Anna Politkovskaya

Politkovskaya covered the second Chechen war for Novaya Gazeta from 1999, going into the region again and again when almost no other Russian correspondent would, and writing about conscripts, refugee camps and what federal forces were doing to civilians. Putin's Russia, which Arch Tait translated into English in 2004, widens that into an argument about the whole apparatus: the army, the courts, the security services, and a president she held answerable for what they had become. Born in New York in 1958 to Soviet diplomats, she took her journalism degree in Moscow. She had been poisoned on a flight to Beslan in 2004 and had lived with threats for years. She was killed in the lift of her Moscow apartment building on 7 October 2006. Five men were eventually convicted of it. Who ordered it has never been settled in court. A Dirty War, collecting the Chechnya dispatches, had reached English in 2001, and A Russian Diary was published after her death.