Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [197]
Nadezhda Kevorkova, Special Correspondent of Gazeta: Live Like a Soldier
The world’s most famous Russian journalist has been murdered. Actually, the only famous journalist on today’s most famous Russian newspaper. Young foreigners interested in our country know about Russia through Anna Politkovskaya’s books, and not through Mikhail Leontiev, Yuliya Latynina, Sergey Dorenko or Oksana Robski. Fine words have already been said about a blow struck at the very heart of Russian journalism, that the profession, free speech, and indeed the very lives of decent people are under threat. It is all lies.
You have to earn such a death. Observers of Kremlin life, chroniclers of the President’s meetings, uncompromising critics of the Government, those mercilessly exposing economic politics, gossip columnists – all belong to the same guild but have differing destinies.
“She lived and died like a soldier,” one of her colleagues said. No more than that.
Those who respected, loved and protected her have nothing to say because their facial muscles fail them. Everybody else’s are in full working order. Some have used muscles to put up posters, others to speak about an “irreparable loss.”
Novaya gazeta never left out a report by Politkovskaya, except once, on April 1, and once in an anniversary issue.
For seven years its editor, Dmitriy Muratov, printed everything his bloody-minded and unaccommodating columnist wrote. Colleagues in the journalistic guild spat behind her back, poured filth over her, debated whether she had some psychological proclivity to describe atrocities. They didn’t like her style, her turns of phrase were questionable, and there was a certain lack of humor.
Even on NTV before the state takeover, TV–6, and Echo of Moscow radio she was an infrequent guest. She did not like generalisations and long-winded discussions about the Wahhabi Internationale or al-Qaeda’s cash. In her presence you could not indulge in calling the Chechens or the federals brutes, Chechnya a dump, or Russia a whore.
Muratov was her unshakeable support, defending her from both friends and foes.
Why? Because this woman had put in the legwork on all her reports; because people came every day to see her; because officialdom feared her; because officials believed her even while they were excoriating her; because the zindan punishment pits she discovered really did exist; because she could not be bribed or intimidated, although she could be afraid, and was on more than one occasion; because she went to Chechnya not during the First War, when only the laziest Moscow journalists didn’t get out there. She went there during the Second Chechen War, whose beginning the liberal politicians Chubais and Nemtsov described as bringing Russian society together again, and marking the rebirth of the Army.
People brought her photographs and clips of atrocities which made men feel sick. She was asked why she went on writing when it was producing no reaction, and replied that it was her duty to write, and she was doing it.
She was on the side of the humiliated. The powers that be she found equally repellent, whichever side they were on. She was not seduced by the interest taken in her by Zbigniew Brzezinski or people from the US State Department, and her report on the reception for the “esteemed democrats of Russia” by Bush and Rice at the US Ambassador’s residence was written in the vein of light political satire.
It is not true that there was no reaction to her writing. Back in the days of Kadyrov Senior, one of his henchmen angrily shouted at the local and Moscow journalists, “Politkovskaya writes in a way that makes people believe her, but you …” He dismissed them contemptuously.
Mikhail Khodorkovsky
Friends and family of Anna! Please accept my profound condolences.
Marina Kostenetskaya, former People’s Deputy of the USSR from Latvia (1989