Anna Politkovskaya

Anna Politkovskaya is a journalist whose work, as presented in the book, joins close attention to victims of state violence with a direct challenge to the authorities’ impunity. Shot dead in the elevator of her apartment building on October 7, 2006, she became in the West an icon of freedom of expression. The narrative’s account of her extends beyond that emblem: it traces the people and causes she defended, and sets her judgments beside those of Eduard Limonov, a figure the narrator had assumed she could only oppose.

Identity and Public Image

Politkovskaya was a star reporter for Novaya Gazeta and a declared opponent of Vladimir Putin’s politics. Before her murder, the book says, her name was familiar chiefly to people closely following the Chechen Wars. Her death changed the reach of that name: her sad, determined face became a Western symbol of freedom of expression.

The narrator’s account preserves the difference between that public image and the work through which she earned it. Her journalism belonged to a small, beleaguered network of human-rights activists, associations, and committees organized by mothers of soldiers killed or wounded in Chechnya. After her death, the narrator spent a week visiting these circles in Moscow. Their offices were cramped, poorly lit, and equipped with old computers; their members were few, and in this small community everyone seemed to know everyone else. For him, they represented practically the whole democratic opposition in Russia.

Reporting and the Question of Impunity

Politkovskaya’s reporting brought the narrator into contact with women who described night-time kidnappings, soldiers tortured by their own superiors, and justice denied. Their complaints were not simply that the police and army were corrupt or that human life was treated cheaply. What they found intolerable was the authorities’ arrogance when ordinary people demanded explanations, and the officials’ evident confidence that they could act without consequence.

That distinction gives her political importance in the book. The issue is not only the existence of violence, but the way power treats demands for an account of it. The mothers of dead soldiers, children massacred at Beslan, and victims of the Dubrovka Theater hostage crisis all stand within this account of citizens confronting a state that, in their view, would not answer them. Politkovskaya’s work made such voices part of the public record, even as people in the narrator’s expatriate circle dismissed the activists as respectable but politically irrelevant.

Those expatriates also rejected the widely held French suspicion that the Federal Security Service, or Putin himself, had ordered her murder. One interlocutor mocked the idea that the killing had been arranged as a birthday gift for Putin and argued that the assassination and the scandal around it harmed the Kremlin more than her articles had. The narrator presents this argument as one voice among competing interpretations, not as proof of who ordered the murder. The disagreement exposes a divide between people who regarded the killing as evidence of political repression and those who regarded that conclusion as implausible or exaggerated.

An Unexpected Defense of Limonov’s Activists

Politkovskaya’s published defense of National Bolshevik Party militants unsettles the narrator’s assumptions. After an encounter with Limonov, he read her account of the trial of forty party members accused of occupying and vandalizing the presidential administration’s offices. The militants had shouted against Putin and received lengthy prison sentences. Politkovskaya described them as young, courageous people of integrity, and as among the few who might give their country’s moral future cause for hope.

The judgment startled the narrator, who had regarded Limonov as a fascist leading a militia of skinheads. He found a similar defense in the words of Yelena Bonner, the widow of Andrei Sakharov: she supported the National Bolsheviks while acknowledging that the party’s name carried unpleasant associations for some people. Their support did not erase the name’s political burden; it showed that, in their view, the conduct and courage of the young defendants mattered more than the label.

The narrator later places Limonov among the leaders of The Other Russia, a political coalition that also included Garry Kasparov and Mikhail Kasyanov. Politkovskaya’s defense of the militants thus helps explain why the narrator reconsidered the political position Limonov occupied. It does not make her a supporter of all his beliefs; rather, it reveals an unexpected point of convergence between a journalist associated with democratic opposition and activists the narrator had classified as beyond its bounds.

The Dubrovka Crisis and a Shared Judgment

The book returns to Politkovskaya through Limonov’s prison notebooks. In October 2002, while in a cell in Saratov, he watched television coverage of the hostage-taking at the Dubrovka Theater. His cellmates preferred crime films and initially showed little interest in the news. Limonov followed the reports through the fifty-seven hours of the crisis, including the gas attack at dawn on October 26 that killed hostages as well as the Chechen attackers.

Politkovskaya was following the events at much closer hand, but the narrator finds that Limonov’s notes reached conclusions strikingly close to hers. Both feared a bloodbath from the outset. After it occurred, both suspected that officials were lying about the number of victims and that nothing had been done to save them. Their convergence is especially notable to the narrator because Limonov was himself charged with terrorism and awaiting trial: the crisis sharpened his attention to how the state might use fear and how his own case could be affected by the country’s growing paranoia.

The episode also crystallized a distinction Limonov would repeatedly make between ordinary crimes and crimes committed by the state. In his view, an individual might commit a crime in passion or drunkenness and then pay for it for the rest of his life, while officials responsible for mass death could receive decorations. The narrator connects this judgment to Politkovskaya’s reporting and to the suspicions both raised about official accounts. When Putin defended a response that accepted losses rather than submit to terrorist pressure, Politkovskaya and Limonov recalled rumors that the 1999 attacks had been carried out not by Chechens but by the Federal Security Service with presidential approval. The book presents these as persistent rumors, not established facts. It notes that Limonov used the word fascist negatively of Putin in this context, as did Politkovskaya.

Assassination and Narrative Significance

Politkovskaya was on a list identifying enemies of Russia, a list that Limonov said was issued by those in power to incite public hatred and included names, addresses, and telephone numbers. The narrator places her there alongside Alexander Litvinenko, poisoned with polonium after denouncing criminality among his former colleagues, and Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who had been imprisoned in Siberia after entering politics. Politkovskaya was shot with an Izh pistol. The list’s significance in the account lies in the chilling proximity it creates between public criticism and the threat of physical attack; it does not by itself settle who was responsible for her murder.

Her role in the narrative is therefore double. Her death makes visible the danger faced by a journalist who opposed Putin’s politics, while her reporting supplies a measure against which both state explanations and Limonov’s political evolution can be tested. The narrator does not dissolve the contradictions between her democratic commitments and her defense of National Bolshevik defendants, or between Limonov’s earlier image and his later position alongside opposition figures. Instead, Politkovskaya’s judgments make those contradictions consequential: they force the narrator to reconsider who could act with courage and integrity, and what political labels might conceal.