Putin's Russia: Life in a Failing Democracy

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She wasn’t charismatic, she didn’t fill lecture halls, and she wasn’t much good at talk shows either. Nevertheless, at the time of her murder in Moscow, Anna Politkovskaya was at the pinnacle of her influence. One of the best-known journalists in Russia and one of the best-known Russian journalists in the world, she was proof—and more is always needed—that there is still nothing quite so powerful as the written word.

The subject of Politkovskaya’s writing was Russia itself, and in particular what she called Russia’s “dirty war” in Chechnya. Long after the rest of the international press corps had abandoned Chechnya—it was too dangerous for most journalists, too complicated, too obscure—she kept telling heartbreaking Chechen stories: the Russian army colonel who pulled eighty-nine elderly people from the ruins of Grozny but received no medals, or the Chechen schoolboy who was ill from the aftereffects of torture but could get no compensation. A hallmark of her books and articles was the laborious descriptions of how she tried, and invariably failed, to get explanations from hostile and evasive Russian authorities. But she had no patience for the fanatical fringe of the Chechen independence movement either. Ideologues on both sides of the war repelled her: What interested her were human stories, particularly when they concerned brave, kind, and honest ordinary people.

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