Along with a mob of other journalists, Anna rushed to a Moscow airport to catch a flight to Beslan, but none could be had. Then a young man approached and identified himself as an airport employee. “Are you Anna Politkovskaya?” he said. “We very much respect your newspaper. We are going to let you on this flight,” referring to a departure to Rostov, from which she could drive to Beslan. According to Anna’s account, he said that someone from the FSB had directed him to put her on the flight.
On board, Anna asked for a cup of tea. Within minutes of drinking it, she became extremely ill. She later recalled that aircraft crew members “beat me on the face and asked me, cried to me, ‘Please don’t die. Don’t die.’” An unconscious Anna was hospitalized in Rostov and given emergency care. A nurse later told her she was “almost hopeless” when brought in. “My dear, they tried to poison you,” the nurse said. Doctors who treated her later in Moscow confirmed that her symptoms were consistent with poisoning. But the substance that nearly killed her was never identified.
Anna was irritated at her own carelessness. How vain to think that airport personnel would recognize her so readily. She should have had second thoughts when they let her on the plane without demanding a passport or any other document. The thought that something was wrong had never crossed her mind.
She never made it to Beslan, where bedlam broke out after a three-day standoff. Shooting and explosions erupted as children began to pour out of the schoolhouse and terrorists tried to make their escape. In the end, some 330 children and adults were killed.
Anna’s commitment to Chechnya made those close to her anxious about her well-being. Dima Muratov, her editor, wondered if it was time she turned to topics right in Moscow. At one point, he ordered her to stop going to Chechnya, but she went anyway.
Many family and friends thought she was in grave danger and regularly pleaded with her to stay home. Elena Baranovskaya, the Nord-Ost mother who now was Anna’s friend, said she and others in the Nord-Ostsi survivors’ group were aghast at the Chechnya articles. “Why are you writing this stuff?” Elena asked. “It’s so dangerous.” Anna’s curt response was, “Well, don’t read it.”
But she let down her guard in a conversation with Alexander Litvinenko in London. She told the onetime KGB officer that she feared entering her apartment building—every time she stood in its dimly lit entryway, she thought someone might be lurking in the shadows. He gave her tips on how to safely enter the building, but said the only sure way to be safe was to leave Russia.
It was the same advice she got from her brother-in-law, Yuri Kudimov, himself an ex–KGB officer and now a wealthy banker in Moscow. “You live in a country where someone could be shot because of a thousand-dollar debt,” he told Anna. “Think about that,” he said.
You’re right, Anna replied, but I’m not ready to give up my job. “I’ve got to do it because I like it,” she said, “but it’s also how I make my money.”
Yuri thought that Anna should at least have a sure way to get out of the country—just in case. The wisest course, he argued, was to take advantage of her birthright and obtain an American passport. With Anna’s consent, he prevailed on U.S.-based friends from his KGB days to collect the necessary documentation from New York archives. The U.S. embassy in Moscow issued the passport, but she showed no inclination to put it to immediate use.
Her friendship with Yuri puzzled me at first. As an undercover KGB agent, he had traveled the globe in the guise of a journalist. His wife, Elena—Anna’s older sister—had accompanied him. One would think that Anna would be bothered by his service in an agency she hated, and surely displeased that her sister had married him. But the matter was not that simple.
Anna and Yuri had been friends for a quarter century, ever since he began dating her sister. There is a charming story of how he impersonated a visiting Canadian to enable Anna to save face at her high school. Elena, already a university student, came home one day to find her sister “at the point of breaking.” Anna had agreed to organize a school assembly with a foreign student as guest of honor. She had found a Cuban boy to fill the role, but at the last minute he had canceled. Now Anna’s prestige was on the line.
Elena called Yuri, her strapping twenty-one-year-old boyfriend. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll be the foreigner.”
The following day, Anna stood before the assembly. We have a Canadian guest, she told the students. Yuri stood. He was wearing a borrowed denim jacket and T-shirt, with a pack of Philip Morris cigarettes stuffed in the front pocket—his best effort to look like a Westerner. Using what he later called “bad Russian” (he didn’t think his English would pass muster), he proceeded to describe life in Canada. He talked about Canadian literature and politics, and handed out cigarettes to some of the boys. He was an absolute hit, and Anna was showered with praise. Her English teacher was the only skeptic, suggesting that next time it would be more “ideologically correct” to invite a Communist brother from Poland or Czechoslovakia.
Some time later, a fellow student visited Anna at home. There was Yuri, sitting in the kitchen with Elena. “What is the Canadian doing here?” the bewildered schoolmate asked. No one had yet caught on to the ruse. Indeed, an amusing rumor quickly reached Yuri’s ear—his girlfriend Elena was defying custom by dating a Westerner.
Anna and Elena traveled different paths as young women. While Anna chose to marry the freewheeling Alexander who shocked her parents, Elena chose Yuri, by all accounts a decent if straightlaced fellow who appeared to be going places. The two young men, both army veterans, were already friends when they began courting the sisters. But when KGB agents separately approached them after graduation and offered attractive pay and benefits to enlist, Yuri signed up and Alexander said no. The couples very soon ran in separate circles, though they never lost touch with each other.
When I met Elena at a chic Japanese café in Moscow, I had to remind myself that she was Anna’s sister, so pronounced was the contrast in their appearances. Anna was bookishly attractive and a conservative dresser. Elena was glamorous, statuesque in a skintight black top and pants, easy to imagine as the jet-setting wife of a secret agent.
After Anna was poisoned on her way to the schoolhouse in Beslan, it was Yuri’s money that paid for a charter plane to whisk her back to Moscow. A cynic could attribute that and other deeds—such as arranging for a U.S. passport—to Yuri’s understandable desire to please his wife by helping his sister-in-law. Yet I sensed a genuine bond between Anna and Yuri that had survived for years. Perhaps their relationship is best understood as one more piece of evidence that Russia is full of contradictions.
Despite her newspaper’s limited audience, Anna’s reporting had an impact within Russia. Her exposés of official malfeasance sometimes generated enough public outrage to force a response by the government. She caused prosecutions to be launched and participated in some of the trials that followed. Anna’s readiness to be a peacemaker in moments of crisis, typified by her attempt to negotiate the release of the Nord-Ost hostages, forced state-controlled television to acknowledge her existence.