Novaya Gazeta

Novaya Gazeta is introduced as the newspaper where Anna Politkovskaya was a star reporter, and as one of the settings through which Emmanuel Carrère encounters Russia’s small, beleaguered democratic opposition. The book’s account connects the paper’s reporting to Politkovskaya’s public defense of political prisoners, while keeping her interventions distinct from any claim about the newspaper’s formal editorial policy.

Identity and Role

The newspaper enters the narrative through Politkovskaya, whose work had focused on the Chechen wars. After she was shot dead in her apartment-building elevator on October 7, 2006, Carrère traveled to Moscow to speak with people who had known and loved her. His assignment was not to investigate the murder; it was to understand the journalist and the people around her. Novaya Gazeta, where she had been a star reporter, became one of the places where that inquiry unfolded.

The Offices and Their Circle

Carrère spent a week in the newspaper’s offices, as well as in human-rights organizations and committees of mothers whose sons had been killed or wounded in Chechnya. The offices were tiny and poorly lit, furnished with old computers. The activists who received him were often elderly, and there were very few of them. In this close-knit Moscow circle, everyone seemed to know everyone else; Carrère came to see it as practically the whole of Russia’s democratic opposition.

That description concerns the newspaper’s place in the account, not evidence that its offices alone constituted an organized opposition. Carrère sets the activists’ work against the condescension of French expatriates, journalists, and businessmen he knew in Moscow. They regarded the defenders of civil liberties as respectable but politically marginal, convinced that formal freedoms mattered little to a population more interested in the chance to become rich. The contrast makes the modest rooms consequential: they are the physical setting for a small network whose importance is disputed even as its members continue their work.

Reporting and Political Defense

A collection of Politkovskaya’s articles gives Carrère a further view of the reporting associated with Novaya Gazeta. He discovers that, two years earlier, she had covered the trial of forty National Bolshevik Party militants accused of occupying and vandalizing the presidential administration’s offices while calling for Putin to go. The militants received lengthy prison sentences, and Politkovskaya publicly defended them, describing them as courageous young people of integrity and as a rare source of hope for their country’s moral future.

Carrère is struck by the distance between this defense and his own image of Eduard Limonov as a fascist leader surrounded by skinheads. He also finds that Yelena Bonner supported the National Bolsheviks, though she acknowledged the unpleasant associations carried by their party’s name. The episode establishes Politkovskaya’s defense of the prosecuted militants as a striking political judgment; it does not make that judgment an official position of Novaya Gazeta. In the narrative, the newspaper matters both as the workplace of a journalist whose death became a symbol of freedom of expression in the West and as the setting for reporting that complicates easy divisions between respectable opposition and disreputable dissent.