Slain journalist was brave, insightful

On Oct. 7, 2006, a gloomy Saturday afternoon with lowering skies and a cutting wind, Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya returned to her Moscow apartment building with an armful of groceries and boarded the rickety elevator. When the lift arrived at her floor, she was found shot to death with two bullet wounds to the chest, one in her right shoulder and, the coup de grace, one in her head. A Makarov military-issue pistol and four spent casings were found next to her body. She was 48.

Politkovskaya was not widely known in the United States, but in Russia and throughout Europe she was a sensation, a scalding critic of Vladimir Putin's two ill-fated campaigns to subdue the breakaway, largely Muslim republic of Chechnya. Her writing for Novaya Gazeta, and her four searing books -- "A Dirty War," "A Small Corner of Hell," "Putin's Russia" and "Russian Diary" -- enraged Kremlin officials, whom she accused of "brutality," "arrogance" and "stupidity," but won her an immense following.

This collection of her final dispatches, "Is Journalism Worth Dying For?" (translated by Arch Tait, Melville House, 480 pages, $19.95), which was found on her laptop after her death, begins with a withering attack on her fellow journalists, whom she accused of slavishly toeing the Kremlin line to secure positions at the proximity of power. "Koverny," she called them, circus clowns whose task it is to divert the public with mindless entertainment while Putin and his acolytes build a "Pyramid of Power" that weeds out "liberally inclined politicians, human rights activists, and 'enemy' democrats."

And what of those who refuse to cater to the Ringmaster? "They become pariahs," she wrote, or, in Politkovskaya's case, targets. The number of Russian journalists who have been murdered in the past decade is astonishing, upwards of 200 by one count, four from Novaya Gazeta alone. One reason for that is the pointed quality of Russian journalism, which is on full display in Politkovskaya's writing. Her reports from Chechnya are sometimes gruesomely intense, often lurid, but always insightful. One is the story of a Russian army colonel whose specialty was tracking down and ruthlessly killing Chechen separatists. Yet this same man made it his avocation to find the wives of his victims and care for them, to wean them from the jihadist precept that the wives of "martyrs" must become suicide bombers.

There is pathos and sorrow in these pages, but also hope and lightness, especially in her non-political stories, many of which are beautifully, even lyrically, written. Yet there is a unique plaintiveness in all her work that recalls dissident writing during the Soviet era. It's almost as if she were shouting "Read what I have to say!" before the secret police arrive. The Russians call it "writing for the drawer," unburdening oneself in private, but in Politkovskaya's case she wanted the world to know what was happening to her country under Putin, the former head of the FSB secret police.

"It is generally accepted that we Russians do not like ourselves much," Politkovskaya observed, sounding very much like Dostoyevsky. Four men, two with close ties to the FSB, were charged with her murder. They were acquitted after a closed trial.

Politkovskaya was murdered on Putin's birthday.

Michael J. Bonafield, an avid Russophile who has traveled to Russia five times, lives in Apple Valley.