A Small Corner of Hell

"There are no superlatives too superlative for Anna Politkovskaya, who, after three books and innumerable investigative reporting trips to Chechnya, was murdered, execution-style, outside her Moscow apartment in 2007. Politkovskaya, a social affairs reporter, was sent to Chechnya in 2000 by her liberal newspaper editor to cover the second, Putin-era, war, not because she knew about wars but because she was “just a civilian”. She turned out to be the best possible kind of Moscow intellectual – a fearless truth-teller. She took issue with the swaggering, macho, murderous pro-Moscow leaders of today’s Chechnya, under Prime Minister Ramzan Kadyrov, (she campaigned against Putin’s man in Chechnya being named to run the region, interviewing people who’d been interrogated by him and publishing reports that he was a sadistic torturer who enjoyed stripping the skin off his victims’ backs).Yet Politkovskaya had no romantic sympathies with the freedom fighters either. Her targets also included the swaggering, macho, murderous anti-Moscow separatists led by Shamil Basayev, now dead, whose extremism plunged Chechnya into a second war against Putin’s forces in 1999 and brought disaster to hundreds of thousands of ordinary Chechen civilians. She’d had considerable sympathy for earlier, moderate, separatists, under Aslan Maskhadov, who’d tried to find accommodation with Moscow as well as more freedom for their people. But, if Politkovskaya was on anyone’s side, it was that of ordinary civilians. Civilians in Chechnya, torn between two rival tyrannies, who couldn’t get their own stories heard by the world – the people who get woken up by soldiers taking their teenage daughter away to rape, or who lose their legs treading on mines, or whose neighbours get their throats cut or their fingers cut off – whose predicament she movingly described. And, of course, she was on the side of ordinary Russians – the people increasingly hemmed in by a blinkered press and ignorant of the world’s bigger realities. What motivated Politkovskaya to go on braving the danger of Chechnya, long after Putin made it clear that journalists were not welcome at his war, was more than compassion. It was the conviction that Russians needed to know what was being done in their name in the secretive south, behind army lines. “I’m sure this has to be done, for one simple reason,” she wrote briskly in A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya. “As contemporaries of this war, we will be held responsible for it. The classic Soviet excuse of not being there and not taking part in anything personally won’t work. So I want you to know the truth. Then you’ll be free of cynicism.” The breathtaking horror – and cynicism – she uncovered gave her a mission so important that she separated with her husband and ignored her son’s pleas to stop her new work. Her discoveries are detailed in this extraordinary book, beautifully written, but so full of tragedy it makes the hairs rise on the nape of your neck. She found corrupt Russian soldiers working hand-in-glove with shady Chechen criminals and political extremists. Her stories put flesh on the widely held belief that Chechnya is a for-profit war. The Russian army, which faces being scaled down as there is no Soviet bloc to defend, has found in Chechnya an excuse to perpetuate itself – and get rich. The economics are grisly: a civilian kept in a pit, alive, by Russian soldiers is worth a ransom from his relatives; a corpse’s price is rather higher. “Everyone has found a niche,” she wrote. “The mercenaries at the checkpoints get bribes of ten to 20 roubles around the clock. The generals in Moscow and Chechnya use their war budget for personal gain. Officers of the middle ranks collect ransom for temporary hostages and corpses. Junior officers get to go marauding during the purges.” Hence an official policy based on, at best, outrageous distortions of the truth, and a landscape empty of heroes or winners. Politkovskaya’s discoveries gave her life a strange new shape. She negotiated with Chechen hostage-takers who took over Moscow’s Dubrovka theatre in October 2002 (a friend of her son’s was among the prisoners). She was subjected to a mock execution by security forces in Chechnya. Kadyrov’s father, an earlier pro-Russian president of Chechnya, “publicly threatened to murder me. He actually said during a meeting of his government that Politkovskaya was a condemned woman”. In 2004, during the siege by Chechen separatists of a school at Beslan in southern Russia, she was asked, by the Chechens, to join the negotiations. She was on the plane south, hoping both to report on the crisis and to act as an intermediary and help to get hundreds of child prisoners out of the boobytrapped gym. But she was slipped a Mickey Finn [drink laced with drugs] on the plane. The next thing she knew, she was in hospital and it was several days later – too late for the children, who had by then been killed in their hundreds. What she remembered of the experience was the three men she’d noticed in the plane, staring at her with the “eyes of enemies”. She blamed the Russian secret services for poisoning her. Politkovskaya’s killer has never been named. Nor has the killer of another Russian whistle-blower, Sasha Litvinenko, who was slipped a dose of radioactive polonium in Piccadilly a month later, or a host of other anti-war activists who have met strange, untimely ends during Vladimir Putin’s Russian presidency. It is some consolation to know that, while Politkovskaya’s books are still in print, her voice has not been silenced."