- I. Early October can be dismal
in Moscow. The short, harsh summer is over, the brief and beautiful refreshment
of September has passed, yet the snow - in which the city has its deepest
life - has not yet come. Instead there is often miasma: gray days pocked
with rain or fog, vague and ragged days, neither autumn nor winter but
suspended in a limbo state.
-
- They say last Saturday was just
such a day in Moscow: tepid, damp, fog through the morning, clouds all
afternoon, a limp breeze pushing at the torpor. The muffled sunlight would
have just begun draining toward night when a young man - dressed in black,
carrying a 9mm Makarov pistol - approached the nondescript apartment building
at 18/13 Lesnaya Street. His target was in sight: a woman, early middle
age, laden with groceries, walking toward the door. A few stray lines of
the setting sun might have split the clouds as he moved toward her - or
perhaps it stayed dim, miasmic. He wouldn't have noticed in any case: the
door was open, they were inside, the pistol was out, he fired - a few shots
to the body, one to the head; the woman fell. Her life was gone; the job
was done. He dropped the pistol, as he'd been taught to do, and left the
scene. It was, they say, about 4:30 in the afternoon.
-
- That's how Russia's leading journalist,
Anna Politkovskaya, came to die on Saturday. Many details of the death
are still unclear - and as the Russian authorities launch their usual "thorough
investigation" of yet another reporter's murder, no doubt the details
will grow more and more muddled, more vague and ragged, until the chain
of accountability leading back to the real culprits, the instigators of
the hit, is lost in the murk. All we will be left with is this stark, basic
fact: one of the world's most fearless voices for truth and human decency
has been silenced forever.
-
- II. Who
was Anna Politkovskaya? Although her death generated a spate of headlines
in the Western media - usually some variant of "Fierce Putin Critic
Slain" - neither her name nor her work was widely known outside Russia.
She occasionally had a column in the Washington Post - usually whenever
the prevailing political winds from the White House turned temporarily
cool toward the Kremlin leader whose "soul" George W. Bush had
mystically seen into and embraced in 2001. Her devastating book-length
critique - "Putin's Russia" - was first published in the UK in
2004 but didn't appear in the US until late last year, to little effect.
-
- Yet inside Russia, Politkovskaya
- a 48-year-old reporter working for Novaya Gazeta, one of the last genuinely
independent papers in the country - had come to be regarded by many as
"the conscience of the nation." This is a role that Russian society
has long required in its public life, from the time of the Tsars through
the Soviet period to the oil-state authoritarianism of today: some prominent
figure to serve - in the absence of viable civic structures - as a moral
counterbalance to the ruthless machinations and arbitrary will of the ruling
cliques. It has been filled by such people as Lev Tolstoy, Boris Pasternak,
Anna Akhmatova, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov and Yelena Bonner.
-
- Politkovskaya was thrust into
this ever-dangerous role by the simple expedient of reporting truthfully
about what she saw and heard: in the killing fields of Chechnya; in the
drab kitchens of families broken by torture, kidnappings, beatings, murders;
in the anguished, fearful voices of the Russian Army's own young recruits,
brutalized, robbed and abused by their own officers; in the courtrooms
and command posts and corridors of power, where death-dealing corruption
flows like a river of raw sewage overtopping its banks in all directions.
-
- Like so many of Russia's "consciences,"
Politkovskaya came from a relatively privileged background. She was actually
born in New York City, the daughter of Soviet diplomats posted to the UN,
although she returned to Russia at the age of five. As the daughter of
diplomats, she had access to banned books, was sent to the best Soviet
schools, later worked as a writer for top Soviet institutions: the national
newspaper Izvestiya, then the in-house paper of Aeroflot, the Soviet airline.
It was the latter job that opened her eyes to the reality of her native
land, she told the Guardian in 2004:
- Every [Aeroflot] journalist got a free ticket all year
round; you could go on any plane and fly wherever you wanted. Thanks to
this I saw the whole of our huge country. I was a girl from a diplomatic
family, a reader, a bit of a swot; I didn't know life at all.
-
- When Mikhail Gorbachev began
his momentous reforms in 1985, Politkovskaya took her newly-acquired knowledge
of Russia's depth and breadth to the independent papers then blossoming,
as the Guardian reports. There she documented the world-shaking collapse
of the Soviet Union, and the tumultuous casino of the Yeltsin years, with
its volatile mix of new personal and political freedoms, extreme social
turmoil, rampant criminality and clueless drifting at the center of power.
She was there for the first Chechen War, Yeltsin's botched and furiously
brutal campaign that ended in ignominious defeat.
-
- She was there too for the sudden
and perplexing rise of the bland-faced former KGB apparatchik, Vladimir
Putin. Anointed, out of nowhere, as Yeltsin's successor, Putin put an end
to Kremlin drift, steadied the social turmoil somewhat, curbed some of
the rampant criminality, and curtailed, often severely, the political freedoms
that flourished briefly - and ineffectually - in the post-Soviet era. But
above all, Putin was determined to renew the attack on Chechnya and eradicate
the results of the earlier debacle. Indeed, as Politkovskaya reported,
this unrelenting and ruthless new war would be the basis upon which Putin
would establish his presidential dictatorship and the overwhelming dominance
of his political faction.
-
- Politkovskaya once said the First
Chechen War was "the Russian media's greatest achievement." Dozens
of brave reporters waded into the conflict, reporting from the front lines
- and from behind the lines - documenting atrocities on both sides, bearing
witness to the homicidal frenzy that razed Grozny to the ground, and to
the murderous incompetence and brutality of the Russian military leaders.
They brought the war into Russia's living rooms, and as in Vietnam, the
folks back home were shocked to see what was being done in their names.
-
- But the Second Chechen War -
Putin's war - was the Russian media's greatest shame, said Politkovskaya.
Putin was determined to control the media presentation. Independent reporting
was virtually banned, although approved "embeds" could join Russian
forces and report back gritty but ultimately uplifting reports of the "battle
against the terrorists." Those few reporters who went their own way,
like Politkovskaya, found themselves balked at nearly every turn, and in
danger from both Russian forces and Chechen freebooters, as the war drove
extremism on both sides to new levels of virulence. But again and again,
she brought back the goods - the facts - and laid them out before the people.
And she kept going back to Chechnya in the war's aftermath, recording the
new crimes and atrocities of the thuggish regime of Chechen warlord Ramzan
Kadyrov, installed as the local boss-man by the Kremlin.
-
- In fact, Politkovskaya's last
story for Novaya Gazeta - which she was finishing on the day she was murdered
- was another carefully documented piece about torture under the Kadyrov
regime. The story will probably not appear now, the paper's editors said.
Russian police have confiscated her computer and all her files as part
of the murder investigation, while key bits of photographic evidence backing
up the story have mysteriously disappeared, the Moscow Times reports.
-
- III. That's
who Anna Politkovskaya was: a reporter, a mother (of two grown children),
a bearer of national conscience. But why was she killed? Who sent the "tall
young man wearing dark clothing and a black baseball cap" captured
on cameras in the foyer of the building, as the Moscow Times reports?
-
- Early suspicion in the West has
fallen heavily on Putin; that was the clear implication of the many headlines
and stories that identified Politkovskaya largely (and sometimes solely)
as a "Putin critic." But whatever else you can say about this
inscrutable little man, he is not stupid. And Politkovskaya's murder would
be a stupid move indeed for Putin to make; it would bring him little or
no benefit, and a great deal of unwelcome heat at a critical moment.
-
- Politkovskaya had been criticizing
Putin for years - to no avail, in practical, political terms. For example,
this summer - long after her book had been published - Putin played genial
host to the G-8 leaders in yet another of their grandiose, meaningless
confabs. They were glad to come wine and dine with Vlad, to grip and grin
with him for cozy photos, to accord him all the respect due to the leader
of a great power - i.e., one with nukes and oodles of oil. Politkovskaya's
years of revelations about the depredations of his rule had obviously cut
no ice with the great and good. Anyway, she was known mostly for writing
about Chechnya; and to Bush, Blair and other leaders of the "developed"
world, Chechnya is now considered just another front in the "war on
terror," with Vlad fighting the good fight against "worldwide
Islamofascism" (or whatever the term of propaganda art is these days.).
If he has to play a little rough with those evildoers, well, that's just
what a Commander in Chief has to do sometimes to defend national security,
right?
-
- Given the West's tacit countenancing
of atrocities in Chechnya, and its indifference to Politkovskaya's revelations
- not to mention her increasing marginalization in the Kremlin-dominated
Russian media itself - her life posed no real threat to Putin. But her
death makes her a martyr, and is already dredging up some of her long-ignored
attacks on his regime. And this comes at a time when Putin is making a
major play to secure a prominent - if not dominant - role for Russia in
Europe's energy market, as well as playing hardball in "renegotiations"
of deals with Western oil giants. Why make trouble for yourself by having
the "national conscience" bumped off in such a conspicuous way?
-
- Kadyrov is also a prime suspect,
and a somewhat more likely one, although here again, with the Kremlin backing
him, he was unlikely to suffer any serious damage from Politkovskaya's
stories, and ordering a hit would have been a stupid move on his part,
too. Then again, thuggish warlords who collaborate in the repression of
their own people are not exactly immune from stupidity. Other suspects
include the ever-corrupt Russian Army, which has often benefited from the
sudden demise of reporters who were looking too closely at its operations;
or one of the nation's criminal clans; or the ultranationalist groups that
had placed Politkovskaya on a death list for her "anti-Russian"
attacks on the nation's leader, as the Moscow Times reports.
-
- Speculation can even extend to
forces trying to make Putin look bad - agents of Georgia or Ukraine, perhaps,
both now being pressured heavily by Moscow; or those Western oil giants,
looking for leverage against Putin's hardball, or maybe a CIA black op
to bring him into line on a Security Council squeeze play against Iran.
Such is the murk that envelops not only the Russian state but the entire
grand chessboard of geopolitics today that anything is possible, and most
of it is plausible. When "developed" democracies officially embrace
torture and aggressive war, flouting the very notion of law while their
leaders, like Dick Cheney, talk openly of "going to the dark side,"
is it any wonder that conspiracy theories flourish at every turn?
-
- And in this new world order of
"dark siders" ruling by fear, force and lies, is it any wonder
that an unarmed teller of unwanted truths would be gunned down in the miasma
of a Moscow October?
-
- Anyone who craves light in this
universal darkness, who prefers hard fact to the blood-soaked fantasies
of presidential dictators, anyone who honors courage in the service of
knowledge and compassion should mourn the death of Anna Politkovskaya -
and take inspiration from her remarkable life.
-
- ____
-
- Chris Floyd is an American journalist.
He lived and worked in Moscow from 1994 to 1996. His work has appeared
in print and online in venues all over the world, including The Nation,
Counterpunch, Columbia Journalism Review, the Christian Science Monitor,
Il Manifesto, the Moscow Times and many others. He is the author of Empire
Burlesque: High Crimes and Low Comedy in the Bush Imperium, and is co-founder
and editor of the "Empire Burlesque" political blog. He can be
reached at cfloyd72@gmail.com.
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