Russian journalist who covered the Kremlin's second war in Chechnya, which began in 1999. She reported for Novaya Gazeta, a beacon of independent journalism in Russia, documenting torture, massacres and forced disappearances. Her work incurred surveillance, assaults and threats from the Russian state.
In 2004 she was poisoned en route to the mass hostage crisis in Beslan, southern Russia. She was shot dead in her apartment block in 2006. A fellow journalist had previously been bludgeoned in the same building, of which Politkovskaya wrote: "The entrance is well adapted for murder, with dark corners in which you are your own rescue service." Her editor at Novaya Gazeta was Dmitry Muratov.
A film about her life and fate, "Words of War", was released in America in 2025 and in Britain in June of that year, starring Maxine Peake. The drama depicts her coverage of the Chechen war and her denunciation of Vladimir Putin as "a vain, brutal, power-hungry authoritarian". Ciarán Hinds plays Muratov and Jason Isaacs her husband.
Politkovskaya believed that horrors in a distant land should not be blithely ignored. As she put it: "Do you still think that if there is a war in one place, it has no bearing on another and that you can sit it out in peace?" Her assassination was a milestone in Russia's slide into tyranny.
Sources: The Economist, May 15th 2025
The most difficult thing in the world is to know how to do a thing and to watch someone else doing it wrong, without commenting.