A Sad Day In Russia

A SAD DAY IN RUSSIA

JERRY DEPEW

On October 10th, 2006, Muscovites packed the funeral hall at the Troyekurovskoye Cemetery for the funeral of Anna Politkovskaya. Her casket rested on evergreen branches, surrounded by roses. In the Russian Orthodox tradition, her forehead was covered in a white ribbon. Outside, a thousand or more waited as the rain fell. Moscow normally has a beautiful Fall with golden, reddish colors, but on this day it seemed that even nature wept because of the death of this courageous journalist. She was gunned down near the elevator to her flat. The assassin shot her with two bullets--one to her head, the other to her chest. The coward assassinated her while she carried groceries up to her flat.

Who was Anna Politkovskaya? Well, she was born to U.N. Russian diplomats in 1958. Because of this, she had dual citizenship with both the U.S. and Russia. At the time of her death, she was 48 years old, divorced, with two grown children, a son Ilya, 28, and a daughter, Vera, 26. She was an investigative journalist working for a small independent newspaper called Novaya Gazeta. Unlike the broadcast media in Russia, this paper is not under the control of the Kremlin. She will go down in history as one of the greatest and bravest of journalists. At a time in Russia when most of the media in Russia is submissive to the Kremlin, she reported and wrote the truth as she saw it.

In her book, Putin's Russia, she wrote: "Why is it difficult to sustain a rosy point of view when you are faced with reality in Russia? Because Putin, a product of the country's murkiest intelligence service, has failed to transcend his origins and stop acting like a KGB officer. He is still busy sorting out his freedom-loving fellow citizens; he persists in crushing liberty, just as he did earlier in his career." By the way, this book is excellent, but it is not published in Russia. It can be found on Amazon.com.

As a journalist, she experienced many hardships. On one occasion while reporting in Chechnya, Russian troops detained, questioned, and beat her. They threaten to rape her, and then threw her into a pit. The leader pointed a gun at her, saying, "If it was left to me, I'd shoot you." During the Beslan school crisis, she was to take part in the negotiations. On the plane traveling to Rostov-on-Don, she drank a cup of tea. When the plane arrived, Politkovskaya felt sick, then collapsed. Poisoned. Unconscious, she had to be hospitalized.

She lived to continue her reports about abuses and torture by the Russian military in Chechnya. This editorial is not about the rightness or wrongness of the war in Chechnya. I really have not researched and studied that question, but I do know that when a country allows reporters to be threatened, poisoned, murdered--that is wrong. A true democracy cannot exist without a free press.

Will the Russian authorities ever find and bring to justice her killer? I doubt it. The track record is not good. The Committee to Protect Journalist's web site shows pictures of thirteen persons killed contract-style. Twelve of these were journalist; one was mistaken for a journalist. All of these murders have happened since President Putin has been in office. No one has been brought to justice yet, and it is unlikely that anyone will be.

Anna Politkovskaya lived a difficult life, but she would not give in, be bribed, or stop reporting the truth. In a recent essay by her published on October 15th, 2006 in the Washington Post, she said: "I will not go into the other joys of the path I have chosen, the poisoning, the arrests, the threats in letters and over the Internet, the telephoned death threats, the weekly summons to the prosecutor general's office to sign statements about practically every article I write (the first question being, 'How and where did you obtain this information?'). Of course I don't like the constant derisive articles about me that appear in other newspapers and on Internet sites presenting me as the madwoman of Moscow." Politkovskaya's unfaltering heart was committed to telling the truth. Now, that heart is silenced.

Today, I am troubled because of the death of Anna Politkovskaya. And so, in the Russian Orthodox tradition, I light a candle, and I mourn her death, and I mourn the loss of another light of freedom in Russia.