Russian man fined for destroying memorial plaque to Novaya Gazeta journalist Anna Politkovskaya

The wall where three separate plaques honouring Anna Politkovskaya have now been destroyed, outside her former home in Moscow. Photo: SOTA

A Moscow court has fined a city resident for destroying a memorial plaque honouring the murdered Novaya Gazeta journalist Anna Politkovskaya, the city courts’ press service said on Wednesday.

Alexander Filippov was found guilty of smashing the memorial plaque on the façade of Politkovskaya’s apartment building on Lesnaya Street, and was fined 1,000 rubles (€11) for petty hooliganism. The plaque read “Anna Politkovskaya lived in this house and was brutally murdered on 7 October 2006”.

However, in an editorial statement issued on Monday, Novaya Gazeta said that a neo-Nazi group had been behind the attack, also accusing it of defacing a makeshift memorial to human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov and Novaya Gazeta journalist Anastasia Baburova, both of whom were killed by neo-Nazis in Moscow in 2009.

“This was a coordinated attack by neo-Nazis announcing that they were back on the streets,” Novaya Gazeta’s statement read. “This can hardly be qualified as petty hooliganism.”

After the plaque was first destroyed on Sunday, messages sent on the closed Telegram channel of neo-Nazi group National Socialism / White Power (NS/WP), appeared to admit responsibility for the act, calling it “a tribute from the Four Letters [NS/WP] to their glorious predecessors from another four-letter organisation”, a reference to the now disbanded Russian neo-Nazi group BORN, which was responsible for the killings of Markelov and Baburova.

Activists subsequently put up two new plaques to Politkovskaya at the same site, both of which appear to have been destroyed by one of the building’s residents, who confessed to destroying both in a video shared online by independent news outlet RusNews.

Politkovskaya, who gained international renown for her exposés of Kremlin corruption and the brutal treatment of civilians in Chechnya at the hands of Russian forces during the Second Chechen War, was assassinated in the stairwell of her own apartment building on Moscow’s Lesnaya Street on 7 October 2006. Those who ordered the crime have never been found.

The European Court of Human Rights ruled in 2018 that the Russian government had failed to carry out an effective investigation into Politkovskaya’s murder. The statute of limitations on the case expired on 7 October 2021.