Anna rang me at the hospital in the morning, before 10 o’clock. She was supposed to be coming to visit, this was her day, but something had come up at home. Anna said my second daughter, Lena, would come instead, and promised that we would definitely meet on Sunday. She sounded in a good mood, her voice was cheerful. She asked how I was feeling and whether I was reading a book. She knew I love historical literature and had brought me Alexander Manko’s The Most August Court under the Sign of Hymenaeus. She had not read it herself. I said, ‘Anya, it is difficult for me to read. I have to read every page three times because I have Father before my eyes all the time.’ [Raisa Mazepa’s husband had died shortly before.] She tried to calm me, ‘He didn’t suffer. Everything happened very quickly. He was coming to visit you. Let’s talk about the book instead.’ I said, ‘Anya there is an epigraph on page 179 which really moves me. It is so much a part of us, so Russian.’ I read it to her: ‘There are drunken years in the history of peoples. You have to live through them, but you can never truly live in them.’

‘Oh, Mum,’ she replied, ‘put a bookmark there, don’t forget.’ I asked my daughter who the author of the epigraph was, and she told me about Nadezhda Teffi, a famous Russian poetess. Then she said, ‘Speak to you tomorrow, Mum.’ She was in a very good mood. Or perhaps she was in a bad mood and just pretending everything was fine in order not to upset me.

I was always very worried about her. Shortly before I went into hospital we had a talk. She was preparing an article about Chechnya, and I simply begged her to be careful. I remember she said, ‘Of course I know the sword of Damocles is always hanging over me. I know it, but I won’t give in.’

Raisa Mazepa (Anna Politkovskaya’s mother), Novaya gazeta,

23 October 2006