Anna Politkovskaya assassination

Anna Politkovskaya’s assassination on October 7, 2006, made the journalist, known especially to people following the Chechen wars, an icon of freedom of expression in the West. She was shot dead in the elevator of her apartment building. The account treats the killing not only as a death but as a test of what her murder meant: a political crime to some, and, to others in Moscow’s privileged circles, an event whose importance was being exaggerated abroad.

The killing and its immediate aftermath

The news of Politkovskaya’s murder prompted Emmanuel Carrère, who was traveling frequently to Russia, to take a magazine assignment in Moscow. The assignment was not to investigate who had killed her, but to speak with people who had known and loved her. He spent a week at Novaya Gazeta, where she had been a star reporter, and at human-rights organizations and committees formed by mothers of soldiers killed or wounded in Chechnya.

Those visits placed the assassination amid a small, poorly resourced world of opposition and advocacy. The offices were tiny and poorly lit, with old computers; the activists were often elderly, and few in number. The people in this circle knew one another, and Carrère came to know them as well. He describes this group as practically the entire democratic opposition in Russia, giving the murder a setting in which the loss of one prominent journalist was bound up with the vulnerability of a much broader civic community.

Dispute over political meaning

Carrère’s French expatriate acquaintances in Moscow regarded the activists with a mixture of sympathy and condescension. They considered them respectable, but believed that hardly anyone in Russia cared about formal liberties so long as people could become rich. From that perspective, the activists were fighting a hopeless cause. The same acquaintances were irritated by the widespread French view that the Federal Security Service, or Putin himself, had ordered the killing.

Pavel, a Franco-Russian academic turned businessman, ridiculed the suggestion that the murder had been arranged as a birthday gift for Putin because it occurred on his birthday. His mock scenario made the accusation sound absurd to him; he rejected it as a fantasy rather than a plausible account of real political life. Pavel instead emphasized Putin’s reported response: that the assassination and the scandal it caused had done the Kremlin more harm than Politkovskaya’s articles had done while she was alive, in a newspaper Pavel described as little read. The exchange leaves the question of responsibility unresolved in this account, while showing how the killing became the subject of competing claims about its political consequences.

The wider climate of impunity

The skepticism of Moscow’s expatriate circle stood beside the testimony Carrère heard from worn-out women. They repeatedly described nighttime kidnappings, in which victims were taken away in cars without license plates; soldiers tortured by their own superiors rather than by an enemy; and justice denied. These accounts did not establish who ordered Politkovskaya’s murder, but they situated it within a wider experience of state and institutional violence, corruption, and citizens’ inability to obtain redress.

For the mothers of dead soldiers, the mothers of children massacred at Beslan, and the mothers of victims of the Dubrovka Theater hostage crisis, the intolerable feature was the authorities’ arrogance and brutality when ordinary people demanded explanations, reinforced by the authorities’ apparent knowledge that they would face no consequences. Against the expatriates’ claim that Russians simply accepted their circumstances, these women’s accounts made the demand for justice central. The assassination’s significance in Carrère’s account lies in this collision: Politkovskaya’s death became an international emblem, while the impunity and silencing that gave the killing its force remained part of daily life for those seeking answers.