Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [139]
There does seem to be a vast supply of land rich in diamonds, oil and gas. The trouble is that first you have to get here.
There are no cities at the center of Russia, only townships, villages and factories. There is no gas in the houses, although there is plenty underground; no water, no drains, no avenues or embankments, neither along the Podkamennaya River nor over the Nizhnyaya Tunguskaya. Both rivers flow this way and that the length and breadth of Evenkia. Nobody has thought of trying to build anything we would recognise as a respectable road. There are no railways, no metalled roads, only an all-season dirt road 14 kilometres long which links Gorny Airport and Tura. All the other “highways” are passable only in the winter. Hence the work routine of the local administration consists of just three things: firstly, keeping the winter roads in good order; secondly, monitoring the forces of Mother Nature as she constantly destroys them; and thirdly, starting all over again. If you let your mind wander and stop monitoring the infrastructure every day, you will soon be unable to move at all. Your world will contract to the size of your own inner world and you will exist in a snowbound cell.
Who, you might ask, is capable of enduring such hardship? The answer is, only 20,000 citizens of Russia. Here, in the very heart of Russia, a meteorite fell in the early years of the departed century. It became known as the Tunguska Meteorite. And now we are here too.
HOMELESS OLD LADIES
November 11, 2004
They sit ranged along an institutional wall, old ladies who abandoned Grozny in various years and in various wars. Their coats date from the 1980s, their boots from Soviet times. Everything is worn and looks like somebody’s cast-offs. Hopelessness is in their faces and there is a sense such as you find in wards for people who have been abandoned and attempted suicide. This is a meeting of “Our Home,” a voluntarily run circle of 53 families which refugees of the “Russian language persuasion” from Chechnya organised for themselves. All are now of pensionable age, and what brought them together was a determination to fight the state for their legal rights, to obtain registration, official status, accommodation and pensions. We are in Moscow and it is now October 2004. For many, it is 10 years since their exodus and the start of their struggle. What success have they had?
Taisiya Tolstova is 81. She listens, sees, moves, and is altogether very active. Taisiya was wounded in the Second World War. She worked for 58 years, 34 of them as a teacher and 30 of those in Norilsk. She returned from the Far North to the capital of Chechnya where she was born, a fourth-generation Russian Groznyan. Now, three times a week, Taisiya cleans all 16 floors of an apartment block in the center of Moscow, all the stairwells and the landings in front of the lifts. She has no choice.
Her remuneration is exactly what she needs, a place to sleep, a little room for the concierges. The women are paid to be there for 24 hours, but instead go home at night, leaving the room free for Taisiya. It is a small, cramped space, into which only a narrow divan can be fitted, but you can sleep there, even if you have to take turns with your mentally disturbed son, Volodya.
Taisiya prays for the people who live in this block. They are her only hope of not sinking into living in filthy cellars. Under the rules of our amazing country, she has lost the legal right to work. She has no status, and without registration you can’t have a job or any other rights. In the 10 years which have passed since she fled Grozny, having lost everything she possessed, she has received nothing from the state which might even partially compensate her losses, enable her to get her life back on the rails, and provide a