"Absolutely political murder"

Journalist Anna Politkovskaya killed in Moscow

Anna Politkovskaya was killed on Saturday, October 7, in the entrance of her house, where she entered at about five o'clock in the evening. The killer - according to investigators, he was a tall young man dressed in dark clothes - entered the entrance after her and remained waiting on the first floor. The journalist went up to the apartment with some of the packages taken from the car in which she arrived from the supermarket, left them there and went down in the elevator to get the rest. When the elevator doors opened, the killer opened fire. Then he threw the gun right there in the elevator and left.

Anna Politkovskaya became a prominent figure in the Russian journalistic community with the beginning of the second Chechen campaign, although she had been working in the press for a long time, almost since graduating from the journalism department of Lomonosov Moscow State University in 1980. At various times she was an employee of such publications as Izvestia, Air Transport, Megapolis Express. From 1994 to 1998, Politkovskaya worked as a columnist and editor of the “Emergency Incidents” department at Obshchaya Gazeta and already there established herself as a journalist who sees the meaning of her work not so much in describing reality, but in changing it - its Publications on social issues required immediate response and were designed to elicit a reaction not only from readers, but also from competent authorities.

And then, in June 1999, Politkovskaya came to Novaya Gazeta, already known then for its biting and sometimes rather one-sided materials about the most painful aspects of Russian life, including the first Chechen campaign. A little over a month later, the invasion of Chechen militants under the command of Basayev and Khattab into Dagestan began, and then a new war in Chechnya itself. And although Politkovskaya wrote not only about the events in this republic, her name will forever remain associated with the North Caucasus and the events that took place there.

At first she simply worked as a correspondent, but soon everything she saw and experienced during numerous business trips to Chechnya and its environs forced Politkovskaya to retrain as a human rights activist - she not only wrote, but also persistently demanded that leaders of all ranks, both military and civilian, both federal , and Chechen, help for those who are in trouble. In a republic at war, this was almost every second person. When the official authorities did not help, Politkovskaya acted herself or turned to readers.

Everything according to the plot

Murder of Anna Politkovskaya

Thus, in December 1999, when generals Shamanov and Troshin were leading federal troops on both sides to Grozny, she managed to organize the departure from the Chechen capital of 89 residents of a local nursing home, who were essentially abandoned in this confusion, and achieved their resettlement in Russia. However, in the summer of the following year, 2000, the pro-Moscow Chechen authorities, wanting to emphasize that the situation in the republic was under control, began to actively invite the old people who had left to return back, promising them tolerable living conditions. 22 people believed, came and again turned out to be of no use to anyone. In August, Novaya Gazeta, on Politkovskaya's initiative, organized a collection of money and food so that the Grozny nursing home could survive while waiting for the promised funds from the Chechen budget to be allocated to it. We managed to collect a lot - more than three tons of food, 120 thousand rubles. Then the epic began to send this unplanned cargo to Chechnya by military aircraft, but Politkovskaya managed to cope with this too. “Tell everyone who did this for us, they will definitely go to heaven,” Novaya Gazeta quoted the words of workers at a Grozny nursing home.

But Anna Politkovskaya not only helped, she also accused those whom she suspected of crimes against the civilian Chechen population. As a rule, the objects of her accusations were Russian officers and generals, who, naturally, did not like it, and they took action as best they could. In February 2001, the journalist arrived in the Chechen village of Khotuni, whose residents wrote to all possible authorities asking them to protect them from harassment from the paratrooper regiment stationed nearby. The matter ended with the military detaining Politkovskaya for three days, after which she, returning to Moscow, accused the regiment officers of provocation, called them “Makhno’s gang” and, most importantly, stated that holes had been dug in the ground on the territory of the unit - the so-called zindans - for keeping captured Chechens in them and that this was done by order of the commander of the federal group in Chechnya, General Baranov. Politkovskaya’s statement stirred up high-level competent authorities: Russian Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov ordered a journalistic investigation into the circumstances of the detention, and the Commissioner for Human Rights in Chechnya, Vladimir Kalamanov, and representatives of the Chechen Republican Prosecutor’s Office went to Chechnya itself, to the village of Khotuni. True, they did not find any zindans in the disposition of the paratroopers and even threatened Politkovskaya with criminal prosecution for libel, but the conflict between local residents and the military still received at least some resolution.

In general, Politkovskaya was often accused of bias, of denigrating the authorities and generals, of unprofessionalism, of excessive sympathy for Chechen militants and terrorists... The latter, by the way, really knew about Politkovskaya - it was with her that the leader of those who in October 2002 agreed to meet captured the theater center on Dubrovka. He introduced himself to Politkovskaya as Bakar, but later it became known that the terrorists who took hostage the audience of the capital’s musical “Nord-Ost” were led by Movsar Baraev. “Was it you who was in Khotuny?” was the question the terrorists greeted the journalist with. Then it was she who managed to learn from one of the hostages, who helped carry water and juices into the hall, brought by Politkovskaya with the permission of “Bakar”, that the militants had set a deadline after which the executions of the hostages were to begin. Politkovskaya transmitted this information to the operational headquarters, and the special services began to act - on the night of October 26, sleeping gas was released into the hall, the victims of which were not only the terrorists, but also almost 130 hostages. Anna Politkovskaya took upon herself to investigate the circumstances of the rescue operation, and this activity, according to one version, became the reason for her murder.

Author's page of Anna Politkovskaya

Archive of "Novaya Gazeta"

Two years after Nord-Ost, when Chechen terrorists seized a school in the North Ossetian city of Beslan in September 2004, Politkovskaya was again ready to act as a mediator. Having learned about what had happened from the news, she immediately went to the airport and managed to board a plane flying from Moscow to Rostov. However, during the flight, the Novaya Gazeta journalist, after drinking tea prepared by the flight attendants, suddenly felt unwell. According to her, she began to lose consciousness, and when she woke up in one of the Rostov hospitals, she learned that they wanted to poison her. Politkovskaya never made it to Beslan, which gave her reason to accuse the Russian authorities of trying to remove her from covering the Beslan events.

Although in Russia Politkovskaya published mainly in Novaya Gazeta, a weekly that has been losing its position in the media market year after year, she quickly gained fame in the West thanks to her bold publications about Chechnya and the anti-democratic nature of the Russian government. Organizations such as Amnesty International, Reporters Without Borders and the OSCE called her an expert on the North Caucasus, and Western publications willingly published her materials. Politkovskaya received a number of prestigious foreign awards, for example, the Award for Courage in Journalism from the international Foundation for Women in Journalism in 2002 or the OSCE Award in 2003 for her coverage of the situation in Chechnya. Domestic structures did not forget her either - in January 2000, Politkovskaya was awarded the title “Golden Pen of Russia”. In addition, her merits were recognized with the following awards: the prize of the Union of Journalists of the Russian Federation “A good deed and a kind heart”, the prize of the Union of Journalists for materials on the fight against corruption, the diploma “Golden Gong - 2000” for a series of materials about Chechnya.

“So it happened - for the first time, not in a movie, I saw a grandmother swollen from hunger. It happened now, in the summer of 2000, in the very center of the large Chechen village of Chiri-Yurt, among a dense mass of people, in the former school No. 3, eight months ago turned into one refugee camp,” Politkovskaya wrote, for example, in her article “Mental Pogrom.” Before such publications, any critics fell silent - no matter how you treat Novaya Gazeta, no matter how you accuse Politkovskaya herself of being biased and trying to exaggerate the suffering of the Chechen people, you cannot escape the facts: she really was there and THIS is really happening there. Politkovskaya’s publications about the state of affairs in refugee camps in Chechnya and Ingushetia really could not leave anyone indifferent. These materials were collected in her documentary book "Journey to Hell. Chechen Diary."

At the same time, the passionate desire to help, alleviate the suffering of innocent victims and expose the sins of the guilty often played a cruel joke on Anna Politkovskaya. When they saw a journalist who was unable to calmly look at someone else’s pain, people, willingly or unwillingly, began to embellish their own and others’ suffering. An indicative incident occurred back in 1997, when Politkovskaya worked at Obshchaya Gazeta. She published an article under the heading “A soldier’s legs were amputated because he violated discipline,” in which, citing information received from a certain reserve captain Shkolny, she accused the command of one of the units of the Moscow Military District of bullying conscripts. This publication earned a counter-journalistic investigation from a correspondent of Krasnaya Zvezda, the official press organ of the Russian Ministry of Defense. The author of the investigation easily proved that Politkovskaya became an unwitting accomplice of the professional litigator Shkolny, who tried by hook or by crook to extract fifty million rubles from the battalion where he once served “for moral suffering.”

Anna Politkovskaya about the war in Chechnya

Archive of the site "Human Rights in Russia"

Similar incidents accompanied Politkovskaya’s activities subsequently, until the last high-profile case, when in the spring of 2006 she, citing a message from an unknown former KGB officer who served time in the camps, warned about the preparation of a provocation against Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was serving time in one of the colonies of the Chita region - allegedly the authorities planned to force him to take part in the escape from the zone in order to kill the disgraced oligarch during the pursuit of the fugitives. The absurdity of such accusations was obvious to any unbiased reader, but, probably, Politkovskaya, who saw too much unimaginable suffering during the years of the Chechen war and more than once encountered the absurdity and cruelty of the actions of authorities at all levels, had her own logic. “This can happen,” “a person can (or could) get hurt” - which means this is a reason to sound the alarm bell, publish articles under scathing headlines, and demand public attention. Journalism from Politkovskaya did not wear white gloves - it was not for glossy covers and not for textbooks on professional ethics, it was, so to speak, direct action journalism.

This is what worried Anna Politkovskaya’s colleagues and relatives and made them fear for her fate. “Anyone who touches the Chechen topic - my opinion - finds himself at the forefront of compromising evidence and leaks, involuntarily sees who has a share and where the money goes, they begin to use him in the dark, especially as a “nervous woman”. Recognition, awards - all this is a smoke screen , mirages,” writes one of her former journalistic colleagues. "Now imagine two camps. In one sits the government, and in the other are its opponents. At first glance, it seems that Anna is in the second camp. In fact, she is on her own and alone in her actions... The enemies of the government in their "fighters can refer to Politkovskaya's notes and post them on their websites. But if suddenly one rainy day they think that Politkovskaya's death will hit the enemy harder than all her notes that have not yet been written, then Anya will simply be killed," adds another. No matter how noble intentions and extraordinary impulses determined Politkovskaya’s actions, she unwittingly occupied a very specific niche in Russian society - the niche of a patented fighter against the political regime, with all its advantages and disadvantages.

The news of Anna Politkovskaya's death shocked everyone - both supporters and opponents. The former husband of the deceased, one of the founders of the “Vzglyad” program and himself a well-known journalist in the 1990s, Alexander Politkovsky, recalled that Anna was first threatened two years ago, when, because of her publications about the fate of the missing resident of Chechnya, Zelimkhan Murdalov, he came under investigation Khanty-Mansiysk OMON officer Sergei Lapin. The accused entered into an email correspondence with the journalist, saying in the first letter that at one time he “undertook sniper training” and now intends to “visit Moscow.” The Ministry of Internal Affairs, at the request of the editors of Novaya Gazeta, then even provided Politkovskaya with security, but all this did not last long - the matter was hushed up, the security was removed, Anna herself reacted unkindly to the prospect of walking under the supervision of the police.

- What goal do you set for yourself in your current position?
- Survive in the circumstances offered by fate

Anna Politkovskaya answering a question from the magazine "Journalist"

But the murder was clearly not organized by a random character in one of Anna Politkovskaya’s publications. Everyone immediately noticed his ordered nature - only professionals act so calmly and they are the ones who throw their weapons at the crime scene. There has been no shortage of assumptions and versions for the third day now. The editors of Novaya Gazeta are talking about Ramzan Kadyrov - Politkovskaya’s latest article entitled “Punitive Conspiracy” was dedicated to him; his journalist in an interview with Radio Liberty last Thursday - on the day of the thirtieth anniversary of the Prime Minister of Chechnya - called him “a coward armed to the teeth ". “Today we don’t know who killed her and why. We can only put forward two main versions. Or it was the revenge of Ramzan Kadyrov, about whose activities she wrote and spoke a lot. Or those who want suspicion to fall on the current Chechen prime minister, who, having passed the 30th birthday mark, can aspire to the presidency,” the newspaper staff wrote in their obituary.

However, other observers and experts immediately noted that “Ramzan Kadyrov is certainly not so stupid” as to order Politkovskaya from a professional killer. They spoke approximately the same way about another version - that the official authorities, almost the president of the country, whom Politkovskaya also did not favor, had ordered the murder. Moreover, experts generally immediately rejected the version that Politkovskaya was killed for this or that publication or exposure. Two circumstances lead them to this idea. Firstly, Anna Politkovskaya has been making her revelations for a long time - since 1999, and the most her opponents could manage was a three-day detention in the village of Khotuni at the very height of the events she wrote about. And secondly, all of its publications had a very low “revealing potential” in the eyes of law enforcement agencies and ordinary people - the circulation of Novaya Gazeta has recently been regularly declining, the obvious bias of the newspaper was too obvious for the average reader to treat it with respect. trust.

In addition, the murder occurred on October 7 - exactly on the day of Vladimir Putin's 54th birthday. Only a person completely out of touch with Russian political realities can assume that the president’s associates decided to give him such a “gift.” The version of settling scores with the journalist on the part of smaller persons, Chechen or Russian, whom Politkovskaya could have “offended” with her reports (like Lapin), also does not stand up to criticism - the thoroughness with which the murder was organized speaks against it. It remains to draw the conclusion that experts have already come to: “The murder of Anna Politkovskaya is not only and, perhaps, not so much an “anti-personal” act, but an anti-social one.” In other words, we are talking about a large-scale provocation in which a nationally known journalist became an unwitting victim and a hostage of her own reputation.

“I would say that precisely because Politkovskaya has never been a really inconvenient person, an enemy, in any case, she has not been one for a long time, precisely because of the biased nature of her investigations, she is very convenient as a target. Which means, most likely ", became the prey of provocateurs. In any case, the provocateurs are already trying to “appropriate” her murder for themselves, that is, to appropriate the symbolic benefit from the murder," said the famous pro-Kremlin political scientist Gleb Pavlovsky. No matter how you feel about his own reputation, you cannot deny his instincts or the other experts who immediately started talking about provocations against the Kremlin. Everyone who is in one way or another responsible for the information security of the current government immediately announced what a blow Politkovskaya’s death would be for the Kremlin and Vladimir Putin personally, especially on the eve of the year of “big elections.” Many immediately pointed out who benefited from this crime: “It is unclear whether the West is the direct orderer of the murder, but it will undoubtedly be its main beneficiary,” writes political scientist Pavel Svyatenkov, adding that Putin’s opponents now have the opportunity to exaggerate the topic of the “Russian Gongadze” with great benefit for oneself.

One can blame pro-Kremlin political scientists for their desire to blame all of Russia’s internal troubles on the West, but the fact remains: Politkovskaya in Europe and the United States was considered a much more influential journalist than in Russia itself; her murder there was already perceived as another attack on freedom of speech, the OSCE has already expressed their concerns about this, mass rallies in memory of Politkovskaya took place over the weekend in Germany and Finland. In Moscow itself, a rally dedicated to the latest anti-Georgian initiatives of the Kremlin spontaneously grew into a rally in memory of Politkovskaya, for whose death those gathered unequivocally blamed the same Kremlin. Boris Berezovsky from London made a sarcastic remark that the OSCE responded, but for some reason Putin is silent... It is also known that on Sunday, the day after his own home holiday, Putin urgently convened a meeting of the Russian Security Council in Novo-Ogarevo , and although the agenda of this meeting, naturally, remained unknown to the general public, there is no doubt that they also discussed the consequences of the murder of a famous journalist for the international prestige of Russia. Since, in the absence of real evidence, evidence and suspects, public opinion in the West and, in many respects, in Russia has turned towards the Kremlin in search of the culprits, it means, as the same Pavlovsky writes, “the killer’s goal has been achieved.”

“This is an absolutely political murder,” said Yabloko party leader Grigory Yavlinsky. There is no point in arguing with this: no matter who the real orderer of the murder of the journalist was and no matter what goals he pursued, the death of Anna Politkovskaya opens a new page in the history of modern Russia. For some reason I don't want to read it at all.

Dmitry Ivanov

"Absolutely political murder"

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