Anna Politkovskaya, 20 years after her murder: tribute at the Strasbourg plenary

Brussels – “My grandmother wrote of Russia under Putin as a country where violence has gradually become systemic and indifference the norm.” These are the words with which the political activist Anna Victoria Politkovskaya chose to remember her grandmother, the journalist Anna Stepanovna Politkovskaya, at a tribute held yesterday (5 October) on the sidelines of the European Parliament’s plenary session in Strasbourg. 

The journalist, an extraordinary writer for the independent Russian daily Novaya Gazeta, has gone down in history for her work exposing human rights abuses in Russia and Chechnya, and criticising the political decisions of the President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, and the former head of the Republic of Chechnya, Akhmad Kadyrov. Having received numerous threats throughout her life, she was shot five times and killed in the lift of her block of flats on 7 October 2006. Twenty years after her assassination, therefore, MEPs from the Committee on Human Rights and the European Parliament’s EU–Russia Parliamentary Cooperation Delegation paid tribute to her by inviting her granddaughter, and the current editor-in-chief of Novaya Gazeta, Kirill Martynov. In his opening remarks, the Vice-President of the European Parliament, Nicolae Ștefănuță, emphasised that the journalist’s “fearless pursuit of the truth” had made her “a beacon of hope for those fighting for justice and human dignity in Russia”.

 Her granddaughter stressed that her grandmother “wrote about ordinary people, about those who found themselves alone in the face of war, violence, injustice and the system” but also “about Chechen families trying to survive amid war and violence, about Russian conscripts killed in the war, about torture, abductions, corruption and a war that destroys not only those it strikes, but also those forced to do the shooting.” For her, “the most important thing about her work was not merely that she exposed those in power. Even more important was that she did not allow human stories to go unnoticed,” she concluded.

 Anna Stepanovna Politkovskaya joined the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta in 1999. Her critical journalism earned her Amnesty International’s Global Award in 2001 and the OSCE Prize for Journalism and Democracy in 2003. Among her most famous works is “Putin’s Russia”, in which the author recounted life in the Federation in the early 2000s. As she explained: “My book consists of jumbled notes on the fringes of life in Russia. For the moment, I cannot analyse that existence. I am simply living, and taking note of what I see.” A detailed account of the journalist’s personal and professional journey was published in Italy by her daughter Vera in a book titled “A mother, a life and a passion for the truth: Anna Stepanovna Politkovskaya”, published by Rizzoli in 2023.