Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [208]
After fairly wild evenings, I wrote in the kitchen at night. Anna herself very much wanted to write. Just 100 metres from where we lived were the offices of the railway union’s newspaper, The Whistle. She went in but returned in dismay. The director had suggested she should begin her article with the words, “How’s it going, railway worker?” You just can’t write like that! There were tears in the evenings at the grey web of everyday routine.
She was surprised I only wrote for work, never for myself. I told her about how, when I was doing my Army training, the sergeant had pulled my diary out of my locker. He read it out loud to the entire unit. Now, I explained to Anna, I kept all my thoughts in my head where no buffoon in epaulettes could grope around in them. I never saw her keep a diary after that. Her diary was her articles. Writing what you think and not what pays is like keeping a diary.
We often had visitors, and there were theatres and the Conservatory near by. “I am my own independent creative unit!” she would say a little sadly, but with a smile, a phrase adopted from some journalism textbook. Everybody who visited us on Herzen Street remembers it, but nobody realized the extent to which it was to become her guiding principle.
She systematically investigated the theatres around us. All her friends and neighbours knew by heart the play, Lunin, or the Death of Jacques at the theatre on Malaya Bronnaya. The ideas of the Decembrist revolutionaries of 1825, and especially of their wives, were discussed passionately in our home.
Marina Goldovskaya, my journalism lecturer, made a film about our family for America. The film is mainly about Anna. Marina several times asked permission to show it in Russia but Anna was always opposed to that. Our friends have their own ideas about the film. In it I come across like the Red Commander of the civil war, Vasiliy Chapayev, only on the barricades of perestroika, saving the Fatherland. Anna is Anka the machine-gunner, lugging shells up to me and guarding the rear. It was just what an American audience wanted, but in Russia it was an embarrassment because of its unintentional support of the reformers’ myth-making. In this film, A Taste of Freedom, the machine-gunner, dissatisfied with her fate, talks publicly about divorce for the first time. Our favorite scene in Chapayev is the suicidal attack. The White Guards advance and are sprayed with machine-gun fire. “A fine advance,” and back comes the contemptuous plebeian reply, “Intelligentsia!”
My heroes are visiting. The entrepreneur Artyom Tarasov is telling us something about residual oil. We don’t understand his diagrams too well, but in the evening talk together about Russia, and an oil glut which will stand everything on its head. It is plain that the so-called Democrats are already dragging their weary bones to Millionaires’ Row on the Rublyovskoye Highway, closer and closer to Stalin’s favorite haunts. Corrupt officials are receiving state awards, and Anna is shocked when she sees the son of 1960s icon Vladimir Vysotsky handing an award named after his father to the Minister of Posts and Telecommunications, Nikolai Aksenenko. The FSB, Interior Ministry and Ministry of Defence wouldn’t dream of celebrating their anniversaries anywhere other than in the Kremlin. In the midst of a crime wave, the cops, using the money of taxpayers who are afraid to go out in the evenings, churn out television programs about how brilliantly they are fighting the criminals. The worse it is for some, the better it is for others. Perhaps an oil glut will give us a breathing space; otherwise portraits of our beloved leader would already be hanging not just in every office but in