A DIRTY WAR
A Russian Reporter in Chechnya

ANNA POLITKOVSKAYA has been a special correspondent for the bi-weekly Russian newspaper Novaya gazeta (circulation 700,000) since 1999. After graduating from the Journalism Faculty of Moscow University in 1980, she worked first for the Izvestiya daily, and then, in the 1990s, for the Megapolis Express and Obshchaya gazeta weeklies. She has made social issues her subject: public mores, the defective judicial system, prison conditions, and the fate of orphans, the disabled and the country's many refugees and displaced persons. In January 2000 she was awarded the prestigious Golden Pen Award by the Russian Union of Journalists for her outspoken coverage of the new federal campaign in Chechnya.

JOHN CROWFOOT lived in Moscow from 1986 to 1999. In the early 1990s he worked with Express Chronicle human rights weekly and Vozvrashchenie publishers. Among his translations from the Russian are Vitaly Shentalinsky's The KGB's Literary Archives, Lev Razgon's True Stories and an anthology of women's memoirs of the Gulag, Till My Tale is Told. He is currently translating the memoirs of Emma Gerstein.

THOMAS DE WAAL reported on Russia and the Caucasus from 1993 to 1999 for the Moscow Times, The Times, the Economist and the BBC World Service. With Carlotta Gall, he won a James Cameron Prize for Outstanding Reporting for their book Chechnya: A Small Victorious War (1997). He is now based in London and working on a book about the Nagorny Karabakh conflict.