Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [215]
The poet Naum Korzhavin has written, “Is the law really an insane competition to see who can sacrifice whom for the good of the many?”Such a competition was indeed organised in Russia in the Stalin era, and it was a defilement. It is exactly what Pasternak describes: “I felt affinity with the poor … but have been spoiled since the times were hexed and sorrow came to be reviled, and philistines and optimists perplexed.” “Making optimists perplexed” refers to those who are invariably, unquestioningly cheerful in the face of other people’s misery, who have no problem with living like that. They believe that living like that means they are in tune with the times, although even the most complex and intriguing of us are very, very ordinary in the eyes of God.
Anna never made a thing of her own exceptionalness, never made a thing about remaining true to herself. She was a sincere person, without cheap sentimentality, without touching sweetness, but she simply would not accept the idea that there might be people for whom you could feel no pity, who were expendable. When, in the name of the People, the state authorities were murdering people, Anna was not with the crowd who silently looked away. Her resistance to evil took the form of frankness. She openly hated evil and openly loved good. She never, ever came to terms with cannibals.
She was pained that the genuine links between people had been destroyed, that people were being divided according to nationality, or into the rich and the poor.
Anna carried on her shoulders and within herself a burden beyond the strength of even hundreds of journalists. Life made her resolute, and taught her to work ably and effectively, and only on behalf of and alongside ordinary people, the most vulnerable and the most forgotten.
She was no idol for the intelligentsia, and neither did she idolise the intelligentsia. That ordinary people living ordinary lives had no place in the New Russian life of the wealthy Anna blamed not only on the state authorities, but on all those “who only needed to promote solidarity.” Even simple solidarity is something almost all the ordinary people have yet to see from the intelligentsia. The “common” people have been overlooked, they are “beyond the bounds of our sympathy,” as Korzhavin once crisply put it.
Anna fought against the demagogy of social justice. She knew that justice is not something you introduce or attain: justice has to be worked on. She worked on it, sometimes completely alone. (“I wriggle between the elites of the sated and the scrubbed, pushing my own line and trying not to become part of any of them.”)
Anna worked inside her own territory, one she had conquered. She was apart from everyone else, but she sought understanding, and failing that, then at least partial understanding.
She didn’t try to shout anyone down, she merely invited people to hear and see each other. She tried desperately to find a modicum of enduring respect in society for the public and the personal.
Anna was a very Russian journalist. Today the pseudo-patriots splutter venomously about her American citizenship and cannot abide the fact that she was the daughter of diplomats and was born in America. Well, good luck to them. I will say only that Anna loved Russia. Russia was her life, and patriotism is love, not national egotism or a means of self-assertion. When Anna was invited to emigrate, she said, “Novaya gazeta still needs me.”
She once told me about a brief note she had published. A family lived in Chechnya.