Extraordinary champion of ordinary people

Some years ago, I went to visit the offices of a small Moscow newspaper, Novaya Gazeta.   Novaya Gazeta has always led a precarious existence — it is one of the few publications that has consistently opposed the Kremlin — and that day the editor was particularly distracted. While I was talking to him, the telephone kept ringing: one of his reporters had been arrested in Chechnya. Since another Novaya Gazeta reporter had recently died in mysterious circumstances, and since yet another had been beaten up quite badly, he was worried. The Russian authorities, he said, were capable of anything.
That reporter, Anna Politkovskaya, was later released. But as it turned out, her editor was right to be worried. She kept writing about the Chechen war, even after it became too dangerous for almost everybody else. She kept criticising the Putin administration, whose KGB-era tactics were, she believed, encouraging Chechen terrorism, and as a result she received constant death threats. Once she was poisoned during a flight to Chechnya. Then, last October, she was murdered in the elevator of her Moscow apartment building. Her assassin made no attempt to disguise the crime as a theft or an accident: he left her body in the elevator alongside the gun he had used to kill her — standard practice for Russian hit men. No one has yet been arrested in conjunction with the crime. No one expects anybody to be arrested either.
A Russian Diary is the book that Politkovskaya was working on at the time of her death. As the title indicates, it contains an almost daily account of 18 months of Russian history: December 2003 to August 2005, the time period during which, Politkovskaya reckons, Russian parliamentary democracy came to an end. Unsentimentally, she records the many bizarre events that unfolded across the country in that period.