Anna Politkovskaya: If one word sums up the life and work of Anna Politkovskaya, Russia's foremost investigative reporter assassinated at the age of 48, it is bravery.
She never saw herself as a war correspondent; indeed, Russia's first disastrous foray into Chechnya, from 1994 to 1998, almost passed her by. It is an irony of her story that the war she did not write about was brought to a halt by crusading journalism. Reports chronicling the civilian cost of Russian artillery bombardments, broadcast on the independent television station NTV, had the same effect as the coverage of Vietnam had done on American audiences 30 years earlier. The Kremlin opted to sue for peace.
At the time, Politkovskaya was writing about state orphanages and the plight of the old: "I was interested in reviving Russia's pre-revolutionary tradition of writing about our social problems. That led me to writing about the seven million refugees in our country. When the war started, it was that that led me down to Chechnya."
By the start of the second Chechen war in 1999, the Kremlin had learned its lessons. The absence of reporting from the other side and lock-down on the battlefield put the Federal Security Service (FSB) in charge and set Chechen against Chechen.
She was in little doubt that Russia had been provoked. The relatively moderate wing of Chechen resistance, led by its former president Aslan Maskhadov, had run out of money. Into the vacuum swept money from the Wahabbis and foreign fighters like the Arab known as Khattab. When September 11th, 2001, provided an international parallel, it was only too convenient for the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. Shamil Basayev, a Chechen warlord who dreamed of creating a Muslim state across the north Caucasus, linked up with Khattab and invaded Dagestan, part of the Russian Federation.
Politkovskaya agreed that Russia had to react. "But it was the way they did it," she said. "It was clear to me it was going to be total war, whose victims were first and foremost going to be civilian." What followed was an excoriating series of articles and two books baring Russia's soul to the atrocities committed in its name - events such as the "cleansing operation" of a village called Starye Atagi from January 28th to February 5th, 2002, and the shooting of six innocent villagers on a bus by members of a GRU military intelligence patrol.
Her first book, A Dirty War: A Russian Reporter in Chechnya (2001), chronicled not so much what Russia was doing to Chechnya, but what Chechnya was doing to Russia. Putin's Russia (2004) described how new Russians got their money, through a combination of violence and old-fashioned thievery: it was to save the dying embers of democracy at home that she flew repeatedly back into the cauldron of the north Caucasus.
In the last interview she gave, Politkovskaya said she planned to publish in Novaya Gazeta the results of a large investigation into torture in Chechnya. The article was never sent. She is survived by her son Ilya and daughter Vera.
Anna Politkovskaya: born 1958; died October 7th, 2006