One year on, another victim of Putin’s Russia

World by storm had an interesting post last week about the possibility of Russian President Vladimir Putin becoming Russian Prime Minister. In the course of commentary on the article, Eagle referred to the deaths of journalists in Russia over the last few years. There have also been numerous and well substantiated recent reports about the use of mental facilities for the detention of political opponents and dissidents.

Appropriate so that today is the first anniversary of the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, journalist with Novaya Gazeta, whose courageous reporting of the war in Chechnya depicting the suffering of the innocents at the hands of Russian and Chechen forces, was often a lone voice in the heavily censored and restricted Russian media. She was also a harsh critic of Putin, chiefly for his role in pushing Russia into a second, and far more brutal, war in Chechnya, but also for his contempt for civil liberties and personal freedoms. In it she warned:

“We are hurtling back into a Soviet abyss, into an information vacuum that spells death from our own ignorance. All we have left is the internet, where information is freely available. For the rest, if you want to go on working as a journalist, it’s total servility to Putin. Otherwise, it can be death, the bullet, poison or trial – whatever our special services, Putin’s guard dogs, see fit.”

It was her reporting from Chechnya that most affected me however. The interviews with terrified Russian conscripts. With a seemingly endless stream of refugees in the camps around Chechnya’s borders whose names she scrupulously noted to ensure they were not forgotten. The macabre attempts to identify the bodies of Russian soldiers so that they could be buried, doomed to defeat by bureaucracy, petty corruption and greed. Her efforts, and those of her publication, to successfully evacuate an old folks home from the middle of Grozny that had been callously abandoned by both sides. The images of a battered Grozny, with children scavenging for food in the courtyards of apartments whose rubble piles still held their neighbours.

Despite threats, beatings, a mock execution at the hands of Russian forces and one previous murder attempt, she persisted in her work until she was shot to death in the elevator of her apartment building in Moscow on October 7th of last year. Putin’s birthday coincidentally enough.

Some people have accused Putin’s intelligence services of having carried out her execution. A great deal of initial speculation centred on Russian backed Chechen Prime Minister Ramzan Kadyrov, a frequent target of Politkovskaya’s work whom she had described as Chechnya’s Stalin. She was working on an exposé of his security forces when she was killed and many of her colleagues in journalism still believe that it was people close to Kadyrov who had her killed for her work in exposing their corruption.

Putin’s investigators have blamed ‘outside forces’ who sought by killing her to destabilise the state and embarrass Putin. At the end of August they arrested a number of people including Chechen organised crime figures and former FSB agents and, curiously, leaked massed of information about them to the media.

As Dmitri Muatov, editor of Politkovskaya’s paper, said:

“The case of Anna Politkovskaya is falling apart; the intention is that it should come to nothing, to zero. This has been done by leaking information which should be kept secret. A couple of high-ranking people from different government structures, from the “siloviki” and special services, have leaked information about this case.

“They have distributed a list of the people detained. This is unprecedented. Why has this been done? Because there was an order to do it so that all the other participants in the case would be able to hide.

“All the photos and biographies, with police information about those detained, were published on the internet and in two tabloids.”

One year on, and no closer to justice.