`A Small Corner of Hell'

We ought to get a little sick every time a journalist dies in the line of duty. For many Americans, and not always for bad reasons, journalists rank in esteem and credibility beneath lawyers and televangelists. Still, the tradition of courageous reporting lives on, or at least it did until Saturday when Anna Politkovskaya was found shot to death in an elevator in her Moscow apartment building. Saturday was Vladimir Putin’s birthday, and many suspect the timing was not coincidental.

Politkovskaya was best known for covering the war in Chechnya and for antagonizing Putin, who seems increasingly to draw upon his experience as an agent for the KGB. On Monday, Ron Rosenbaum blogged on the larger significance of Politkovskaya’s murder, in what he calls Putin’s “KGB-style dictatorship”: “I have a feeling that the entire history of the past 20 years, indeed entire post-1945 trajectory of world history will have to be re evaluated from the point of view of this repulsive crime and what it represents.”

In his report for the Guardian on Sunday, Tom Parfitt wrote from Moscow:

“In an anthology Another Sky, due to be published next year by English PEN, a writers' group campaigning against political oppression, Politkovskaya chillingly predicted yesterday's events: `Some time ago Vladislav Surkov, deputy head of the presidential administration, explained that there were people who were enemies but whom you could talk sense into, and there were incorrigible enemies to whom you couldn't and who simply needed to be "cleansed" from the political arena. So they are trying to cleanse it of me and others like me.’”

I have read translations of two of Politkovskaya’s books – A Dirty War: A Russian Reporter in Chechnya (The Harvill Press, 2001) and A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya (University of Chicago Press, 2003). I read them because, like most Americans, I knew so little about Chechnya, a recent slaughterhouses. Also I had heard of Politkovskaya’s reputation for bravery and gritty reporting. She was born in 1958 in New York City, where her parents were diplomats at the United Nations. She seemed real, doing what every dedicated beat reporter does but in a part of the world where that can get you killed.

The books, without context, can be dizzying, but Politkovskaya focuses on the lives of ordinary Chechens, and the editions I read came with useful introductions and ample footnotes. She was more storyteller than political analyst, but made no pretext of “objectivity” in the American sense. I would suggest you read Politkovskaya’s books – the most fitting way to eulogize a writer – to remind yourself that journalism can be mortally important. She gave the title “Executions of Reporters” to a section of A Small Corner of Hell, and in it she wrote:

“Silence does not bode well. That’s what the war has taught us.”