The silencing of Anna
Russia's great journalist was gunned down by killers who may have been contracted to snuff out her investigation of government torture.
By Michael Mainville
Reuters/Sergei Karpukhin
Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya speaks at a news conference in Moscow, Oct. 29, 2002.
Oct. 13, 2006 | MOSCOW -- On the cold, grey afternoon of Oct. 7, a modest Lada car loaded with groceries pulled up outside a central Moscow apartment building. An elegant figure with steel-grey hair and large glasses emerged, shopping bags in hand. Anna Politkovskaya, Russia's most dogged investigative journalist, was facing a deadline and planning to finish her latest story by the next day. On her desk were photographs and notes about civilians who had been abducted by pro-Kremlin forces in Chechnya and tortured into confessing to crimes they had not committed.
Politkovskaya must not have noticed the thin man in dark clothes and the young woman who, according to surveillance tapes, had been following her in the supermarket. Her groceries were too much to carry all at once, so she brought a few bags to her apartment and took the elevator down to fetch the rest. When the elevator doors opened, the man from the supermarket was standing before her, a silencer-equipped IZH pistol in his hand. The first two shots hit Politkovskaya in the chest, the third in the shoulder. By the time her killer fired a final shot into her skull, Politkovskaya, 48, and a mother of two, was already dead. The pistol, its serial number filed off, was dropped next to her body.
Contract-style killings of prominent figures are hardly rare in Russia. Only a few weeks before Politkovskaya's murder, Andrei Kozlov, a Central Bank official who had spearheaded a crusade against money laundering, was also gunned down in Moscow. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, Politkovskaya was the 13th reporter to be assassinated since President Vladimir Putin came to power.
Yet Politkovskaya's killing still came as a shock. She had seemed invincible, facing down repeated threats and surviving an alleged poisoning in 2004 to report on what she called Russia's "dirty war" in Chechnya. For years, she had courageously exposed human-rights abuses in Russia and particularly in the North Caucasus region that includes Chechnya, making frequent trips to the war-torn area. She wrote, often in harrowing detail, of topics that have become off-limits for nearly all other journalists in Russia and broke the biggest taboo of all by criticizing Putin himself. For her last, unfinished piece she'd been investigating the systematic torture of prisoners in what Russia has termed its own war on terror in Chechnya.
"She was incredibly brave. Much more brave than many, many machos in armored Jeeps surrounded by bodyguards," her newspaper, the biweekly Novaya Gazeta, wrote in a special issue published after her death. "She took any injustice, regardless of whom it involved, as a personal enemy."
For many of her colleagues, Politkovskaya's prior survival had served as inspiration -- evidence that despite increasing pressure on independent media by the Putin government, there was still some room in Russia for honest, critical reporting.
"There is almost no investigative journalism left in Russia and I think that a lot of people will be scared," Alexei Venediktov, the editor in chief of Ekho Moskvy, Russia's last independent radio station, told reporters outside Politkovskaya's funeral in Moscow on Tuesday. "Many of my colleagues will be afraid when entering their houses," he said. "They will constantly be looking over their shoulders." Venediktov had already overheard reporters in the corridors of his station saying they should steer clear of reporting on Chechnya.
Novaya Gazeta on Thursday printed an unfinished version of the story Politkovskaya had been working on the day she was killed. Like most of her work, it focused on human-rights abuses in Russia's southern province of Chechnya, where tens of thousands have died during two Kremlin campaigns to crush rebel separatists. The article described the alleged torture of a young Chechen man by security forces loyal to Ramzan Kadyrov, the pro-Kremlin prime minister of Chechnya. Kadyrov was a frequent target of Politkovskaya's work. She wrote in the piece that brutal torture was being widely used to extract false confessions from innocent civilians so that the pro-Moscow Chechen government could appear to be capturing rebel fighters. Kadyrov's forces, she said, were responsible for "a conveyor belt of organized confessions" aimed at "baking criminal cases like pancakes."
The story included written testimony from a Chechen man named Beslan Gadayev who had been extradited from Ukraine and handed over to law enforcement officers in the Chechen capital, Grozny. Asked whether he'd killed two men in Chechnya, Gadayev swore that he had not.
"They said 'Yes, you did kill them.' I denied it again and then they started beating me," Politkovskaya quoted him as saying. He was struck twice in the face, handcuffed and suspended from a pipe between two filing cabinets. "Then they attached wires to my little fingers," Gadayev continued. "In about two seconds I felt electrical shocks. At the same time, they were beating me all over with rubber truncheons. I couldn't stand it anymore and I started to scream, calling to God Almighty and begging them to stop. To shut me up they put a black plastic bag over my head." Despite repeated beatings that day, Gadayev refused to confess.
The following day, a plainclothes officer walked into his cell and said that journalists were waiting for him outside. "He said that I would have to confess to three murders and an armed robbery, otherwise they'd repeat the whole thing again and this time rape me as well. So I agreed," he said. "After my interview with the journalists they forced me, again threatening torture, to testify that all of my injuries from the beatings had been incurred when I tried to escape." Gadayev remained in a Chechen prison awaiting trial, Politkovskaya wrote.
Next page: The missing pieces of Politkovskaya's investigation -- and the work she still had planned