ANNA HAD JUST RETURNED HOME FROM DOING THE SHOPPING. It was the evening of October 7, 2006 and she looked tired. She had been to the supermarket on the Frunzenskaya, the road that runs along the Moskva, and earlier had gone to visit her mother, who was dying from cancer, in the hospital. Her father had died from a heart attack as soon as he heard of his wife’s illness. Bad luck just kept piling up.
Divorced, with two grown up children she rarely saw, Anna was greeted at the door by Van Gogh, a dog she had saved from abuse as a puppy. About him she once wrote: “It’s evening. I turn the key in the lock and Van Gogh is there. He always jumps up on me when I come home, no matter what, no matter if he’s in pain or if his stomach hurts from something he ate or even if he’d been fast asleep. He’s the source of a constant flow of affection. Everyone leaves you, everyone gets tired of you, but a dog never stops loving you.”
She has three shopping bags in her car, so she parks in front of her building, Lesnaya Ulitsa, Number 8. It is not hard to find a place. The area is safe and residential, elegant even. It has become the neighbourhood of choice for the rising professionals of the new Russia. Anna enters the code for the front door of the building, takes the lift up to her apartment and puts down the first two shopping bags, which are full of food and household goods. Then she goes back downstairs to get the third bag, which contains articles of personal hygiene for her mother that are lacking in the hospital. She takes the lift back up to the first floor. As soon as the doors open, even before she steps out on to the landing, she sees a man and a woman. He is young, thin, and wears a baseball cap with the peak pulled down over his eyes, or so say the witnesses. Next to him is the woman. One of them points an Izh pistol equipped with a silencer at Anna’s chest. The left side. They fire three times. Two shots go directly into her heart, ripping it into three parts, while the third bullet ricochets up to her shoulder. Just to make sure they have completed the job, even after her body crumples to the floor, they shoot her in the nape of the neck. They had followed Anna home from the supermarket, knew the code to the building, and waited for her on the landing. After the murder, they drop the handgun – serial number erased – in the pool of blood and leave. Later, a neighbour summons the lift. When the doors open, she screams and mumbles a prayer. Anna’s body is lying there.
It was President Putin’s fifty-fourth birthday, and Anna’s death came as a gift. Anna Stepanovna Politkovskaya, née Mazepa, was born in New York and buried on October 10, 2006 at Trojekurovo cemetery. She was forty-eight. In the first row of mourners at her funeral are her two children, Ilya, twenty-eight, and Vera, twenty-six, as well as her sister, her ex-husband and her dog. Her words could not have been stopped by any means other than bullets. Three years later, Anna’s killers were all acquitted: Sergej Chadzikurbanov, ex-officer with the Ministry of Internal Affairs; the two Chechen brothers, Dzabrail and Ibragim Machmudov; a third brother, Rustam, who was also implicated, but managed to escape abroad and has never been arrested; and Colonel Pavel Ryaguzov of the Security Forces. The president of the military court also acquitted the two individuals who followed and shot Anna. To this day, neither a guilty party nor an assassin have been found. And yet Anna’s words are still thorns in the side of Russian power.
A Dirty War is a dangerous book. Anna Politkovskaya wrote it because she wanted to talk about an open wound that was about much more than a remote area in the northern Caucasus Mountains. By writing the book, she made the war in Chechnya a reality for everyone. And that is precisely what got her killed: her ability to make Chechnya a hot topic in London and Rome, Madrid and Paris, Washington and Stockholm. Her words were nitroglycerine for Putin’s government. The book became more incendiary than a television programme, an eye-witness report or a trial in the international court. A Dirty War brings together everything that Anna saw in one of the worst wars human kind has ever fought, a war in which raped women and tortured soldiers were forced to declare they were actually at fault. Her philosophy can be summed up by an aphorism from Marina Tsvetaeva, whose poetry was the subject of Anna’s dissertation: “All my writing is careful listening.”
Anna worked under tough conditions. She got a mere $30 for each of her trips to Chechnya. She could not live off her writing, and she received no financial satisfaction from her work. She received nothing for travel expenses, and the majority of her salary ended up going to defence lawyers contesting the allegations that rained down on her every time one of her signed articles appeared. At first her enemies tried to snuff out her fire by wearing her down. They tried to discourage her with libel suits. They did not want to kill her, just to destroy her image. They wanted to make the many people who adored her think she was a rampant careerist.
I will never forget the words pronounced by Alexander Politkovsky, Anna’s ex-husband, on the day after her death: “In 1994 she covered the struggle between the two oligarchs, Vladimir Putin and Vladimir Gusinsky, over control of Norilsk Nickel, the world’s largest producer of nickel, when it was being privatized. Putin ultimately won, but at a certain point in time Gusinsky met Anna and showed her a defamatory dossier that he had scraped together on our family. Anna was frightened. I went to pick her up and the two of us sat in the car and talked for a long time. That was when she decided that she would press on with her work, even though she feared being discredited more than death itself.” Better to die than be discredited. That is the only consolation there is. It is terrible and tragic, but it is true.
At least since her death they have stopped trying to discredit her. That was the first method of attack her opponents used. They threw mud at Anna and tried to show that she and her family were conniving, corrupt and criminal. They went to the families of the victims that Anna had interviewed and pressured them into saying that she had invented everything, that it had all happened very differently. They spread rumours and lies. They said Anna was a liar, a megalomaniac, that she was insane, a clown, an opportunist. Actually, hundreds of journalists in Russia hated her because her husband had done well for himself during perestroika, earning a position as an authoritative, critical voice, even if it was for Soviet television. And then there was the fact that Anna wrote for a newspaper whose equity was in part controlled by Mikhail Gorbachev and by the oligarch Alexander Lebedev. The winds of calumny blew in such a way that the revolutionaries stood on the same ground on which the old communist bosses had once stood. It was not hard for those who held political power to find pretexts for wrecking her reputation, much in the same way that hundreds of journalists all around the world continue to defend her and to do what they can to investigate what really happened.
Anna’s husband explained why she feared more than anything else being discredited: “She wrote articles to bring about change. Each piece was supposed to help someone or to counteract an injustice. She always needed to produce something, even if it was minor. If she lost her credibility, she would not have been able to go on. And it almost happened once, years ago, when Ramzan Kadyrov, the pro-Russian governor of Chechnya, threatened to drag her into a sauna and take photographs of her in compromising positions with naked men.” They would have drugged her, kidnapped her and captured her – the oh-so dangerous journalist – in porno shots with oiled men. “So here’s how that woman, the one who writes about our country as if it were hell, really lives,” people would have thought. Who would ever have believed she had been drugged and kidnapped? People would have accepted the smutty pictures as the truth. They would have complained about her vices, the orgies, the indulgences of the new courtesan who considered herself a fighter. Indeed, if it had ever come to pass, if the photographs had gone up on the front pages of major newspapers and gossip sites around the world, no denial or evidence could have wiped the mud from her face. It would have cast doubts on every article, every enquiry, every single word she had written. And that was only the first risk Anna ran.
Before bullets – or when bullets cannot accomplish the desired effect – they try to destroy your credibility, weaken your authority and nullify your words without actually dealing with the words themselves. They try to create a system that empties those words of all meaning, reducing the word to a shell. On more than one occasion Anna decided to put aside her role as a journalist and actively to participate in what she was seeing and writing about. In October 2002 she entered into talks with the terrorists who had taken over the Dubrovka Theatre in Moscow during a performance of Nord-Ost. She did it by offering to bring water to the hostages. In September 2004, during the occupation of the school in Beslan, she wanted to act as a mediator. She would have succeeded, too, because both sides respected her, but Anna declared that she had been poisoned on the flight to Ossetia. The poison was supposed to kill her, preventing her from helping to resolve the crisis. Their weapon: a cup of tea. After just one sip, Anna’s head began spinning and her stomach started to contract into spasms. Before fainting, she called a hostess for help. They brought her to a hospital in Rostov. When she woke up, a nurse whispered, “My dear, they tried to poison you, but the blood tests have been destroyed – orders from above.” I clearly remember Italian journalists ribbing each other and saying things like: “Our Anna has seen too many Bond movies. When you’re in danger, you don’t blab about it at every conference. Silence is your defence.” This is the sort of thing people said after Anna was poisoned.
But Anna knew that silence would have been a huge gift to the forces that were trying to delegitimize her. Over time, she had received very many threats, and had even once been given a private bodyguard by her newspaper, Novaya Gazeta. On September 9, 2004 she published an article in the Guardian called “Poisoned by Putin”, but many people – too many people – rejected her claims. For some reason her colleagues’ envy of her visibility became enmeshed with the power of her words. This led on the one hand to an increased awareness of the struggle for human rights in Chechnya, whereby she was transformed into a symbol. On the other hand, it also helped the government to portray her as a narcissistic, opportunistic woman. She was totally isolated. In the Guardian she said that “This is nonsense, but was it not the same in Soviet times when everyone knew the authorities were talking rubbish but pretended that the emperor still had his clothes? We are hurtling back into a Soviet abyss, into an information vacuum that spells death from our own ignorance . . . For the rest, if you want to go on working as a journalist, it is total servility to Putin. Otherwise, it can be death, the bullet, poison or trial – whatever our Special Services, Putin’s guard dogs, see fit.” Her books and articles alone stood by her.
In Memories of a Revolutionary Victor Serge writes: “I am more interested in speaking than writing. Others are better at blending words with facts. I don’t have time. I just have to speak.” The same was true for Anna. Her books are immediate, swift. They have the power of discovery, of news, of unknown information being made known. And this is what made her vulnerable.
“To those in the West who say that I am the key militant against Putin, I reply that I am not a militant, I am a journalist. That’s all. And a journalist’s job is to inform. As for Putin, he has done some unimaginable things and I have to write about them.” Her politics were absolved by the need to write. What is more, she detested writing editorials: “It doesn’t matter what I think; it matters what I see.” So the reports and articles kept coming.
Anna Politkovskaya understood that her readers would defend her. Since she had participated in several international conferences, she knew that the public’s interests and experiences would support her. They were her real bodyguards. Her tools might have been interviews and reportage, but when a public figure, whether politician or bureaucrat, was evasive or mendacious, Politkovskaya moved on to indictments. In fact, she was a witness in dozens of cases. In an interview that appeared in the Guardian on October 15, 2002 she said: “I went beyond the role of journalist. I put aside my job and learned things I never would have if I had stuck to being a simple journalist, someone who stands still in the crowd, like all the others.” This motivation may have been the driving force behind her explorations of Chechnya in 1999. Ever since then, in article after article, she collected information for the book that today represents one of the most important documents for understanding the physiology of every conflict, ferocious, hidden, abominable, terribly modern.
Politkovskaya was a child of the dissident tradition of the 1970s, which opted for a pacifist and non-violent approach to undermining the regime. To unmask the lies in her country she utilized the very channels the Russian state had created, not stopping at newspaper articles, but furthering her fight by legal processes. She went beyond journalism. She wanted to stare into the eyes of the guilty parties. She sought out stories of the victims of torture and rape and then brought the criminals to court. When successful by dint of evidence she introduced, Anna brought about their conviction and punishment – and allowed the victims to taste justice.
One essential element above all others shines through her book: the power of language. What weight does the written word have? How can language be used to different degrees? She grappled with the questions that torment writers and readers alike. Literature is an athlete, Mayakovsky wrote, and the image of a word leaping over obstacles and struggles is a powerful one for me. I believe the specific weight of literary language is determined by its actual presence in the flesh of the world – or by its absence.
In a debate about writing with Giorgio Manganelli, Primo Levi once declared that obscure writing was immoral. I believe that literary writing is naturally labyrinthine and multiform, and while I do not think there are any unambiguous roads, I can recognize the ones under my own feet. When Philip Roth said that after If This is a Man no-one could ever say they had not been to Auschwitz, he did not mean people simply became aware of the existence of the camps, he meant that Levi brought us there, that because of his writing we, too, have waited in line for the gas chambers. Such is the power of his language. While books which are neither documentary records nor reportage do not actually count as evidence, they can most definitely take the reader into the same territory, and let him know what it is like to be in someone else’s skin. To some degree this is the difference between an article and a work of literature. It is not the subject that matters, or the style, it is the possibility of using words to whisper or shout, to express – not just to communicate. To make the reader feel a part of what he is reading. It is not about Chechnya, or Saigon, or Dachau. It is your home. The stories in A Dirty War are our stories.
Shortly before his death, Truman Capote wrote, “Truth and fiction are two rivers divided by an island that is gradually shrinking, and that are about to meet. Eventually, the two rivers will flow together.” A writer does not run the risk of revealing secrets, or of having discovered who-knows-what kind of hidden truth. A writer runs the risk of saying it. And saying it well. That is what makes a writer dangerous and feared. He reaches people with words that carry information. Certainly, his words can be obscured, interrupted, defamed, denied, but he conveys something to the reader that ultimately only the reader can deny or confirm. The power of literature lies in its ineffability. It cannot be reduced to a single dimension. It is not just one thing. It is not just news or information, sensation, pleasure or emotion. This multiplicity makes it possible for literature to go beyond any limits, to go beyond any single community or professional circle, to enter anyone’s daily life. It is a totally ungovernable instrument and can pass through any interface. This power is what made Soviet governments more concerned about Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago and Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales than the effects of the spying of the C.I.A.
The élan vital of writing continues to be the necessary condition for distinguishing a book worth reading from one that is better kept closed. The universe of concentration camps seems to have squeezed quite extraordinary drops of life from literature. Personally, I am not interested in literature as a vice. Nor am I interested in literature as a lesser philosophy. I do not care about beautiful stories that cannot be bothered to deal with the blood of our times. I want to smell the rot of politics and the stench of business. Yes, there is a kind of literature that can have amazing qualities and meet with favourable consensus. But that kind of literature does not interest me. I agree with Graham Greene when he said, “I don’t know what I’m going to write about when I start, but what matters is that I write about something that matters.” I want to try and understand how things work, the machinery of power, the nuts and bolts of the metaphysics of our customs. The world is full of substance in need of an artificer.
I want to write without being afraid of going outside the literary margins. Excluding data, addresses, percentages and weapons, I want to contaminate everything. Style is fundamental, of course, but as Hemingway famously observed, “Style is grace under pressure.” The writer’s grace, sense of timing and profundity all need to be held hostage by the pressure of the situation, by the need to be spoken, to be revealed. Literary truth lies in language, not in the individual. And the truth of language in our era is paid for with one’s life. We have come to expect things to be this way. We have trained our minds to think like that. Of this, I am ever more convinced. Surviving has actually become a way of generating suspicion, a way of subtracting truth from your words. The actual truth of your language, and its analysis, has no greater proof than death. Paradoxically, surviving the truth of language means a diminishing of truth in language itself. Truth in language always gets a response from power, if it is well constructed. And “power” is a generic and whorish term, applied to all kinds of institutions: the military, the criminal world, culture, industry.
Their response to Anna’s words did not have the effect they intended. They killed her, but not her words – because the proof that you have struck power in the heart is to be shot in the heart. An equal and opposite reaction. A ferocious reaction. This reaction can either bring about a new, shared truth, which is somehow acceptable, or we turn to the truth of images captured by cameras. Artistic and moral truths rely very little on the individual and more on the eye, as if man were dismembered and every organ isolated. The intellect is destined to receive the same separation as in the Apology of Menenio Agrippa: the reporter is the eyes, the writer is the hand and a bit of mind. The journalist is the eyes with a bit of hand, the poet is the heart, and the narrator is the stomach. The time has come perhaps to create a monster with more hands and eyes, a monster that can invade, include and abuse every tool available to him. This is the work of the writer who concerns himself with reality and writes for the sake of it. Language continues to be an essential part of it, but the solitude of the writer and the dangers implied in writing are enormous.
Stanislav Markelov was Anna Politkovskaya’s lawyer. He fought against the early release of Colonel Yuri Budanov, who was the highest-ranking official to be convicted of war crimes in a Russian tribunal. On January 19, 2009 Markelov was assassinated. In the case against Budanov, Markelov had represented the family of Elza Kungaeva, an eighteen-year-old who had been raped and murdered by a group of Russian soldiers in Chankala. Elza’s father, who has lived for years in Norway, received regular death threats. Colonel Budanov was to all intents and purposes an untouchable and Elza’s murder became a symbol of the abuses committed in Chechnya by Russian soldiers. The episode takes up several pages of Putin’s Russia by Anna Politkovskaya. She mentions Budanov by name. He probably would never have been indicted if it had not been for the media attention Anna’s book generated. Budanov was arrested in 2000, found guilty and sentenced to ten years in 2003. Recently he was freed, in spite of Markelov’s campaign against him.
Markelov was murdered alongside his colleague Anastasia Baburova, a journalist from Novaya Gazeta – the paper Anna worked for – who had taken over Anna’s investigations into Chechnya.
He who writes, dies. Anastasia was shot in the head when she tried to stop the hitman from killing Markelov. The assassins thought she was crazy for reacting like that and not running away. It confused them. Anastasia was killed for fighting back against her executioners. She was twenty-five.
Since the campaign of defamation did not destroy Politkovskaya’s reputation, and since her words survive her, everything now rests on her readers’ shoulders.
I do not want these words to seem like an introduction to Anna’s oeuvre. They are instead a solemn plea to the readers who decide to spend some time with her writing.
A prayer that her readers will continue to fully experience the world of A Dirty War. A prayer that the sacrifice she made to tell the story is never forgotten. A prayer that the reader can feel every hour of Anna’s life, a life spent knowing it had an end point, yet knowing that that end point was purely physical, and that it would lead to the diffusion of her work into a constellation of stories that would wait patiently for readers to make them their own.