The Kremlin did its best to get in her way. Except for news events such as Nord-Ost, Anna was essentially barred from Russian television. “I am a pariah,” Anna wrote.
Yet Putin did not respond publicly to her slashing attacks on him and his policies. Nor were there punitive actions directed at Anna personally. She traveled unhindered in and out of Chechnya. Her Russian passport was never seized, even as she went abroad to excoriate Putin and meet with his critics in London—Oleg Gordievsky, the 1980s KGB defector; Akhmed Zakayev, the Chechen opposition representative abroad; and Litvinenko. Fabricated criminal charges were a favored tactic to punish “enemies” of the Russian state, but none were ever lodged against Anna. Indeed, she said that she could meet and interview almost any top official, as long as the encounter was kept secret.
Putin’s public silence was attributable to his media savvy. He knew that television and radio were what really mattered inside Russia; he had been elected twice largely due to the heavy propaganda hand that the state wielded over the airwaves. Relatively few Russians read newspapers, and most of those who did bought the major dailies. Anna’s employer, Novaya Gazeta, was no threat to him. Putin seemed to have written off Novaya Gazeta as a grudgingly tolerated relic, like Russia’s only remaining independent radio station, Echo Moskvy.
None of this is to suggest that the threats against Anna’s life ever lessened. After her poisoning, she wrote: “If you want to go on working as a journalist, it’s total servility to Putin. Otherwise, it can be death, the bullet, poison or trial—whatever our special services, Putin’s guard dogs, see fit.”
“I know this is all going to end badly,” she told one friend. To another, she said, “I know I am not going to die in my bed.” While handing Anna a journalistic award for courage, Mariane Pearl, the widow of slain Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, could “feel that this woman knew she was going to die. Everybody in the audience could.”
Anna began telling her daughter, Vera, where she kept important personal papers, such as financial records. “I’m putting this document here,” Anna said. “If I’m not here, remember it is here.”
She almost certainly realized that she had crossed an invisible line, the boundary in Russia beyond which it is acceptable to murder someone. Sergei Lapin (no relation to “Cadet,” the police lieutenant in Chechnya who threatened Anna) was deputy chief prosecutor of Moscow until 2006. He knows about the boundary and how murder happens in the segment of Russian society Anna reported on.
No smart political leader or businessman outright orders a killing. He doesn’t have to. When a threat of any kind appears on the horizon, his organization understands that it must be dealt with. The responsibility to do so falls to underlings “whose job, to say it softly, is to make sure the business develops smoothly,” said Lapin.
“Everyone does his job. They understand they want to do a certain deal. Then they see that it isn’t working. They say, ‘We tried to negotiate, it didn’t work. So that’s it.’ Rarely the head of the organization will say explicitly that he wants someone killed. But [his deputies know] the deal needs to get done. The head finds out ex post facto.”
Vera tried to shrug off what her mother was saying. “One could hardly believe this would really happen,” she said. Still, Vera and her brother and their father, Alexander, tried to think of ways to persuade Anna to take fewer risks. It seemed an impossible task.
Then, in early 2006, the daughter discovered she was pregnant. The father was a young man she was dating. Vera would not marry him, but she would have the child, she announced. That gave Anna pause. She was going to be a grandmother. Her two children recalled a pledge Anna made that she would lead a quieter life if one of them produced a grandchild. “She never simply promised,” Vera said. “It meant she really would.”
Later in the year, there was reason to think Vera’s optimism was well placed. Anna told a friend that she was thinking of quitting journalism altogether and becoming a stay-in-Moscow grandmother. At an August 30 dinner celebrating her forty-eighth birthday, Anna expressed delight about the impending birth. The hostess sensed that her friend wanted to “return to a normal life,” meaning no more trips to Chechnya.
On October 5, Radio Liberty asked Anna to comment on the thirtieth birthday of Ramzan Kadyrov, now the prime minister of Chechnya. Anna savaged him as usual, calling the pro-Putin ruler the “Stalin of our times” who tortured and murdered fellow Chechens to stay in power. He was a likely candidate for a revenge killing, she warned, adding: “I don’t wish death on anyone, but as far as this particular person is concerned, I think he should take serious care of his security.”
Early on the afternoon of October 7, mother and daughter separately left Anna’s house to shop. Both were on the lookout for a bathroom basin large enough to bathe the baby. Each time Vera came across a basin that might work, she used her cell phone to alert her mother, and Anna did the same. Their hunt for the right basin bordered on the comic: They soon realized they were crossing each other’s tracks, sometimes visiting the same shops only minutes apart.
Later in the day, Vera told her mother to go home and rest. Despite her public persona of invincibility, Anna had not fully recovered from the effects of the poisoning two years earlier en route to Beslan. More than once, the children had had to summon an ambulance when her symptoms worsened.
Around four-thirty p.m., Vera called Anna at home, but there was no answer. Then her cell phone rang. It was Ilya. He also had telephoned their mother’s apartment and got no answer. Thoughts of the poisoning arose.
“You are close. Why don’t you go check?” Vera suggested.
Ten minutes later, her brother called back.
“They killed Mama,” he said.
A man in a baseball cap had secreted himself inside Anna’s apartment building. When she stepped out of the elevator on her floor, he was waiting. He stood before her and fired four shots point-blank. Three bullets tore into her chest and the fourth penetrated her head. The force of the shots slammed her back into the elevator car, where a neighbor found her body. The murder weapon, a 9-millimeter Makarov semi-automatic pistol with its serial number scratched out, was left at the scene.
Vera didn’t believe it, couldn’t believe it.
Anna’s friend from childhood Elena Morozova was in her car when an acquaintance called and told her to turn on the radio. “We’ve got this bit of tragic news,” the announcer said. “Anna Politkovskaya was killed near the entrance to her house.”
Elena telephoned Masha Khaykina, another of Anna’s close friends from school days. “They’ve killed Anka,” she said.
Masha screamed.
In London, Alexander Litvinenko’s wife told him, “Oi, Alexander, I have terrible news for you. They shot Anya.” He began pacing “like a wounded animal.”
Vladimir Putin was at a party in honor of his fifty-fourth birthday. A guest conveyed the news of Anna’s assassination. He issued no immediate statement.
Asked about her death three days later, in Germany, Putin famously replied that it was a pity but that her “influence on the country’s political life…was minimal.”
By one expert’s measure, Anna’s killing was out of the ordinary. Oleg Panfilov, with whom I worked in Tajikistan in 1992, directs a Moscow center that defends press rights in the former Soviet states. He said twenty-six reporters were killed in the former Soviet Union in 2006, the last year for which he had complete statistics. But he believed that only one—Anna—probably died for what she wrote. The other deaths likely could be attributed to personal disputes or business disagreements, he said.