or business disagreements, he said.
Anna had a long list of enemies. Almost every time she wrote a story, she was protesting an injustice that someone had suffered. That also meant she was attacking someone—the person or persons at fault. And Anna named names. So the number of characters who might have wanted her dead is large. Ramzan Kadyrov, the Chechen leader she repeatedly berated, is thought by many to be a prime suspect. He had publicly threatened her. The murder happened two days after his birthday, giving rise to speculation that it was a present from thuggish admirers. Three Chechens were among the ten men arrested in the case, perhaps an additional reason to focus attention on him.
My hunch is that this was not a murder that required approval at the top. But it is reasonable to suspect that the FSB was complicit in Anna’s death, at least at some level. Those who engineered her killing almost certainly assumed they would get away with it. They knew it would be seen as a political killing and that there would be repercussions. But they must have had reason to believe that they could weather the repercussions with relatively little effort. It is a level of confidence that one would expect to find within the FSB, or among those close to the organization. (One of the first suspects to be arrested was an FSB officer, who was accused of providing Anna’s address to the triggerman. Will it be shown that he was ordered by someone higher up to provide this assistance? Perhaps, but that’s not a requirement. He could have been operating under the usual understanding that certain people are fair game. The wisdom of former prosecutor Sergei Lapin may have application here.)
What about Putin? Did he order Anna’s murder? I have not heard anyone present a credible case against the Russian president. I don’t believe it happened at his explicit direction, or even his vague suggestion. Some have suggested a theory like the one linking Anna’s killing to Kadyrov—that it was a gangland-style present to Putin. She was slain on the exact date of the president’s birthday. In the end, though, such speculation is an almost pointless exercise. Putin is responsible because, as with Nord-Ost and Paul Klebnikov’s murder, he created the climate of impunity in which someone decided that Anna could die. Putin’s rule protects those who are inside the system or at least accept it. Outsiders cannot expect the same protection. That applies to business, politics, or journalism. Violence can be permissible against those deemed to be outsiders.
Anna’s legacy is that she made a difference, no matter Putin’s cold dismissal of her worth. She did what she did because she saw no one else doing it. She refused to be intimidated, and she made people’s lives better.
But I suspect that she didn’t care much about a legacy. For Anna, it added up to this: She did her best, she lived her life, and that was about it. Yes, it would have been pleasing to think that people would remember her. But would that have changed how Anna answered her calling? I think not.
Irina Fadeeva, one of the Nord-Ostsi women, who lost her teenage son, Yaroslav, in the theater tragedy, related the following to me:
A while after Anna’s death, Irina dreamed that the two of them were out walking. They came to a glass house, and Anna headed toward it.
“I’ll walk with you,” Irina said.
“No, you can’t come with me,” Anna replied. “With me it’s very dangerous. They could kill me.”
Anna pulled her hat tight over her eyes, and disappeared inside.