Is Journalism Worth Dying For?: Final Dispatches (63 page)

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. One night people in uniform came and took away their 16-year-old son. The parents searched for him for a long time but did not find him. Then their house was bombed and they fled. They wandered through Central Russia, living in cellars. They had nothing left, not even their family photographs.

One day they came to Anna to tell her about their son, what kind of boy he was, what he liked, what books he read, the kind of smile he had.

Anna wrote about all that. Later they came to see her again, to thank her. The only thing they had left of their son was Anna’s note in the
newspaper, and now it hangs on their wall behind glass in a picture frame. “It’s important to have something to hold on to, even if it is only in newsprint,” his parents told her.

She did more than her duty.

Who Killed Anna and Why? Vyacheslav Izmailov, Military Correspondent for
Novaya gazeta

Thousands of people have died in Chechnya in extra-judicial killings. Not in battle: many of those killed had no involvement at all with the resistance fighters.

The victims of Major Lapin and his accomplices from the Khanty-Mansiysk Combined Militia Unit, assigned to the October District Interior Affairs Office in Grozny, died under torture; the GRU agents in Captain Ulman’s gang shot and burned teachers from the Chechen village of Dai; Colonel Budanov, the Commanding Officer of 160 Tank Regiment, raped and murdered a 17-year-old Chechen girl.

The criminal charges brought against these scum in uniform were brought not as a result of facts revealed in Anna Politkovskaya’s publications, but mainly as a result of the publicity she gave them by writing about them in
Novaya gazeta
. I have no doubt that, given the chance, these Lapins, Budanovs and Ulmans, and also some of their supporters, might well have settled scores with Anna Politkovskaya. Only, however, if they had the opportunity, and I do not believe that such an opportunity presented itself. Nevertheless, these possibilities, even though they have been looked at to some extent by
Novaya gazeta
’s inquiry, should not be dismissed.

Anna wrote about torture, murder, and abductions in Chechnya. These monstrous deeds were perpetrated by representatives of all the security agencies: the Interior Ministry, the FSB, the Central Intelligence Directorate (GRU), and also the Kadyrovites, Baisarovites (Movladi Baisarov’s men were operationally under the command of the FSB), the Yamadayevites (Suleyman Yamadayev is the Commander of the East Special Operations Battalion of the Central Intelligence
Directorate of the Ministry of Defence, the Kakievites (Said-Mahomed Kakiev is the Commander of the West Battalion), and resistance fighters.

Moreover, in order to divert suspicion from themselves, any of these organizations might employ the methods of their rivals and even enemies. All these kidnappers and murderers have so covered their tracks and so mimicked one another that sometimes they themselves could not tell who had abducted or murdered a particular person.

Sometimes, however, Anna’s revelations were completely exclusive and presented, moreover, in the form of brilliant journalism. They discredited newly proclaimed “Heroes of Russia,” and struck one living “Hero,” Ramzan Kadyrov, who was making good money through criminal business dealings out of the memory of that dead “Hero,” his deified dad, hitting him, as they say, not on the eyebrow but smack in the eye.

Until May 9, 2004 the Kadyrov family’s opportunities for self-enrichment were relatively limited. In those days Ramzan’s immediate entourage drove around not in Mercedes and Ferraris, as they do today, but in far more modest Zhiguli-99s and Zhiguli-10s.

After the death of Akhmat-hadji Kadyrov, his son Ramzan found he had considerably greater scope. In the first place, he was immediately promoted to the position of First Deputy Prime Minister, in effect crushing the Prime Minister, Sergey Abramov. In the second place, he set up the Akhmat-hadji Kadyrov Foundation, an organization for the laundering and uninhibited exploitation of resources amounting to many millions of dollars. Kadyrov Junior and his henchmen levied tribute on the entire population of Chechnya, from the humblest toilet cleaner to the highest state officials, including ministers, rank and file officers of the militia, and senior officers of the Chechen Interior Ministry.

In her article, “Ramzan Kadyrov, the Pride of Chechnya” (
Novaya gazeta
, No. 42, June 5, 2006), Anna proved that the A. Kadyrov Foundation obtained its funds in the main by extortion from the Chechen people. Anybody who refused to pay up was, at best, sacked. As a result of his legalised extortion racket, Kadyrov Junior became the richest
man in Chechnya. He and his retinue now drive around in flashy foreign cars, build themselves palaces in Chechnya and beyond its borders, and buy expensive flats in Moscow.

Anna explained how journalists working on Kadyrov’s image were generating a myth in Chechnya to the effect that the Republic’s restoration was taking place at the expense of Ramzan Kadyrov personally and of his Foundation. She showed that of 27 projects, only six were being financed by non-budgetary resources. The other projects, amounting to billions, were being financed from the budget of the Russian Federation.

Having in spring 2000 become Prime Minister in the Chechen government, Ramzan Kadyrov was sucking at the breasts of two mothers, the Russian federal budget and his own Foundation’s proceeds of crime.

Describing the Chechen beauty competition held at the Foundation’s expense, Anna wrote, “After the jury had announced the name of the winner and many girls had been given cars, there was a celebratory dinner in a Gudermes restaurant. Kadyrov Junior and several dozen bodyguards arrived. The winners were commanded to dance for him and the others and, as the dancing continued, Kadyrov Junior ordered bodyguards who were not dancing to throw banknotes at the young ladies, hundred-dollar and thousand-rouble banknotes […]

“Years will pass, all things will pass, and people will have no wish to recall any detail of these Hundred Days with their oaths of loyalty to the Kadyrov cause. But what of the girls who in May 2006 crawled around on that restaurant floor? What of the young journalists who put their signatures to a publication titled ‘Kadyrov, the Peacemaker,’ at a time when hundreds of people had been tortured to death in Tsentoroy? How will they live with themselves? I cannot imagine.”

The mafia does not forgive such exposés.

I Remember, Anna and I were Talking … Galina Mursalieva, Columnist for
Novaya gazeta

I remember Anna and I were talking about the heroes of our times.
There had just been two tragic incidents: Private Andrey Sychev had been brutally mutilated in the Army, and another 20-year-old in Moscow, Alexander Koptsev, had himself done the mutilating when he took a knife into a synagogue and wounded those at prayer. Anna very scrupulously investigated the circumstances of the first tragedy, and I examined the highly dramatic fate of the second young man. Together we identified a phenomenon: she told me that money was being sent from different parts of the country to the mother of Private Sychev, and I told her that money was also being sent to the mother of Koptsev. She was extremely interested by this twist. People who knew her well remember her ability to home in on the essence of her topics, to empathise her way into them. You could almost feel it physically. Her whole being leaning forward, slightly hunched, one hand propping up her chin and the other at her brow like the peak of a cap – that is how she looked as she sat at her desk, thinking and concentrating.

“So those are the new heroes Russia has chosen,” she said.

“I suppose so,” I agreed. “If you discount the glitz, the gossip column celebrities, the show business personalities, then in effect we are left with just these two boys, symbolising two of Russia’s horrors: the reign of the ‘grandads’ in the Army, and xenophobia. The popular mind seems to have no room for any other heroes.”

Anna thought for a moment, and then said abruptly, “In other words, we have none.”

I had to agree.

I also remember saying to her that nowadays no sensation lasted more than three days. She gestured dismissively, “They don’t even last a day.”

A certain solemn person said to me today, “Do you mean to say that you told Anna Politkovskaya, whose work was the most long-lasting sensation of recent history, who was herself a symbol of free, independent journalism and unquestionably a heroine, that there couldn’t be any long-lasting sensations? You said that the only heroes can be people who evoke either pity or aggression? You said that to a saint after whom streets will be named?” Well, actually, yes.

These words were simply inapplicable to her in life. Depending on
her mood she would either have burst out laughing in the face of anybody who spoke so pompously about her, or would turn away, having lost all interest in them.

I knew what she had achieved, I knew about the bronze presentation cases from award ceremonies, and I knew their recipient had never opened them. She not only never wore the mantle of the fine words which had been said about her, she didn’t even try it on because that was not her style.

Of course I knew who I was talking to. I wasn’t blind. I had seen the stream of people from every part of Russia coming to her, seeing in her their last hope of justice. I understood what she was doing, the risk she was constantly running. But as often happens, when you’re in the middle of a professional conversation, you can’t start viewing the person you are talking to as an icon, the more so when the icon herself never switches on her canonised look. You are talking to a colleague on a straightforward, everyday, down-to-earth, work level. I was just sitting too close to her, our desks side by side, for seven years.

I remember her coming back after receiving all sorts of amazingly prestigious awards. There was no celebration, no joy, only disappointment. There she was sitting, holding her column very close in front of her and reading out her own text. I came in and said in passing, “Anna, congratulations. That’s super.”

“But they don’t want to understand anything. They won’t listen! They are completely uninterested. It’s not super, Galya.”

“But it’s a victory?”

“No!”

And at first I didn’t understand. Why would they hand out these awards, how could they select and assess if they didn’t want to understand? OK, perhaps it wasn’t a victory, but surely an award was at least a demonstration of support?

“Yes, but it is support for a journalist and not for what he or she is doing. They not only don’t want to get involved in helping with what I’m doing, they don’t even want to try to understand it!”

If it had been anyone else, I would have suspected they were
striking a pose, but the woman sitting there and saying this was so disillusioned, so weary, her expectations so clearly disappointed. The individuals on whom people’s fates depended, who might have brought about a breakthrough in the situation, didn’t want to lift a finger to help. It wasn’t just Russia, it was the world. It just wanted to buy her off.

She was being left alone with a burden she could hardly bear. She had been fêted and blessed on her way, and in the process they had psychologically washed their hands of her. That was how I understood the situation.

But there were other people, a whole pack of them within Russia, who seemed to be on her side. I’m not talking about those who hated Anna – their position was clear enough and what more can one say about them? I’m not even talking about those who did not like her, because that too is not all that important. There were others, though, who didn’t love her enough. They were agitated every time something terrible happened to her, when she was taken prisoner in Chechnya, when she was poisoned on her way to Beslan. Yes, they were upset, but when everything worked out all right, they didn’t think it had been that big a deal. They were sort of beside her, and this gave them the right to snipe at her. They stood shoulder to shoulder with her, but in a casual sort of way, and looked on at someone who had assumed a burden which, without exaggeration, would have had a thousand people groaning under its weight. And they decided it wasn’t that big a deal.