Sunday February 25, 2007
The Observer

Saturday 7 October was a marathon of disheartening tasks for Anna Politkovskaya. Two weeks earlier her father, a retired diplomat, had died of a heart attack as he emerged from the Moscow metro while on his way to visit Politkovskaya's mother, Raisa Mazepa, in hospital. She had just been diagnosed with cancer and was too weak even to attend her husband's funeral. 'Your father will forgive me, because he knows I have always loved him,' she told Anna and her sister, Elena Kudimova, the day he was buried. A week later she underwent surgery, and since then Anna and Elena had been taking turns helping her cope with her grief.

Politkovskaya was supposed to spend the day at the hospital, but her 26-year-old daughter, who was pregnant, had just moved into her flat, on Lesnaya Street, while her own place was being prepared for the baby. 'Anna had so much on her mind,' Elena Kudimova told me when we met in London, before Christmas. 'And she was trying to finish her article.'

Politkovskaya was a special correspondent for the small, liberal newspaper Novaya Gazeta, and, like most of her work, the piece focused on the terror that pervades the southern republic of Chechnya. This time, she had been trying to document repeated acts of torture carried out by squads loyal to the pro-Russian prime minister, Ramzan Kadyrov. In the past seven years Politkovskaya had written dozens of accounts of life during wartime; many had been collected in her book A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya. Politkovskaya was far more likely to spend time in a hospital than on a battlefield, and her writing bore frequent witness to robbery, rape and the unbridled cruelty of life in a place few other Russians - and almost no other reporters - cared to think about.

One day, at the Ninth Municipal Hospital in Grozny, the Chechen capital, Politkovskaya encountered a 62-year-old woman named Aishat Suleimanova whose eyes expressed 'complete indifference to the world', as she wrote in a typical piece. 'And it is beyond one's strength to look at her naked body. She has been disembowelled like a chicken. The surgeons have cut into her from above her chest to her groin.' Two weeks earlier, a 'young fellow in a Russian serviceman's uniform put Aishat on a bed in her own house and shot five 5.45mm bullets into her. These bullets, weighted at the edges, have been forbidden by all international conventions as inhumane.'

In the west, Politkovskaya's honesty brought her a measure of fame and a string of awards, bestowed at ceremonies in hotel ballrooms from New York to Stockholm. At home, she had none of that. Her excoriations of Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, ensured isolation, harassment, and, many predicted, death. 'I am a pariah,' she wrote in an essay last year. 'That is the result of my journalism through the years of the second Chechen war, and of publishing books abroad about life in Russia.'

Despite the fact that Politkovskaya was articulate, attractive and accomplished, she was barred from appearing on television, which is the only way the vast majority of Russians get news. To the degree that a living woman could be airbrushed out of post-Soviet history, she had been. 'People call the newspaper,' she wrote, 'and send letters with one and the same question: "Why are you writing about this? Why are you scaring us? Why do we need to know this?"' She provided an answer as much for herself as for any reader: 'I'm sure this has to be done, for one simple reason: as contemporaries of this war, we will be held responsible for it. The classic Soviet excuse of not being there and not taking part in anything personally won't work. So I want you to know the truth. Then you'll be free of cynicism.'

On the afternoon of 7 October Politkovskaya drove to a supermarket near her mother's flat on the Frunzenskaya Embankment. Her daughter had planned to meet her there but was delayed. Nonetheless, as a surveillance camera at the store later showed, Politkovskaya was not alone. A young woman and a tall, slender man whose face was obscured by a baseball cap lurked in the aisles as she shopped. When Politkovskaya finished she drove home in her silver Vaz 2110 and parked a few feet from the entrance to her building. She took the tiny elevator up to her flat on the seventh floor and dropped two bags of groceries at the door. Then she went down to fetch the rest of her parcels. When the elevator opened on the ground floor, her killer was waiting. He shot her four times - the first two bullets piercing her heart and lungs, the third shattering her shoulder, with a force that drove Politkovskaya back into the elevator. He then administered what is referred to in Moscow, where contract killings have become routine, as the kontrolnyi vystrel - the control shot. He fired a bullet into her head from inches away. Then he dropped his weapon, a plastic 9mm Makarov pistol whose serial number had been filed away, and slipped into the darkening afternoon.

'Anna knew the risks only too well,' her sister told me. Politkovskaya was born in New York in 1958 while her father was serving at the United Nations; not long ago her family persuaded her to obtain an American passport - 'but that was as far as she would go,' Kudimova said. 'We all begged her to stop. We begged. My parents. Her editors. Her children. But she always answered the same way: "How could I live with myself if I didn't write the truth?"'

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