Alistair John
posted 1 August 2007

Towards the end of A Russian Diary, in an entry dated 23 August 2005, Anna Politkovskaya writes:

In the past six months hunger striking has become the sole means of asserting the right to free speech, a right supposedly guaranteed by the Constitution. There is much you can no longer say, but you can still go on hunger strike to show that you have been silenced. Sounding off at protest meetings has become virtually useless … standing in picket lines is pointless … Even writing books that don’t get published in Russia because they are off-message doesn’t have much impact. They are read only by people living abroad. (p288)

A Russian Diary is indeed yet to be published in Russia. In the now infamous press conference following her murder, President Putin told foreign reporters that Politkovskaya was a journalist of little importance or significance in her native country. The sad consensus is the statement is mostly accurate. In a country of 145.2 million people, the paper she wrote for, Novaya Gazeta - an island of independent, liberal journalism - has a circulation of 670,000, and Politkovskaya was banned from appearing on television.

The other sad consensus is that her murder was a premeditated act of censorship (which coincided, perhaps tellingly, with the birthdays of her two great nemeses: Putin, and his puppet leader of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov). And this was a form of censorship reserved for the most virulent target. In the years preceding her murder Politkovskaya had numerous death threats, she had been held hostage and was the victim of a particularly vicious poisoning. Through it all she continued to write, and her notebooks from that period form this book. It is a chance to read two years’ worth of analysis, observation and insight from one of the world’s great investigative journalists.

But A Russian Diary has too much structure to be a mere scrapbook, and has been produced with a keen sense of narrative. Entries vary in length, with some no longer than a line (albeit a line that resonates) while others stretch to half a dozen pages, written in a format that could easily have been a newspaper report. While the prose itself is always impassioned, the tone ranges from searing anger to - more often than not - one not dissimilar to Alan Bennett’s annual diaries: a resigned and passive grunt at the ways things are. But where Bennett is scoffing at the management speak of a New Labour advisor, Politkovskaya is recording in everyday fashion some gruesome horror like a bomb on the underground. The diary format is exceptionally well-suited to recording the concurrency of events, and the way crises, left untreated, build.

Certain themes run throughout. The first entry provides a snapshot of the various constants that will run all the way to the end. On 7 December 2003, the day of elections to Russia’s Parliament, President Putin began his re-election campaign. It was also the day of a terror attack where more than a dozen people died. At a press conference, Putin did what? Offer condolences to the family? No. He had a photo-op with his labradors, making no mention of the attack. The Russian people reacted by re-electing Putin’s United Russia Putin’s party regardless. Other themes are present through the book: the troubling and absurd lack of care for ordinary Russians from their leaders; the huge difference between Russia’s elite and its masses – as well as the huge indifference the Russian people seem to have for their position and state.

This chronicle is divided into three acts, and the titles – ‘The Death of Russian Democracy’, ‘Russia’s Great Political Depression’ and ‘Our Summer and Winter of Discontent’ – may well seem rather strange and grandiose for this two year period, especially when the supposed assassin of Russian democracy is a statesman currently taking (alleged) tipples of vodka with France’s president, chomping on lobster at the American president’s weekend retreat, and – most gloriously of all – directing Britain’s new prime minister to show a bit more tact and statesmanship in his foreign relations. One of the nicest features of this diary format is its adeptness at highlighting certain coincidences of timing. 7 July 2005, a day when Putin stood shoulder to shoulder with the other G8 leaders, comes roughly around the midpoint of Russia’s Political Depression. The entry for that date deals with the imprisonment of Mikhail Khordovosky, whose investigation, trial and incarceration form one of the major arcs of the book.

Khordovosky, one of the oligarchs who reached an extreme level of wealth during the mid 1990s, is now being held in a Siberian prison, sentenced to a near decade of hard labour after being found guilty of tax fraud in a trial roundly considered a sham. Instead, it is considered he was breaking an implicit pact between those with political power and those with financial power – to stay in their own realm. He is thus considered by many to be a political prisoner, and his conduct during his sentencing and imprisonment (it is his hunger strike to which Politkovskaya refers in the entry above) make him a hero to Russia’s embattled liberal elite, which is desperately in need of prestige and weight.

But it would be wrong to see Politkovskaya as a mere mouthpiece for elite liberals. Politkovskaya was an advocate, not a commentator, and for the most part her advocacy was devoted to individuals at the very bottom of society’s pile. This is a partly why her name is known more than the many other Russian reporters who have been murdered since the fall of Communism. She trawled the deepest depths and found stories that require readers constantly and consciously to remind themselves that her work is reportage and not the gruesome fictions of a depraved mind.

Often, the deepest depths involve Russia’s military. Is not possible to talk about the excesses of the Russian military without referring to Chechnya, and so Chechnya cannot be omitted from discussion of Politkovskaya’s work. In the course of her career she published two books on Chechnya, and had a reputation so high amongst Chechens that during the Nord Ost theatre siege by Chechen terrorists in 2003, she was drafted in as the negotiator. Chechnya comprises a vast bulk of entries, including a deeply moving one where Politkovskaya travels to meet with Kadyrov - variously described as a ‘psychopathic and illiterate’, ‘stupid’, ‘virtually braindead’ and an ‘imbecile’. She records her breakdown into tears at the fact that such a worthless individual has got to a position of unfettered power, and that so many dignified lives have been reduced to being little more than playthings of his perversities.

But the stories of Russian soldiers themselves prove the most revelatory. Although the atrocities in Chechnya have not been covered fully enough, they are at least atrocities we know enough about to be rueful of our ignorance. The abuse of Russian conscripts by officers is a phenomenon of which we are scarcely conscious. And yet here are grotesque tales - the battalion of soldiers maimed and killed after spending a night in sub zero temperatures wearing nothing but light clothing; the war veteran reliant for his medicines upon a childhood friend pilfering from the hospital where she works; the conscript tortured to death by his fellow officers having spoken up about being made to march miles in boots three sizes too small – a march that wore his toes away to the bone - which cut deepest and linger longest after we have finished reading.

These cruelties are compounded by that fact that the men’s families have had no recourse. The authorities have closed ranks to prevent the stories from leaking out and, when they do leak, from any justice being done. Politkovskaya’s entries on this topic should be required reading for anyone who thinks the absence of independent media or the subversion of the rule of law only impinge on the rights of the intelligentsia – not to mention the people who are still yet to wince at seeing European leaders cavorting with Putin.

Such is the bleakness and brutality in the book that at times the only thing that makes it bearable is to consider the fact that it has been written at all. The tenacity, bravery and humanity of the author is, and will always be, a profound inspiration to those who read her, and A Russian Diary is one of those books that will confirm to certain readers of a certain age that journalism is an career worthy of their dedication. With that in mind, reading A Russian Diary as a posthumous book, with the knowledge there will be no more words published by this reporter, is awful.

But in many respects, hanging over each entry is the question why we should read it at all, when this is a book by a Russian citizen for the Russian citizen, and ultimately, we are only the people living abroad. The answer is perhaps that when Politkovskaya’s name is now spoken in Britain, it is more often than not used in conjunction with another: Alexander Litvenyenko. ‘Those in Russia who hope for help from the West need finally to realise that winning back our democratic freedoms is down to us’, Politkovskaya writes in February 2005. ‘Europe is tired of hearing how wicked Putin is. It would prefer to be fooled and hear how good he is’. Russia’s descent into authoritarianism comes as it re-enters the world stage. The Litvenyenko saga combined with Russia’s international ascendancy means neither the death of Russian parliamentary democracy, or the nature of what has taken its place – so clearly and comprehensively chronicled in this diary - can be ignored by us much longer. And it is therefore of deep concern that we have lost one of Russia's most impassioned and resonant voices.