Anna Politkovskaja

Abstract

This paper draws a profile of Anna Politkovskaja, the journalist murdered in Moscow in October 2006. When the communist regime collapsed she sided with the “Democrats” (Boris Eltsin), but afterwards she departed from them when the first Cecenia War began (autumn 1994). With the beginning of the second Cecenia War (August-September 1999) Anna Politkovskaja definitively understood the Democrats no longer existed in Russia. In fact, opening the road to the new massacre had been their own responsibility. Once she had understood the truth, she began to tell the way “they”, the “Democrats” had organized the Cecenia Wars. Many times she went to that devastated land and denounced the dreadful war crimes committed there by the Russians, writing on her daily Novaja Gazeta. She openly condemned the Russian army and government for their lacking in respect of civil rights and their violation of the Constitutional State, both in Russia and Cecenia. In the West she had published a book –Putin’s Russia– from which she gained fame. But it provoked the Russian President to anger. The strong will of this woman with a feeble voice to testify and inform has been blown out, together with her obstinate tenaciousness. Anna Politkovskaja had staked her own life, conscious of the risk.