Anna Politkovskaya

The killing of Anna Politkovskaya October 7 has rallied her colleagues and fellow citizens in a way few recent events have. "We must all change the situation after this tragedy and stop the passivity of civil groups and the journalistic community," a Russian journalist friend told me just hours before 3,000 people gathered in the heart of Moscow to mourn her death and demand the government conduct an immediate investigation.

Politkovskaya's murder was shocking, but for anyone who follows Russian political life today not surprising. As Oleg Panfilov, who runs Moscow's Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations, said upon learning of her murder, "I always thought something would happen to Anya, first of all because of Chechnya."

I met Politkovskaya a few times, in Moscow and in New York. Her demeanor--quiet, even shy--belied her role as a journalist enraged by the injustice and corruption she believed were strangling her country. Since 1999 her unflinching investigative reporting on the brutality and corruption of the Chechen war had made her the target of numerous death threats, but she never slowed down. In fact, when she was killed, Politkovskaya, 48, was at work on an article claiming torture of Chechen civilians by security forces loyal to the region's pro-Moscow prime minister. Her reporting appeared in Russia's leading opposition newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, one of the few independent outlets left in the increasingly state- or oligarch-controlled media.

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