Anna Politkovskaya

Anna Stepanovna Politkovskaya (Mazepa; 30 August 1958 – 7 October 2006) was an American-Russian journalist and human rights activist, who reported on political and social events in Russia, in particular, the Second Chechen War (1999–2005).

It was her reporting from Chechnya that made Politkovskaya's national and international reputation.

For seven years, she refused to give up reporting on the war despite numerous acts of intimidation and violence.

Politkovskaya was arrested by Russian military forces in Chechnya and subjected to a mock execution.

Anna Mazepa Politkovskaya was born in New York City in 1958, the daughter of Stepan Fedorovich Mazepa (1927–2006) from Kostobobriv, Ukraine and Raisa Aleksandrovna Mazepa (1929–2021) from Kerch.

Some sources say that her birth name was actually Hanna Mazeppa.

Other sources state that she was born in Chernihiv region of Ukraine.

Her parents, Soviet diplomats at the United Nations, were Ukrainian.

Politkovskaya spent most of her childhood in Moscow; she graduated from Moscow State University's school of journalism in 1980.

While there, she defended a thesis about the poetry of Marina Tsvetaeva and married fellow student Alexander Politkovsky.

They had two children, Vera and Ilya.

At first Alexander was better known, joining TV journalist Vladislav Listyev as one of the hosts on the late-night TV-program Vzglyad.

Apart from her childhood years, Politkovskaya spent no more than a few weeks outside Russia at any one time, even when her life came under threat.

She was a U.S. citizen and had a U.S. passport, although she never relinquished her Russian citizenship.

Politkovskaya worked for Izvestia from 1982 to 1993 as a reporter and editor of the emergencies and accidents section.

From 1994 to 1999, she worked as the assistant chief editor of Obshchaya Gazeta, headed by Yegor Yakovlev, where she wrote frequently about social problems, particularly the plight of refugees.

Her post-1999 articles about conditions in Chechnya were turned into books several times; Russian readers' main access to her investigations and publications was through Novaya Gazeta, a Russian newspaper that featured critical investigative coverage of Russian political and social affairs.

From June 1999 to 2006, she wrote columns for the biweekly Novaya Gazeta, a newspaper with strong investigative reporting that was critical of the new post-Soviet regime from the outset.

She published several award-winning books about Chechnya, life in Russia, and Russia under Vladimir Putin, including Putin's Russia.

Politkovskaya won awards for her work.

She used each of these occasions to urge greater concern and responsibility by Western governments that, after the September 11 attacks on the United States, welcomed Putin's contribution to their "War on Terror".

She talked to officials, the military and the police and also frequently visited hospitals and refugee camps in Chechnya and in neighboring Ingushetia to interview those injured and uprooted by the renewed fighting.

In numerous articles critical of the war in Chechnya and the pro-Russian regime there, Politkovskaya described alleged abuses committed by Russian military forces, Chechen rebels, and the Russian-backed administration led by Akhmad Kadyrov and his son Ramzan Kadyrov.

She also chronicled human rights abuses and policy failures elsewhere in the North Caucasus.

In one characteristic instance in 1999, she not only wrote about the plight of an ethnically-mixed old peoples' home under bombardment in Grozny, but helped to secure the safe evacuation of its elderly inhabitants with the aid of her newspaper and public support.

From 2000 onwards, she received numerous international awards for her work.

Her articles, many of which form the basis of A Dirty War (2001) and A Small Corner of Hell (2003), depict a conflict that brutalized both Chechen fighters and conscript soldiers in the federal army, and created hell for the civilians caught between them.

As Politkovskaya reported, the order supposedly restored under the Kadyrovs became a regime of endemic torture, abduction, and murder, by either the new Chechen authorities or the various federal forces based in Chechnya.

One of her last investigations was into the alleged mass poisoning of Chechen schoolchildren by a strong and unknown chemical substance which incapacitated them for many months.

After Politkovskaya became widely known in the West, she was commissioned to write Putin's Russia (later subtitled Life in a Failing Democracy), a broader account of her views and experiences after former KGB lieutenant colonel Vladimir Putin became Boris Yeltsin's Prime Minister, and then succeeded him as President of Russia.

This included Putin's pursuit of the Second Chechen War.

In the book, she accused the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) of stifling all civil liberties to establish a Soviet-style dictatorship, but admitted: "[It] is we who are responsible for Putin's policies ... [s]ociety has shown limitless apathy ... [a]s the Chekists have become entrenched in power, we have let them see our fear, and thereby have only intensified their urge to treat us like cattle. The KGB respects only the strong. The weak it devours. We of all people ought to know that."

She also wrote:

"We are hurtling back into a Soviet abyss, into an information vacuum that spells death from our own ignorance. All we have left is the internet, where information is still freely available. For the rest, if you want to go on working as a journalist, it's total servility to Putin. Otherwise, it can be death, the bullet, poison, or trial—whatever our special services, Putin's guard dogs, see fit."

"People often tell me that I am a pessimist, that I don't believe in the strength of the Russian people, that I am obsessive in my opposition to Putin and see nothing beyond that", she opens an essay titled "Am I Afraid?", finishing it—and the book—with the words "If anybody thinks they can take comfort from the 'optimistic' forecast, let them do so. It is certainly the easier way, but it is the death sentence for our grandchildren."

She was poisoned while flying from Moscow via Rostov-on-Don to help resolve the 2004 Beslan school hostage crisis, and had to turn back, requiring careful medical treatment in Moscow to restore her health.

In 2004, she published Putin's Russia, a personal account of Russia for a Western readership.

On 7 October 2006 (notably, on the 54th birthday of the then President of Russia Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin), she was murdered in the elevator of her block of apartments, an assassination that attracted international attention.

In May 2007, Random House posthumously published Politkovskaya's A Russian Diary, containing extracts from her notebook and other writings.

In June 2014, five men were sentenced to prison for the murder, but it is still unclear who ordered or paid for the contract killing.