Anti-Putin
Journalist
Murdered In Moscow
By Patrick Martin
11 October 2006
World
Socialist Web
The
assassination of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya is an ominous
warning to working people and intellectuals in Russia and throughout
the world of the lengths to which the regime headed by the former KGB
agent Vladimir Putin will go to suppress criticism and political opposition.
Politkovskaya, the best-known
journalistic critic of the Putin government, author of two books exposing
the barbarism of the war in Chechnya, was gunned down in the lobby of
her apartment building in central Moscow. She was 48 years old, and
had survived several previous assassination attempts as well as countless
threats.
The murderer, shown by CCTV
cameras as a young man wearing a hooded jacket, approached the journalist
as she was leaving the building and fired three shots into her body
and a fourth into her head, then threw down the weapon, a Makarov 9mm
pistol of the type regularly used by paid hit-men in Russia.
Politkovskaya wrote for the
bi-monthly Novaya Gazeta, a bourgeois-democratic magazine critical of
the Putin regime which was partially financed by billionaire Alexander
Lebedev and former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev. She spent most
of the last seven years writing investigative reports on the war in
Chechnya, for which she made more than 50 trips to the war zone. She
sympathetically interviewed Russian conscripts, Chechen guerrillas,
and civilians trapped in the fighting.
Born in New York to a Russian
couple who worked at the Soviet mission to the United Nations, Politkovskaya
is the thirteenth journalist murdered in Russia since Putin came to
power in 2000. All of these victims had run afoul either of government
officials or powerful economic interests, and nearly all these cases
remain unsolved.
Igor Yakovenko, general secretary
of the Russian Union of Journalists, said, “There is no doubt
she was killed for her professional activities.” He suggested
that the timing of the murder—on Vladimir Putin’s birthday,
and a few days before the birthday of Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov—was
a gruesome tribute. “Apparently, this was a present for the two
leaders,” he said.
The International Federation
of Journalists (IFJ) said Politkovskaya’s murder was a “shocking
outrage that will stun journalists across the world.”
Politkovskaya wrote several
books, including, A Dirty War: A Russian Reporter in Chechnya, A Small
Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya and Putin’s Russia, an
exposé of the regime’s corruption and attacks on democratic
rights. She was reportedly writing an article about torture in Chechnya
the weekend she was murdered. It was to be published on Monday, but
Novaya Gazeta had not yet received the text.
While evincing sympathy for
the suffering of the Chechen people, and opposing the Russian military
occupation, she was also opposed to the Islamic fundamentalism of such
Chechen terrorists as Shamil Basayev, organizer of the massacre of schoolchildren
and teachers at Beslan in 2004.
One widely quoted passage
from her reporting on Chechnya could apply equally to America in Iraq,
or countless other great power interventions against small nations.
“The army and police, nearly 100,000 strong, wander around Chechnya
in a state of complete moral decay,” she wrote. “And what
response could one expect but more terrorism, and the recruitment of
new resistance fighters?”
According to a profile in
the British press, Politkovskaya was repeatedly detained by Russian
special forces while reporting from Chechnya, and several times threatened
with rape and murder. In 2001, she fled to Austria after receiving a
particularly pointed death threat from an army officer. In 2004, while
on her way to cover the siege at Beslan, she was apparently poisoned
and nearly died.
While the Russian prosecutor
general Yuri Chaika declared he would personally lead the investigation
into the murder, because of its “particular importance and its
wide resonance within society,” it is more than likely that the
order for Politovskaya’s liquidation came from within the Putin
security apparatus, if not from the president’s own entourage.
The killing is the second
assassination of a prominent Muscovite in less than a month. Andrei
Kozlov, a Central Bank official identified with anti-corruption campaigns
that infringed on the interests of billionaire oligarchs and high government
officials, was shot to death as he left a soccer match in September.
Putin himself has maintained
a stony silence about the brutal killing of his most vocal media critic,
a silence which amounts to moral endorsement of the assassination.
In this, Putin is true to
his roots. He served for two decades in the Stalinist KGB and its post-Soviet
successor agency before being elevated into high office. Accompanying
him into the Kremlin is an entire coterie of former secret policemen,
the so-called soloviki, who combine the repressive brutality of the
Stalinist secret police—responsible for the mass murder of Trotskyists
and other socialists—and the corruption and avarice of the new
Russian ruling elite.
The murder of Politkovskaya
testifies to the nature of the regime that has arisen from the so-called
“democratic revolution,” supported and in no small part
orchestrated by the US and other imperialist powers, which replaced
the moribund Stalinist regime with one based on capitalist restorationist
policies.
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