Russia:Murdered journalist Anna Politskaya was a vocal critic of Putin, but some of his opponents get off lightly.
A Russian Diary By Anna Politkovskaya, translated by Arch Tait Harvill Secker, 323pp. £12.99.
Anna Politkovskaya had completed A Russian Diaryshortly before an assassin or assassins waylaid her at the entrance to her Moscow apartment block and shot her dead, in October 2006. According to figures issued by the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, she was the 43rd journalist to be killed in the line of duty in Russia since the Soviet Union expired at midnight on December 31st, 1991.
Twelve of these died during the presidency of Vladimir Putin.
In recent weeks, more than a million people attended readings throughout the world in condemnation of her murder. In the preface to the diary, the British TV journalist Jon Snow writes: "I must confess that I finished reading A Russian Diary feeling that it should be taken up and dropped from the air in vast quantities throughout the length and breadth of Mother Russia, for all her people to read."
Unfortunately I do not feel able to commend the book so wholeheartedly. Anna Politkovskaya was an extremely brave journalist who wrote with intense passion on subjects that embarrassed Russia's new political and business establishment. She has, rightly and courageously, exposed the appalling behaviour of sections of the Russian security forces in Chechnya. She has brought to light corruption in the higher echelons of her native country. Her courage and persistence have illuminated a much-criticised profession.
There are, however, some disturbing aspects to A Russian Diary. These relate not so much to what Anna Politkovskaya has written but to what she, and more particularly her publishers, have omitted. Inside the front cover, for example, we are told that she has interviewed "people whose lives have been devastated by Putin's policies, including the mothers of children who died in the Beslan siege . . ."
It is not stated that the lives of those mothers were, in fact, devastated in the first place by an unprecedented act of terrorism in which the warlord, Shamil Basayev, felt no compunction about kidnapping hundreds of children. Basayev's murderous personality, but not his action in Beslan, is criticised in a small section of the book. President Putin, however, is targeted throughout the entire work. Anna Politkovskaya's right to do this is without question, but some of Putin's opponents get off very lightly indeed.
THROUGHOUT THE BOOK, for example, there are references to the writer Eduard Limonov and his supporters in the National Bolshevik Party. They are commended for their anti-government actions and the inability of security agencies to break them and make them appeal for clemency. There is another, far darker, side to this group which is not mentioned.
One of the many low points in Limonov's career came during the Bosnian war, when he was pictured in a BBC documentary accepting an offer from Radovan Karadzic to shoot at the civilian population of Sarajevo. Initially a supporter of the madcap ultra-rightist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, Limonov broke with his former ally, saying that "a Jew masquerading as a Russian nationalist is a sickness, a pathology". His party's stated aim is the creation of a great empire in which all of Europe will come under Russian domination.
Grigory Yavlinsky, a genuine liberal and democrat, is criticised, mainly because he and his Yabloko Party's opposition to Putin is not considered as strong as that of Limonov and his followers. This is a pity, for Politkovskaya's former deputy editor at Novaya Gazeta, Yuri Shchekochikhin, was a Yabloko member of the Russian parliament and his name, too, is on the list of those journalists who have lost their lives.
ANNA POLITKOVSKAYA, TOher credit, admits that people have told her she has been obsessive in her criticism of Putin, but she, unlike many western commentators, is also highly critical of Yeltsin, on whose watch an even larger number of journalists was killed.
Indeed the book contains a reference from the Yeltsin era that could explain how the sycophancy of political underlings may have led to the deaths of many Russian journalists. Politkovskaya refers to what has become known as the "Pasha Grachev Effect". Grachev, Yeltsin's defence minister, she wrote, "was thoroughly fed up with the fact that Dmitry Kholodov, a journalist, was unearthing his dark secrets. The Minister of Defence is said to have hinted to his military friends how Kholodov was pissing him off; the next thing you know the journalist was blown to pieces".
"The dissidents and the democrats," she wrote, "both tried to fool the people for too long into believing that Yeltsin, of all people, was a real democrat. There came a time when that fairy tale became unsustainable and 'democrat' became literally a dirty word . . .".
The western commentators and politicians who participated in that particular piece of deception are now among those most loudly and belatedly criticising his successor.
Séamus Martin is a retired international editor and Moscow correspondent of The Irish Times.
