When her nemesis Vladimir Putin’s face fades, and is forgotten, the legacy of Anna Stepanovna Politkovskaya (1958-2006) will remain. Aage Borchgrevink, right, adviser in the Norwegian Helsinki Committee, also mourns Politkovskaya. (19-OCT-06)
Borchgrevink’s obituary was first published in the 13- 19 October issue of the Norwegian weekly Morgenbladet. It has been translated by HRH-F / Niels Jacob Harbitz and is republished here with the author’s permission.
The message that Anna Politkovskaya was shot and killed by unknown perpetrators outside her home in central Moscow on Saturday 7 October, did not come as a surprise to those who knew her. Fame and good fortune could not protect her forever, and she had been risking her life for many years. So how could it happen that this Moscowite, born in New York and brought up in a privileged Soviet diplomat family, ended up as Russia’s possibly most important human rights defender and one of the best known journalists in the world?
Anna Politkovskaya was a classical journalist. Her focus on individual destinies from all over the Russian Federation brought her time and again into conflict with the official version. What she saw on the ground did not correspond, neither with the picture of the Russian Federation that Kreml tried so hard to develop nor the picture of the Chechen Republic that some of the local separatist leaders there held up. Politkovskaya became fierce critic of the regime because her classical journalist method brought her to the heart of a century long Russian drama: The conflict between Empire and individual. And nowhere did this conflict express itself more clearly than in the federal warfare in the separatist mountain republic of the Chechen Republic.
As a war reporter, Politkovskaya had a key capacity, what one might call ‘the double courage’: the courage to risk life, but also to meet people, take on board their stories and let them touch and affect her. Few journalists possess both these kinds of courage. Even fewer have managed to continue their work for the whole of seven years in one of the worst and most futile conflict zones of modern times. Under these conditions, Politkovskaya wasn’t just a journalist, but rather a one-woman campaign. She organised money collections for burnt down school libraries and destroyed old people’s homes, and provided protection for witnesses to crimes. Some of these witnesses now live in Norway.
When she managed to carry on, it was because she believed that her journalism could change the Russian Federation, something that may seem strangely naive in Putin’s time, but might have sprung from her background as an intellectual offspring of the idealist currents of the Perestroika period. Politkovskaya stood firmly within the Russian humanist tradition from Pushkin via Tolstoy and Chekhov to Sakharov. Her stubbornness also came from the fierce temper that many of her colleagues were subjected to, and a conviction that she had committed her life to a Cause she did not want to abandon, namely the Chechen Republic. The way she saw it, the question as to whether the Russian Federation will re-emerge as a fascist dictatorship or a liberal democracy was inextricably tied to the conflict in the Chechen Republic. For this Cause, she was willing to sacrifice everything. In the end, she did just that.
Someone devoting herself to such a Cause must be persistent, maybe even a monomaniac. Some one devoting herself to a cause also risk becoming a loner, a stranger even to her closest friends and relatives. Politkovskaya had many admirers, but I don’t know how many close friends she had. Both within her own newspaper and among Russian and international human rights activists she could seem isolated, sometimes suspicious and vulnerable. On the other hand, she had an almost incomprehensible care for some of the families whose stories she worked on: Wherever she was in the world, whatever she was doing, she seemed always to find time and energy to call to check on ‘her Chechnyans’. Politkovskaya sacrificed everything for the cause, but the Chechen Republic gave her a lot back.
Anna Politkovskaya constantly worked against the tide. During the first war in the Chechen Republic, both Russian and international journalists travelled in large numbers to the Russian federal republic, and their work was decisive in putting an end to the war. At that time, Politkovskaya was working on social issues – old people’s homes orphanages and the health care system in the Russian Federation. During the second war in the Chechen Republic, Russian authorities has succeeded in blocking close to all witnesses out of the conflict zone and thus win the media war. Only a handful of journalists have occasionally managed to sneak into the zone on their own, and only some very few local journalists have tried to stand up against the authorities’ pressure. One journalist, however, the authorities could not censor, Anna Politkovskaya. Through seven years of articles, books, lectures and testimonies she managed what no human rights organization aschieved: to communicate the human suffering in the Chechen Republic to a broader audience.
Politkovskaya was a perfect spokeswoman for her Cause. . She was a thorough journalist, with personal courage and a charismatic persona. She was a sought after guest among international political elites, and among Western intellectuals and media. There she sat, upright, insistently fixing her eyes into those of her listeners, repeating that she was “a journalist, only a journalist”.
Politkovskaya received a host of awards and invitations from all over the world. Even so, in many ways she remained as isolated as the first time I met her, in September 2001. Then, she sat in her flat without daring to venture out in the streets, after she and her newspaper hd received threats from the military security services. She had asked for support among journalist colleagues, but nobody had visited or interviewed her about the situation, not even members of the great international press corps in Moscow.
Through her work for her Cause, Politkovskaya became inextricably tied to the man behind the war in the Chechen Republic, Prime Minister, later President Vladimir Putin. Putin and his man in the Chechen Republic, the brutal Prime Minister Ramzan Kadyrov, represented all she hoped the Russian Federation and the Chechen Republic should not become: darkness, silence, mafia-like security services coming to get people at night or have them executed by contract killers in dark stair cases. Putin was Anna’s dark twin, just like Brezhnev was Sakharov’s nemesis.
As one studies pictures of the two old antagonists, one can imagine that Sakharov’s warm eyes will live beyond our time, while Brezhnev’s wrinkled face already seem dated, like a pair of old shoes, or a Soviet-style car. Likewise, the legacy of Anna might also one day remain clear, when the face of her adversary, the former KGB man Vladimir Putin, has faded, become redundant and forgotten.
