Anna Politkovskaya’s assassination on October 7, 2006, is presented as more than the killing of a journalist: it becomes a test of how Russians and Western observers interpret power, impunity, and political dissent. Shot dead in the elevator of her apartment building, she was transformed in the West into an icon of freedom of expression, while the circumstances and meaning of her death remained fiercely disputed. Emmanuel Carrère recounts the event through conversations and later discoveries that complicate any simple division between liberal heroes and political outcasts.

The killing and its immediate aftermath

Carrère was traveling frequently to Russia when news broke that Politkovskaya had been killed. A magazine asked him to fly to Moscow, not to investigate the murder but to speak with people who had known and loved her. He spent a week in the offices of Novaya Gazeta, where she had been a star reporter, and among human-rights associations and committees of mothers whose sons had been killed or wounded in Chechnya. These were small, poorly lit offices with old computers; the activists were few, and the circle was so close-knit that its members all seemed to know one another. Carrère describes them as constituting practically the entire democratic opposition in Russia.

The contrast between Politkovskaya’s posthumous reputation and her visibility before her death is stark. Carrère writes that, apart from people closely following the Chechen wars, few knew her name before she was killed. Afterward, her determined face became an emblem in the West of freedom of expression. That transformation gave the assassination a public meaning beyond the loss of one reporter, even as Russian acquaintances of Carrère questioned whether her work had mattered to most people in Russia.

Competing accounts of responsibility

Among Carrère’s Moscow acquaintances were French expatriates, journalists, and businessmen who regarded the belief that the FSB, or Putin himself, had ordered the killing as absurd. Pavel, a Franco-Russian academic turned businessman, focused on the coincidence that Politkovskaya was killed on Putin’s birthday. He mocked the idea that state security officials would arrange such an obvious birthday gift for the president, arguing that the scenario belonged in a gangster film rather than real life.

Pavel’s skepticism did not resolve the question of responsibility; instead, it exposed the distance between competing interpretations. He repeated Putin’s reported view that the assassination and the resulting scandal had hurt the Kremlin more than Politkovskaya’s articles had, since they appeared in a newspaper that few people read. Carrère listened to such defenses of the authorities in wealthy Moscow apartments, where the argument was that conditions could be worse and that Russians were content so long as they could get rich. He set this complacency against accounts from exhausted women describing nighttime kidnappings, soldiers tortured by their own superiors, and justice denied. The book records the dispute without establishing who ordered the killing.

Her work and the unexpected political alliance

Politkovskaya’s own writing and advocacy resist the assumption that her role can be reduced to a predictable alignment with liberal opposition figures. Two years before her death, she had covered the trial of forty National Bolshevik Party militants accused of occupying and vandalizing the presidential administration’s offices while shouting for Putin to go. They received lengthy prison sentences. Politkovskaya publicly defended them, describing them as courageous young people of integrity and among the few who could offer hope for the country’s moral future.

Carrère found this defense difficult to reconcile with his prior image of Eduard Limonov as a fascist leader of a skinhead militia. He was equally struck to find Yelena Bonner, the widow of Andrei Sakharov, supporting the National Bolsheviks despite reservations about their party’s name. Politkovskaya’s stance therefore connected her defense of political prisoners to a broader question: whether opposition to the authorities could be recognized even when it came from groups that many observers considered repellent. After her death, her support for the jailed militants contributed to Carrère’s reconsideration of Limonov’s position in Russian politics.

Political significance and the limits of certainty

The assassination’s significance deepens in the account as Carrère follows the changing status of Limonov and the opposition. Months after discovering Politkovskaya’s defense of the militants, he learned that Limonov was joining The Other Russia, a coalition that also included Garry Kasparov and former prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov. The combination unsettled Carrère’s expectations and helped lead him to choose Limonov as the subject of a magazine’s first issue. Politkovskaya’s writing thus becomes an unexpected guide to a political realignment: her judgment of imprisoned activists made visible an opposition landscape that Carrère had previously treated as morally straightforward.

Later, Limonov told Carrère that he had been placed on a list of enemies of Russia, alongside Politkovskaya, Alexander Litvinenko, and Mikhail Khodorkovsky. He presented the list as one of people to be killed or otherwise targeted and treated himself as a likely next victim. This is Limonov’s claim within the narrative, not an independently established account of Politkovskaya’s murder. Its recurrence nevertheless links her killing to the atmosphere of danger surrounding critics of the Kremlin. The event remains unresolved in Carrère’s telling: its public symbolism is undeniable, but the competing claims about state responsibility are left in tension rather than settled by the narrative.