Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [209]
Anna’s first real victory was on the program Vzglyad [“Viewpoint”]. Volodya Mukusev and I came back from Minsk where we had been earning money by doing meetings with viewers. Anna turned out the pockets of my anorak before putting it in the wash. “Have you read this?” she asked. It was an urgent appeal for help, in a woman’s handwriting, in red ink, about the Belarussian Children’s Haematology Center. “This is addressed to you because of your Chernobyl,” Anna exclaimed. “We must phone immediately!” A week later I returned to Minsk. Blurred filming with an amateur video camera which can be taken anywhere without being conspicuous. The truth is being concealed. We dig out information. Parents’ tears.
I was away in a different part of Russia when Andrey Razbash edited the story, which swept Europe. In a short time millions were collected for the clinic. Anna insisted I should go back for an “inspection” trip to Minsk, and later to Germany where Russian doctors were being trained up. Raisa Gorbacheva visited the children’s hospital. Within a few years the doctors were no longer Russian, and the Haematology Center was the best in Eastern Europe. Anna was delighted to see the situation so radically altered. Before the program went out more than 80 per cent of the children there were dying. Only a few years later, roughly the same number were being cured and the remainder were in remission.
She sat distraught and frozen in my car next to the house where journalist Vlad Listiev had just been murdered. We had never been close, but a year before she had arranged an amazing party at our house. It was very crowded, another attempt to bind together something that was falling apart.
International Women’s Day, March 8, 1995, wasn’t the obvious day to choose. Vlad did not drink, went away to offer good wishes to the women of the world live on air, and came back to the party. Everyone had had plenty to eat and drink and was in a good mood. Anna noticed a slight whiff of money. “You didn’t once mention Ivan Kivelidi. He gave you the start-up capital for your television company. You won’t last long at this rate.” That same year the charming Ivan Kivelidi was mysteriously poisoned.*
Sitting in that car, neither of us yet realized that an oil bonanza would send everyone into moral hibernation, that the mass media would glamorously and expensively expire in the hands of “natural monopolies,” whose naturalness was not obvious. I often heard on my assignments, “What a fearless namesake you have working at Novaya gazeta.” I was glad people could see that, and were aware of her commitment to her guiding principle. There were threatening signs. At home pistols were left in parcels at the door of our flat. Another time the fire hydrant in the attic above was turned full on. That was unambiguously directed at her.
By 1996 the whiff of money had become a stench. The mysterious “box of Xerox paper” containing half a million bucks for Yeltsin’s election campaign. Wealthy individuals who had built themselves mansions beyond the borders of Russia claimed that Russia was still their home. Anna was busy trying to save old people from a home in Grozny and told me on her return how a former friend of mine, by now a big official, had waited for ages by a corridor the old people were to emerge from, keeping well away from the gunfire like the coward he was, but well within range of the television cameras, in order to get himself filmed as their saviour and shown as such to the whole of Russia. To her great satisfaction, he failed, but it was symptomatic of a spreading web of vile behaviour. Anna always agreed with Dostoyevsky that you don’t get at the truth through lies and trickery, even as a temporary expedient, as our recent history has shown.
We had a stint working as a husband-and-wife team. Anna was the first