A Russian Diary Read online

  ALSO BY

  ANNA POLITKOVSKAYA

  a dirty war: a russian reporter in chechnya

  putin's russia: life in a failing democracy

  a small corner of hell: dispatches from chechnya

  FOREWORD

  SCOTT SIMON

  ANNA POLITKOVSKAYA COULD HAVE LEFT RUSSIA–REMEMBER THAT as you read these journals. She was born in 1958 in New York, where her Ukrainian parents were Soviet diplomats at the United Nations. The U.S. embassy in Moscow considered her a citizen. She was entitled to an American passport.

  With all of the resourcefulness that Anna Politkovskaya had relied on to survive in Chechnya and Ingushetia, she might have pulled a scarf over her short, soft gray hair, doffed the simple oval glasses by which she was so easily identified, left her apartment building by a back door, met a friend to guide her, and gone to the U.S. embassy. Or visited her sister, Elena Kudimova, in London (Russian officials were glad to see her go, knowing that next to nothing she said or wrote outside of Russia would ever be heard or read there), and just stayed. She could have flown to Berlin or New York to accept one more award for heroism. She could have gone to a conference on the Caucasus in Paris or Vienna, told stirring stories of her indisputable courage to astounded students at Columbia, Stanford, or Iowa State, signed up with a think tank in Washington or Cambridge, and never have to go back to Moscow.

  Anna Politkovskaya could have lived in Manhattan, Palo Alto, or Santa Monica, with a car service waiting downstairs to whisk her away to expound on Russia's corruptions and treacheries from the safe confines of a television studio or college campus. She would have risked leaving her mother, who was battling cancer, and her twenty-six-year-old daughter and first grandchild. But she would be alive—surely what they would have preferred.

  Family and friends had urged her to leave. Russian soldiers, police, oligarchs, criminal gangs, and the highest-ranking Russian politicians had explicitly threatened her life. When she grew violently ill after sipping a cup of tea on a flight into Beslan to negotiate during the school hostage crisis in 2004, she saw it was an attempt to silence her there and then. Alexander Litvinenko, the former KGB man who became a critic of Vladimir Putin, told her to leave Russia.

  But Anna told David Hearst of Britain's Guardian newspaper in 2002, “The more I think about it, the more I would be betraying these people if I walked away. The only thing to do is to take this to the bitter end, so that no one can say that when things became difficult, I ran away.”

  Those words would sound sanctimonious from almost anyone else.

  AS THE DAUGHTER OF SOVIET DIPLOMATS, Anna grew up with books, magazines, and access to news that was banned for ordinary citizens; in fact, her parents, impressed by the free flow of ideas in the West, smuggled books in for her. When she studied journalism at Moscow State University, she risked writing her dissertation about the poet Marina Tsvetaeva, who had been banned by Stalin and eventually hanged herself.

  She went to work for Izvestiya, the official house organ of the Supreme Soviet Central Committee. Pravda, the other best-known official daily (but in no sense a competitor) was the official voice of the Communist Party. Pravda means “truth,” Izvestiya means “news,” and the joke among Russians was, “There is no news in Pravda and no truth in Izvestiya.”

  Within a few years Anna was able to meet the criteria for a job at the in-house magazine of Aeroflot, the state airline of the USSR. The journalism was probably trickier than what Americans associate with airline monthlies (creating a favorable impression of the grimy and treacherous Aeroflot fleet in the early 1980s would have tested Dostoevsky's imagination). But she also qualified for free plane tickets, which she used to explore the breadth of her own vast, dazzling country. She fell in love with the majestic immensity of Russia's variety and soul. She was appalled by the depth of its poverty and cruelty.

  When the era of Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika began to bloom, Anna saw opportunities to do the kind of journalism she had known in the West. She became part of the founding group of Novaya Gazeta (New Newspaper). It was that newspaper that first sent her to Chechnya, where she would return thirty-nine times. At the heart of these journals is the anger and revulsion Anna Politkovskaya felt over what she witnessed there, over and over, and what that brutality disclosed about the system that ruled her country.

  Americans may see the Russian war in Chechnya as a prolonged conflict stretching on for more than a decade, like the Soviet campaign in Afghanistan (or America's in Vietnam). But for Russians, there are two distinct wars. The first was declared by Boris Yeltsin, after local leaders split the Chechen-Ingush republic in two as the Soviet Union spun apart in 1991. Ingushetia joined the Russian Federation. Chechnya refused. Russian forces rolled in to Chechnya in 1994 (Czechoslovakia 1968 style, one is tempted to say) when Russia said that instability and civil war threatened peace in the region.

  But by 1996, the ill-equipped Russian Army, which rained down expensive explosives on Chechens, but could not feed or shoe its soldiers, had to withdraw. Russian public opinion, appalled by the uselessness, cost, and visible brutality of the war, called on Yeltsin to sue for peace. Many in his government openly blamed the press for informing and inflaming the public. Anna Politkovskaya was prominent among those reporters who sent back vivid and infuriating stories of Russia's scorched-earth campaign of kidnappings, rapes, massacres, and the bombing of innocents. If such coverage caused the public to shut down the war in Chechnya, Anna believed it was an example of what a free press and an informed public in a democratic society should have the power to do.

  Anna Politkovskaya strongly believed that Vladimir Putin and Russian security services had allowed the self-proclaimed Chechen terrorist Shamil Basaev to stage raids in Dagestan in 1999. This permitted Vladimir Putin to cite chaos and instability as a reason to send Russian forces back into Chechnya. I am less certain of that, and will leave Anna to make her own argument in these journals. But Putin had manifestly drawn lessons from the first failed Russian campaign in Chechnya: keep out reporters, and have no mercy. The killings, rapes, indiscriminate shellings, and torture of Chechens became more intense—and went almost unreported.

  In October 2002, heavily armed terrorists professing allegiance to Chechen separatists (Shamil Basaev claimed credit for the plan) seized the Dubrovka theater in Moscow during a performance of Nord-Ost, a Russian musical. They took 912 people hostage. The terrorists said that all of the captured theatergoers would be killed unless the Russian government withdrew its forces from Chechnya.

  Anna Politkovskaya, whose reporting from Chechnya had made her name known among the terrorists, was called in to try to negotiate some kind of agreement that would save the lives of the hostages. No agreement was reached. The Russian government quickly concluded, if it had ever thought otherwise, that none was possible. After just two and a half days, Russian special forces stormed the building. But first they laid down a cloud of what is still an unidentified gas.

  Thirty-three terrorists were killed—some might have escaped—but so were at least 130 of the hostages. No Russian special forces died.

  Important questions persist: How did any of the hostages die when a gas was laid down to render their captors unconscious? Why was there no medical assistance on-site for the hostages? Why were terrorists shot if they were stunned and inert? Was there something that government forces didn't want anyone to have the chance to say?

  Anna Politkovskaya came away convinced that the terrorists (and she called them that; no stylebook euphemisms for Anna, like militants or activists) never would have killed the hostages, and that the Russian government never would have permitted a peaceful solution: it wanted to shed blood. I am less sure of the former than I am of the latter. She
was there, I was not, and I honor her experience and judgment. I just am not convinced that the kind of people who use guns to capture innocents in the first act wouldn't use them to kill before the curtain fell. From my own experience I can imagine gasping, coughing terrorists shooting hostages as they grasp that Russian special forces are preparing to storm in.

  But indisputably, the Russian government used the siege to squelch the last gasps of a free and independent press. It closed one television station during the siege and censored radio and television coverage. Then the Putin government used the siege to persuade the lower house of the Duma to pass broad, blunt new restrictions on what the press can report and how. And the Duma pointedly refused to form a commission to investigate the government's handling of the theater siege. Questions about how and why the gas was used, and the effect inside, will never be fully explored.

  (Anna saw Basaev as the almost predictable creation of the savagery of Russia's assault on Chechnya. In fact, a Russian air attack on Basaev's hometown of Dyshne-Vedeno in 1995 had killed eleven members of his family, including his wife and children. But I cringe at seeing this as any grounds for the siege of the school in Beslan, for which Basaev also claimed credit with no apparent regret. More than 344 civilians were slaughtered, including 186 school children.)

  During this period, Anna was angry at America and Western Europe, which continued to support Vladimir Putin. She did not expect or want the West to sally forth. She had already had enough Western “help,” thank you, and said, “Those in Russia who hope for help from the West need finally to recognize that winning back our democratic freedoms is up to us.”

  But she was aghast when the West turned a blind eye toward Putin's crushing of Chechnya, his stranglehold on power, and his suppression of opposition, just as it had once overlooked Stalin's starvations, hangings, gu-lags, and massacres. The sad truth is that a lot of Western democracies like dealing with dictators. Tyrants can be tidy and reliable business partners.

  She also became frustrated with opponents of Putin's rule almost as much as she was with Putin's own regime, and the criminal gangs and oligarchs who ran wild with his indulgence. She thought that the tyrants and thieves had no conscience, while the reformers were elitists with little conviction, or courage for confrontation.

  “Our society isn't a society anymore,” she wrote. “It is a collection of windowless, isolated concrete cells… The authorities do everything they can to make the cells even more impermeable, sowing dissent, inciting some against others, dividing and ruling. And the people fall for it.

  That is the real problem. That is why revolution in Russia, when it comes, is always so extreme. The barrier between the cells collapses only when the negative emotions within them are ungovernable.”

  And to be sure, in some of her lowest moments, some of them revealed in this book, Anna Politkovskaya wondered if Russians really wanted a free press—or a free country. And indeed a 2005 poll conducted by the All-Russian Public Opinion Research Center showed that 82 percent of the public wanted censorship. That figure might have represented the great number of Russians who were aghast at the coarse sex and violence that has become common on television in particular. But it certainly gives the government popular support for laws that stifle the press and political opposition.

  At about that time, Anna wrote approvingly of a group of people who organized a series of hunger strikes:

  There is much you can no longer say, but you can still go on hunger strike to show that you have been silenced. Sounding off at protest meetings has become virtually useless, mere preaching to the converted; those who share your views already know the situation, so why keep telling them about it? Standing in picket lines is pointless, unless it is to salve your conscience. At least you'll be able to tell your granddaughter that you did more than vent your spleen in your own kitchen. Even writing books that don't get published in Russia because they are off-message doesn't have much impact. They are read only by people living abroad.

  By the way: at this writing, Anna Politkovskaya's A Russian Diary isn't being published in Russia.

  ON THE DAY THAT ANNA POLITKOVSKAYA was shot to death, October 7, 2006, in the elevator of her apartment block on Lesnaya Street, the editor of Novaya Gazeta says that she was about to file a long story on torture as it is routinely conducted by Chechen security forces supported by Russia. That story will almost certainly never be read by anyone, inside or outside Russia. Even the substance of it will probably never be known. Russian police seized her notes, her computer hard drive, and photographs of two people she would reportedly accuse of torture.

  It is dangerous to be a real journalist in Russia today. A conscientious Russian journalist, unlike reporters in North America or Western Europe, doesn't have to travel into war zones to risk his or her life. Danger comes to his or her doorstep, car, or apartment block.

  The Glasnost Defense Foundation, led by Alexey Simonov of the Moscow Helsinki Group, reports that during 2005 alone, six Russian journalists were murdered, sixty-three were assaulted, forty-seven were arrested, and forty-two were prosecuted. The editorial offices of twelve publications or broadcasters were attacked. Twenty-three editorial offices were closed. Ten were evicted from their premises. Twenty-eight newspapers or magazines were confiscated outright. Thirty-eight times, the government simply refused to let material be printed or distributed.

  Thirteen Russian journalists have been killed—in Russia, not Chechnya, Iraq, or Afghanistan—since Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000.

  Any American journalist who reads Anna Politkovskaya's journals should find it difficult to accept with a straight face the awards we give one another that laud us for being bold or courageous.

  I've probably had a fairly typical career for a reporter who has covered conflicts. I've had to duck sniper fire, been shaken by bombs, and once spent two anxious days locked in a room by teenage Palestinian kids who said they didn't trust Jews and wanted the tapes of my interviews. I've been called a Communist by fascists and a CIA agent by Communists, and I've been not too cleverly or subtly threatened. But as a member of the Corleone or Soprano family once said, “This is the business we've chosen.”

  Yet after reading A Russian Diary, I hope I always shrink from the arrogance to compare any challenges I face to those of a conscientious Russian journalist. If the president of the United States, Bill Gates, the CEO of Exxon, or the head of the Chicago mob doesn't like one of my stories, he has the power to crush … a pen in his hand and write a really strong letter.

  The likes of Seymour Hersh, Nina Totenberg, and Brian Ross would be in prison in today's Russia—or driving cabs for their own protection. When American reporters challenge the government or corporate line on a story and spotlight abuse, deceit, greed, crimes, and conflicts of interest, they can wind up on All Things Considered, The Daily Show, and the bestseller list. They bring home trophies, get good tables in restaurants, and are given fellowships.

  If Anna Politkovskaya had the courage to attempt so much with so little, how can those of us who are reporters in the unsurpassed freedom of America demand anything less of ourselves?

  A Russian Diary is not a personal memoir in the way Americans have come to expect. Readers will discover little here of Anna Politkovskaya's personal life. There is little visible, even between the lines, of the strain of Anna's career on her family, or the “special challenge” of being a woman in a war zone (she would have been hard to book on Oprah Winfrey). She does not tell self-serving anecdotes about her colleagues. She rarely shares the gritty details of how she was able to dig up, cajole, or uncover a story. There are no entries of the kind that say, “Had coffee with a pleasant young woman named Jolie at the Satsita refugee camp in Ingushetia, and she said …” She rarely speaks of being scared—except for her country.

  Of course Anna had a personal life. She had two children and was about to become a grandmother. Her sister, Elena Kudimova, told me in a letter, “Anna never thought about being remembered,
because as a normal human being less than fifty years old, she was looking forward to living, especially inspired by the fact that she would have been a grandmother soon.”

  She was considered a caring friend, and friends have told the story that once she returned home to Moscow from Grozny, where she had reported on a Russian rocket attack that killed scores of people, including babies, new mothers, and grandmothers, in a market and a maternity hospital, only to find her husband packing up to move out of their apartment. “I can't take this anymore,” he was supposed to have said, which might sound more sympathetic the second or third time you hear it.

  I don't think what Westerners might call Anna Politkovskaya's work— which wasn't ambition for money, notoriety, or advancement, but the struggle for the survival of her country—was more important to her than her family. Anna heard a ticking clock winding down on a box of dynamite in a darkened room. She could see no good life for her family or anyone's family unless the country that she loved could pull back from its fall into despotism and cruelty. As a patriot and a parent, Anna Politkovskaya gave her life to try to prevent that.

  “People often tell me I am a pessimist; that I do not believe in the strength of the Russian people; that I am obsessive in my opposition to Putin and see nothing beyond that,” she wrote. “I see everything, and that is the whole problem. I see both what is good and what is bad… By 2016 many of my generation may no longer be around, but our children will be alive, as will our grandchildren. Do we really not care what kind of life they will have, or even whether they will have a life at all?”

  March 1, 2007

  CONTENTS

  Foreword by Scott Simon

  Translator's Note

  PART ONE: THE DEATH OF RUSSIAN

  PARLIAMENTARY DEMOCRACY

  December 2003-March 2004

  PART TWO: RUSSIA’S GREAT POLITICAL