Is Journalism Worth Dying For?: Final Dispatches (62 page)

An Independent Creative Entity Elena Morozova

MLAN (Masha–Lena–Anna): this remarkable association lasted long enough to celebrate its fortieth anniversary, but came to an end on October 7, 2006. The bullets fired from a Makarov pistol hit their target, the heart of the association, Anya.

We had been friends since childhood, and it was a friendship not directed against anybody else, as seems often to be the case nowadays: we just enjoyed each other’s company and all that went with that. Friendship, especially if it lasts for many years, is a living organism. Like molecules in a cell, we were sometimes drawn to each other, sometimes repelled. Sometimes we existed quite autonomously, before again drawing close. We were forever asking Anna to write about us because so many interesting things happened; life threw up plots which the scriptwriters of soap operas might have envied. She did not take the suggestion seriously, and said she would think about it when she was old and sitting at home with her grandchildren. During the last decade, however, she never had time to sit anywhere. She periodically disappeared from our cosy, well-ordered life in the center of Moscow and went back again and again to a different, terrifying life where a war was being fought, people were dying, a life of pain and suffering.
She flew there to give help and hope, to rescue people and restore the truth. Protecting the peace of our families, we instinctively avoided letting that war into our hearts. We told her she only lived once, that she should think about her children and parents, that she shouldn’t take such risks. Anna didn’t even try to argue with us. She considered herself duty bound to relieve the pain of others. In the traditional photographs taken during our happy reunions in recent years, her eyes are always sad. That other life never completely freed her to return to our life in Moscow.

Anna was absolutely convinced of the rightness of her choice to fight for justice, and to defend the weak and the wronged. It is the way saints live but, as we know from history, their lives are unfortunately often short. She cannot write any more now. Now it is our turn to write about her.

The idea of forming our association came to us one time when, joining hands, we jumped off a garage roof into a deep snowdrift. Alas, I doubt there are any garage owners left who are so kindly disposed towards children. A few months before we had all been new pupils in Class 1B. We were all born leaders and a happy childhood intuition must have suggested to us that it would be better to join forces, to form a nucleus which would attract our classmates, rather than fight it out with each other to be the leader of this new pack. We were minded to do good, having been brought up on the edifying novellas of Valentina Oseyeva and Arkadiy Gaidar, and tales about heroic Young Pioneers.

Our first good deed was to help the class dunce, a boy called Volodya, to revise for a series of class tests and to improve dramatically on his disgraceful marks. We gathered at Anna’s. She proposed an original incentive: for every mistake he made in the maths examples Volodya would have to eat several sugared cranberry sweets. Soon the sweets were all gone, but the mistakes persisted. Volodya did not come to school the next day. Sweet things disagreed with him and he came out in a terrible rash which took ages to clear up.

Our inclination to do good deeds evolved into a determination to catch criminals. Every day as we walked to school we passed a stand in the street which had photographs of people wanted for questioning by the militia. This inspired us to new feats. For several days we followed
close on the heels of a suspicious person who evidently lived somewhere nearby. Perhaps he really did have a criminal past. At all events, he spent most of the day in the company of the local alcoholics or just hanging around aimlessly. We were convinced that we had detected a terrible saboteur and that the Motherland would be proud of us. We were never to forget the militiamen seating us in a motorbike sidecar, and with eyes ablaze and our Pioneer neckerchiefs flying in the wind we were driven round the courtyards in search of our suspect. We do not know to this day what the militia talked to him about, but for years after that our hypothetical criminal crossed to the other side of the road whenever he saw us.

We were good at our schoolwork, always organised the class concert, edited the wall newspaper, bought presents for the boys on February 23, for Soviet Army Day, and took part in amateur dramatics and dancing. We lived our lives to disconcert the foe and make our mothers proud of us. Anna was outstandingly good in every subject for the entire 10 years. Before tests and essays, her classmates would push and shove to sit as close to her desk as possible, which ensured a good mark. If Anna came into the class in the morning and said she hadn’t managed to do the homework, we knew for a fact that it was impossible. She was also successfully studying music, and had far less free time than her classmates for playing outside. From childhood she knew the meaning of discipline and hard work.

In her teens qualities became evident which were to be fundamental to her personality. She was physically incapable of condoning unfairness. She acknowledged no absolute authorities, and always told the truth to people’s faces, whatever the consequences. Anna was perfectly capable of throwing down her exercise book on the teacher’s desk if she considered he had marked her unfairly. She even stood up to the headmaster, who the teachers themselves were afraid of, if she felt another pupil had been treated unfairly. She was a maximalist. When she argued her cheeks would become livid, and she could be very abrupt. “Ostap has got the bit between his teeth,” we would joke, remembering the manic hero of Ilf and Petrov’s
Twelve Chairs
. At first we found her unyielding nature difficult, but later learned to ignore it and
tried not to bring her to boiling point, either giving way in arguments or changing the subject. We kept that habit going in later life.

Soon our friend’s civic activism moved up a gear. Anna began doubting the fairness of “developed socialism,” which is how society in the Brezhnev years was characterised. She was extremely sensitive to the sham values underlying it. We were baffled as to why she wanted to change the rules, and not just live in accordance with them like other people. It was obviously a lost cause, but she genuinely could not understand our indifference and lack of desire to improve society. Her first newspaper reporting was challenging and topical. She saw the main reason for working as a journalist as being to put right the situation she was describing, to identify and excoriate those responsible.

We grew up. Anna was the first to marry and the first to become a mother, while she was still very young. Her parents were upset that she had encumbered herself with all the trials of family life at such an early age. I will never forget her coming for a break at my dacha, holding her three-year-old son by the hand, with her year-old daughter in her arms, and simultaneously managing a folding pushchair, a potty, changes of clothing, baby food and books. All this she coped with without a car, travelling first by Metro and bus, then on the suburban train, and finally making it to the dacha on foot. It was not something every young mother could have undertaken, but Anna was never afraid of difficulties. In order to save up to buy a piano for the children, she took a second job as a cleaner at a studio on the ground floor of her apartment block. Soon a vintage instrument was bought which served not only for making music, but also as a bookshelf, a writing desk, an ironing board, and as a stand for the parrot’s cage. In those days beginning journalists lived very modestly indeed. Preparing endless breakfasts, lunches and dinners; doing the laundry and tidying up; teaching the children music, drawing and general knowledge, Anna would periodically exclaim, “I am an independent creative unit.” In fact, there was very little time for creativity, and she was able to write only at night after the children had been put to bed and the housework done.

We always joked that the more difficult her life became, the better she looked. She was naturally good-looking, and seemed to confirm
the male chauvinist maxim that “hardship makes women prettier.” She was never stumped for an answer, able in an instant to summon up her will, focus herself like a sportswoman preparing for a jump, and fling herself into battle against the latest vicissitude.

Throughout her life Anna made few demands on her surroundings. She had neither the time nor the money to furnish her new flat on Lesnaya Street, an address which has now unhappily become so famous. She dressed tastefully but simply and was uninterested in jewellery or expensive clothes. The handle of her favorite black bag, which went along on her numerous assignments in Chechnya, was bound round with sticking plaster, and immense efforts were needed to persuade her to buy a new one. There was a hole of unknown origin in the side of her beloved Zhiguli, but she did not want to buy a new car. She liked learning to cook new dishes and would scrupulously, step by step, carry out all the instructions in a recipe. Unfortunately, she had no time and could not be bothered cooking for herself. The only foods which were invariably to be found in her home were honey, cheese, rolls and tea.

We spent the whole of our lives within sight of each other, but it will remain a mystery to us how Anna managed to exist in two parallel worlds: in our familiar life, which is the life most women live, and in the life of an investigative journalist, writing mostly about politically sensitive matters, about society’s imperfections, as responsive to the pain of others as to her own, making every effort to improve the lot of at least one person. In her “civilian” life Anna devoted a lot of time to her children and was a real friend and adviser to them. She often dropped in for a chat, and we would sit in the kitchen, drinking endless cups of tea and talking about everything in the world, but trying to avoid mentioning that other life. Anna was a marvellous conversationalist. She could tell a story vividly, and was an attentive listener. You could always turn to her for help. When my son was born she left the guests who had come to her birthday party to run over to the maternity hospital and leave me a note of congratulations. (It was before the era of mobile phones.) Anna could not bear irresolution and spinelessness. She greatly valued personal freedom. She was a complex
person, but we always knew that we were living with an icon.

Anya was … It is impossible to become reconciled to that past tense. The pain of loss is something we have yet to come to terms with. For now it seems that Anna has again flown out on an assignment, and that soon our answering machine will pass on her favorite message, “Hello, this is Anya Politkovskaya. I live just across the road. Call me.”

Unfortunately, there is no reaching her now by phone, but she is constantly in our thoughts. We miss you so much, Anna.

A Woman of Integrity Zoya Yeroshok, Columnist for
Novaya gazeta

We were not close friends, but when we met we talked at great length, usually after Anna returned from an assignment. She would tell me about the people she was describing at that moment. She spoke of them in great detail but very unemotionally.

Her office was a reception room for the whole of Russia, and there was invariably some person in trouble sitting there. Anna would listen to them for hours, questioning them, rescuing them from difficulties, giving them back their life. In
Novaya gazeta
’s office I only ever saw her working, never just drinking coffee in the bar or chatting idly.

Anna was a pure, honest and fearless journalist, absolutely selfless and original. In the seven years she worked for
Novaya gazeta
she published more than 500 articles, and of these more than 40 resulted in criminal charges being brought or trials reviewed.

Her words had a different specific gravity from even the very best words in the very best order. They cast a shadow, probably because they had the power to redeem or expose. Mostly, they redeemed, despite her many critical articles, because Anna always remembered who she was writing for and what she was writing about. She never wrote just for the sake of it.

She was a journalist with raw nerves, for whom nothing was simple or easy – everything was serious and responsible. She was a very clear and intelligible journalist, never picking a fight for the sake of it. Rather,
she had a tragic awareness that it was unavoidable. Anna wrote a lot about Chechnya, but her real concern was just ordinary people and the lives they were living. The attitude towards Chechens in our beloved Fatherland has long been not even to regard them as cattle (since cattle are sentient beings), but as matter, as inanimate objects. Many came to accept this attitude.

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.