Russian journalist shot to death

Published 9:00 pm Saturday, October 7, 2006

MOSCOW – Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian journalist whose byline defined the fading craft of investigative and crusading reporting in President Vladimir Putin’s Russia, was gunned down and killed Saturday in the lobby of her apartment building in central Moscow.

Politkovskaya, 48, was renowned for her probes of the brutality of Russia’s military campaign in Chechnya as well as the banality of corruption permeating Russian life, from the remote provinces to the lights of Moscow.

Born to Soviet diplomats in New York in 1958, Politkovskaya, who also had American citizenship, chronicled nearly every major story in Russia in the past decade. Her reporting often clashed with official versions of such events as the hostage crisis at a theater in Moscow in 2002 and the bloody end of a school siege in Beslan in 2004.

She was a harsh critic of Putin’s rule and was working on a story about torture in Chechnya, where a Kremlin-backed strongman has all but routed a separatist movement that sparked two bloody wars, but at a cost to Russia that has yet to be measured.

The article was to be published Monday, according to her newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, one of the few independent media outlets in a country where much of the press is apprehensive if not directly controlled by central authorities or regional power brokers.

Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who is said by friends to be concerned about the increasing lack of pluralism in the country, became a minority shareholder in the newspaper this summer.

“It is a savage crime against a professional and serious journalist and a courageous woman,” Gorbachev told the Russian news agency Interfax. “It is a blow to the entire democratic, independent press.”

The Kremlin issued no immediate comment on the killing.

During the Moscow theater siege, she entered the building and spoke directly to the hostage-takers. On her way to Beslan to report on the crisis, she became ill, leading to allegations that she had been poisoned to prevent her from reaching the school, where 331 people later died.

Politkovskaya’s newspaper said it would conduct an investigation of the killing.

The shooting occurred on Putin’s birthday and closely followed the birthday of his anointed leader in Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov. Angry journalists could not let the coincidence pass.

“Apparently, this was a present for the two leaders,” said Igor Yakovenko, general secretary of the Russian Union of Journalists.