“If I record what is actually happening, it will lead to change, to peace… I would be betraying these people if I walked away…” So said Anna Politkovskaya, a reporter for Novaya Gazeta (New Newspaper), one of Russia’s last organs of liberal media, in an interview in 2002.
Last year, she was gunned down in what was apparently a contract killing. Reviewing her posthumously published memoirs, “A Russian Diary”, Alexander Nazaryan writes in Salon:
“Hers may seem a Sisyphean task, perhaps even a touch naive, and it is easy to applaud her bravery with elegiac obituaries on journalistic integrity, as many have done from a safe distance in the West.
“The greater challenge, however, is the self-examination that Politkovskaya demanded of all democratic societies, which should reveal that Russia is only the mirror, however distorted, of any nation in which private interests and civil liberties negotiate an ever-shifting terrain.”
Read the full review: A Russian Diary
IJR 