a dirty war (anna politkovskaya)

The journalist, Anna Politkovskaya, was murdered in 2006. Reading this book of her articles written for Novaya Gazeta about the second Chechen war, and knowing what we know about Putin’s Russia, the fact of her murder, no matter how shocking, no longer seems surprising. In much the same way as being a journalist in Mexico is a perilous profession, being a journalist prepared to go after the truth in Putin’s Russia is a job with a low life expectancy. Politkovskaya details the events of the war with a sanguine tone, describing its barbarous cruelties with her weather-beaten prose. The world had little interest in the suffering of the Chechens, and Politkovskaya seems all too aware of this. The absurdities of the Russian military campaign, one which appeared to benefit no-one and nothing save for consolidating Putin’s grasp on power, are repeatedly flagged up. One of the many grotesque chapters deals with the military office in charge of documenting the fatalities of Russian soldiers, charged with finding a way of delivering information no-one wants to hear. One can imagine his relief at finding someone willing to listen to him.

Of course, these past months we have all been compelled to finally take our heads out of the sand and pay some attention to the horrors that Politkovskaya detailed and warned about over twenty years ago. She was the Cassandra that no-one wanted to hear. Why did no-one care about Chechnya and Grozny’s fate? Perhaps because it was a Muslim country, perhaps because it was that little bit further away than Ukraine, perhaps because it was deeply inconvenient for vested interests who depended so much on the largesse of Russian wealth. Read Politkovskaya’s book and weep, not just for Ukraine, but for all the other people who have been victims of an aggression which seems to be almost nihilistic. Politkovskaya herself being another of these victims, an irony which she would no doubt have reported with the deadpan humanity which marks out as one of the bravest journalists of the twenty first century.