In August 1999, more than a thousand Chechen militants crossed into the neighboring Russian republic of Dagestan to support a small Islamic uprising. Russian forces pushed back, forcing the Chechens’ commander, Shamil Basayev, to retreat. Then came the bombings of the four apartment buildings in Moscow and elsewhere, and the launching of the Second Chechen War by Russia’s new president, Vladimir Putin. Anna’s editor at Novaya Gazeta dispatched her to the war-torn region.
She made no pretense at objectivity. She seemed to see nothing heroic on either side, and focused almost exclusively on casualties of the war—innocent civilians whose lives were destroyed, hapless Russian soldiers flung into deadly combat. In one of her earliest dispatches, about a man named Vakha who had been blown up in a minefield, she wrote: “Now dead, Vakha lies on a field again, but this time fearlessly, with his wounded face looking up and his hands spread wider than they’ve ever been in his life. The left hand is about ten yards from his black jacket, which has been torn to pieces. The right hand is a bit closer, about five steps away. And Vakha’s legs are quite a problem: They disappear, most likely turning to dust at the time of the explosion and flying away with the wind.”
Her husband, Alexander, told Anna that he was not pleased with her absences and the danger she was facing. But after all the years of living in his shadow, she had no intention of stopping. Within a year, in her mid-forties, Anna hit her stride as a war correspondent, distinguished not only for her unapologetic irony and sarcasm, but also for a willingness to go to places where few others dared venture. Her career became forever intertwined with the callousness of the Chechen war and the conduct of Putin, its chief prosecutor.
At turns she sympathized with and castigated the Chechen leadership. She wrote increasingly accusatory stories about the Chechen prime minister, Ramzan Kadyrov, whose political career was launched after his pro-Moscow father, Akhmad, was killed in a bombing by Chechen opponents. While Anna thought Akhmad was brutal, she thought worse of Ramzan, whom she called “psychopathic and extremely stupid,” the “deranged” leader of a torture-and-murder paramilitary force. She ridiculed his loyalty to Putin. “What kind of qualifications do you need to be a favorite of Putin?” Anna wrote. “To have ground Chechnya beneath your heel, and forced the entire republic to pay you tribute like an Asiatic bey, is evidently a plus.”
Her salary wasn’t much, and her newspaper’s circulation wasn’t large. But its readers were passionate, especially the dwindling number of liberals who admired Anna for writing regularly on painful subjects that most of the population seemed happy to ignore. And she relished the attention that came her way. Even official Russia—especially agencies dealing with foreign policy and security in Chechnya and the Caucasus as a whole—read what she wrote and took it seriously. As she became known as an expert on Chechnya, “she started liking it,” her brother-in-law said.
Outside the country, Anna was a journalistic celebrity. Her articles—and, eventually, four books that were largely expansions of her reporting—attracted speaking invitations from around the world. She visited the United States, France, Norway, and Great Britain, and over three years collected almost $100,000 in prize money from organizations that supported human rights, press freedom, and achievements in reporting.
With the money—no small sum, even in booming Moscow—she at last was able to establish a comfortable life for herself and her family. Above all, she wanted Vera to have a place of her own, and so Anna gave her apartment to her daughter and bought another for herself in a lively neighborhood of cafés, within strolling distance of the historic Mayakovski Theater. Anna looked at Vera as a wisp of a girl, different from her son, the sturdy Ilya. He exhibited the discipline, steeliness, and ambition of his mother, and had become director of an advertising company. I thought Anna underestimated her daughter. It was true that Vera inherited her father’s artistic gifts and devil-may-care manner, but I also sensed in her a tough inner strength and street smarts.
Anna’s marriage to Alexander, under increasing strain, finally collapsed. As her fame had grown, his had gone into a steep decline. He could not attract commercial support for the kind of programs that suited his talent. In the familiar tradition of broadcast journalism everywhere, others had risen in his place. But Anna had learned from his natural talent and absorbed his appetite for risk, and then taken both to new levels.
The two never officially divorced, although Alexander made only sporadic appearances in her life. Anna complained to friends that he was distant from the children; she was especially angry at him for not sharing the costs of their son’s wedding reception in 2003, which Anna arranged (including a traditional troika with three white horses). When I last saw Alexander, in late 2007, he had taken a second wife, a woman twenty-three years his junior, and was making short documentaries in his own small studio, while mentoring the occasional young journalist.
Anna was often called fearless, but she was the first to say she was not. “I’m afraid a lot during every trip [to Chechnya],” she told a Polish journalist. “But, if I wanted to live without fear and risk, I would become a teacher or a housewife.”
The dangers that she faced because of her fiery articles were quite real. She was imprisoned for four harrowing days by a Russian military unit while in Chechnya to investigate accounts of civilians being brutalized in a concentration camp. Anna said her captors tortured her, but she declined to describe “the details of the interrogations, because they are utterly obscene.” One officer put her through a mock execution and threatened to rape her in a bathhouse. Another officer, identified as an FSB agent, intervened, and she was confined to a bunker until her release.
Anna received multiple threats after writing that a Russian Interior Ministry officer named Sergei “Cadet” Lapin had tortured a prisoner who then vanished. Lapin said he was coming to Moscow to kill her, while an anonymous letter to her newspaper warned that a sniper would be sent to exact revenge. Anna’s editor ordered her to stay home and police assigned four officers to guard her. When a fresh set of threats erupted after she appeared in a televised interview, Anna took temporary refuge in Vienna. Soon her children were calling to report that a woman of Anna’s approximate age, height, and hair color had been murdered in front of her apartment house. They were sure the killer had mistaken the victim for their mother. As for Lapin, he was later convicted in the case Anna had exposed, and sentenced to ten years in prison.
Ramzan Kadyrov, the Chechen prime minister, whom she had accused of atrocities and called an imbecile, also threatened to kill her. Many Chechens seemed to think the pro-Putin Kadyrov was serious, according to Anna. But she discounted his threat. He wouldn’t risk harming her because he would be too obvious a suspect, she reasoned. “The people in Chechnya are afraid for me, and I find that very touching,” Anna wrote. “They fear for me more than I fear for myself, and that is how I survive.” In fact, she did not believe that the greatest risk to her lay in Chechnya; more danger lay elsewhere.
In 2004, Chechen terrorists seized an elementary school in Beslan, in the southern Russian region of North Ossetia. They took some 1,200 children, parents, and teachers hostage and strapped explosives to the interior of the sweltering building. Anna, in Moscow, took matters into her own hands. She telephoned Akhmed Zakayev, the European representative of rebel Chechen leader Aslan Maskhadov, and urged that the latter go quickly to the school and negotiate for the children’s immediate release. Zakayev (who was a friend of Alexander Litvinenko and lived across the street from him, in London) told her that he would get in touch with the rebel commander and try to make that happen.