Anna Politkovskaya was born in 1958. After studying at the Moscow State University, she received a diploma in journalism. Anna Politkovskaya has worked for various newspapers and collaborated with TV and radio stations.
Her works include Russia Under Putin and A Dirty War: A Russian Reporter in Chechnya (2001), a compilation of dispatches written between 1999 and 2000. A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya was published in 2003.
In February 2001 Anna Politkovskaya was arrested while in southern Chechnya. She was formally accused of violating the strict laws controlling media coverage of the conflict and was ordered out of the enclave. In October 2001, after receiving death threats related to her reporting in Chechnya, Anna Politkovskaya relocated to Vienna for a time. Supported by the Vienna Institute for Human Sciences, she was able to write her new book. During the hostage drama at the Nordost Theatre in 2002, Anna Politkovskaya agreed to the hostagetakers’ request to assist during negotiations.
Anna Politkovskaya was decorated with the Participant in Battles Medal for her work in the field. In addition to other awards, Anna Politkovskaya received the 2000 Golden Pen Award from the Russian Union of Journalists, the Freedom of Expression Award of the Index on Censorship, the IWMF Courage in Journalism Award, and the OSCE Prize for Journalism and Democracy.
Sunday, October 15, 2006
Politkovskaya's body was discovered in her Moscow apartment building with bullets in her head and chest, a Makarov pistol tossed at her feet. Her killing at age 48 came two months after she wrote this previously unpublished essay for "Another Sky," an English PEN book forthcoming from Profile Books in 2007.
"So what is the crime that has earned me this label of not being "one of us"? I have merely reported what I have witnessed, no more than that. I have written and, less frequently, I have spoken. I am even reluctant to comment, because it reminds me too much of the imposed opinions of my Soviet childhood and youth. It seems to me that our readers are capable of interpreting what they read for themselves. That is why my principal genre is reportage, sometimes, admittedly, with my own interjections. I am not an investigating magistrate but somebody who describes the life around us for those who cannot see it for themselves, because what is shown on television and written about in the overwhelming majority of newspapers is emasculated and doused with ideology. People know very little about life in other parts of their own country, and sometimes even in their own region."
