A young woman and a tall, slender man whose face was obscured by a baseball cap lurked in the aisles as she shopped. Nonetheless, as a surveillance camera at the store later showed, Politkovskaya was not alone. Her daughter had planned to meet her there but was delayed. That afternoon, Politkovskaya drove to a supermarket near her mother’s apartment, on the Frunzenskaya Embankment. The classic Soviet excuse of not being there and not taking part in anything personally won’t work. “ ‘Why do we need to know this?’ ” She provided an answer as much for herself as for any reader: “I’m sure this has to be done, for one simple reason: as contemporaries of this war, we will be held responsible for it. “People call the newspaper and send letters with one and the same question: ‘Why are you writing about this? Why are you scaring us?’ ” she wrote. To the degree that a living woman could be airbrushed out of post-Soviet history, she had been. “That is the result of my journalism through the years of the Second Chechen War, and of publishing books abroad about life in Russia.’’ Despite the fact that Politkovskaya was articulate, attractive, and accomplished, she was barred from appearing on television, which is the only way the vast majority of Russians get news. “I am a pariah,’’ she wrote in an essay last year. Her excoriations of Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin, insured isolation, harassment, and, many predicted, death. In the West, Politkovskaya’s honesty brought her a measure of fame and a string of awards, bestowed at ceremonies in hotel ballrooms from New York to Stockholm. These bullets, weighted at the edges, have been forbidden by all international conventions as inhumane.’’ The surgeons have cut into her from above her chest to her groin.’’ Two weeks earlier, a “young fellow in a Russian serviceman’s uniform put Aishat on a bed in her own house and shot five 5.45-mm. “And it is beyond one’s strength to look at her naked body. One day at the Ninth Municipal Hospital, in Grozny, Politkovskaya encountered a sixty-two-year-old woman named Aishat Suleimanova, whose eyes expressed “complete indifference to the world,’’ she wrote in a typical piece.
In the past seven years, Politkovskaya had written dozens of accounts of life during wartime many had been collected in her book “A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya.” Politkovskaya was far more likely to spend time in a hospital than on a battlefield, and her writing bore frequent witness to robbery, rape, and the unbridled cruelty of life in a place that few other Russians-and almost no other reporters-cared to think about. This time, she had been trying to document repeated acts of torture carried out by squads loyal to the pro-Russian Prime Minister, Ramzan Kadyrov. “And she was trying to finish her article.’’ Politkovskaya was a special correspondent for the small liberal newspaper Novaya Gazeta, and, like most of her work, the piece focussed on the terror that pervades the southern republic of Chechnya. “Anna had so much on her mind,’’ Elena Kudimova told me when we met in London, before Christmas. Politkovskaya was supposed to spend the day at the hospital, but her twenty-six-year-old daughter, who was pregnant, had just moved into Politkovskaya’s apartment, on Lesnaya Street, while her own place was being prepared for the baby. A week later, she underwent surgery, and since then Anna and Elena had been taking turns helping her cope with her grief. “Your father will forgive me, because he knows that I have always loved him,” she told Anna and her sister, Elena Kudimova, the day he was buried. She had just been diagnosed with cancer and was too weak even to attend her husband’s funeral. Two weeks earlier, her father, a retired diplomat, had died of a heart attack as he emerged from the Moscow Metro while on his way to visit Politkovskaya’s mother, Raisa Mazepa, in the hospital. Saturday, October 7th, was a marathon of disheartening tasks for Anna Politkovskaya.