Rejecting safety of silence in corrupted Russia

Book of the Day: Nothing But The Truth: Selected Dispatchesby Anna Politkovskaya. Translated by Arch Tait, Harvill Secker 468 pp, £18.99

AFTER INVESTIGATING yet another vicious attack on a Russian journalist, and exposing the familiar nexus of organised crime and official corruption that lay behind it, Anna Politkovskaya asked whether people should risk their lives to tell the truth about Kremlin power and the Russian people.

Soon, she feared, Russian politicians, businessmen and the security services would no longer have to terrorise journalists because “they will have achieved what they wanted: there will be nobody left prepared to lay down their life in order to get at the truth about other people’s lives. If there is no demand, there will be no supply”. This cuts to the heart of why Politkovskaya wrote the articles gathered in this fine collection: to rouse Russians before they sleepwalk into complete subjection to a state that steals, lies and kills its own citizens to enhance its power.

It is futile to try to understand post-Soviet Russia without reading Politkovskaya, who was shot dead in her apartment block in Moscow three years after writing the words quoted above.

She is best known for her reports from Chechnya, where she defied death threats and constant official harassment to give a voice to people who were engulfed by war and abandoned by Russia’s leaders to the brutal whims of federal troops and Kremlin-backed militias. But she also wrote on Russia’s other great ills, poverty and corruption, and with passion and wit on everything from tango in London to Paris in springtime, and domestic life with a neurotic bloodhound called Van Gogh.

Going to remote villages whose people felt forgotten, Politkovskaya returned with horrific tales of how Chechens were subjected to kidnapping, torture and summary execution by the forces entrusted by Vladimir Putin to bring peace to the region.

Politkovskaya’s mounting fury with the state’s refusal to investigate its own crimes and deliver justice to its citizens is palpable as her reports mount up.

Rather than bringing peace to Chechnya, Putin’s dirty war spread to the neighbouring republics of Ingushetia and Dagestan, and brought bloodshed to provincial towns and to the Kremlin’s doorstep.

After the siege at Moscow’s Dubrovka theatre in 2002 and at Beslan’s school two years later, Politkovskaya condemned Russian officials and rebel leaders for failing to prevent or negotiate a peaceful conclusion to calamities that claimed more than 500 lives. She charted the official inquiries into these events, and saw they were blatant cover-ups. The unanswered questions were so numerous and fundamental that she began to suspect a state hand in organising the attacks, or ensuring that they ended badly.

Politkovskaya never made it to Beslan. She drank a poisoned cup of tea on the flight from Moscow and woke up in hospital.

She knew that she had infuriated some dangerous people. She also knew that the Russian state would not protect her, and that relatively few of her quiescent compatriots cared what happened to government critics.

After she was murdered, Putin said Politkovskaya’s “influence on political life in Russia was minimal”. Unfortunately, he was right, and she is more widely read in the West than in her homeland. But that is more an indictment of Putin’s Russia than of a brave, intelligent and sensitive woman who rejected the safety of silence.

Daniel McLaughlin covers central and eastern Europe for The Irish Times