In Review

04 December 2008 05:05 BST

A Russian Diary by Anna Politkovskaya

Random House, translated from the Russian by Arch Tait, hardback, 323 pages, £17.99, out now.

In a nutshell

Russia's lost moral conscience speaks.

What's it all about?

Compiled in the 18 months between the winter of 2003 and autumn two years later, A Russian Diary is the last published book from the pen of award-winning journalist Anna Politkovskaya before her murder last October.

Beginning with the deeply flawed parliamentary and then even more scandalously unconstitutional presidential elections, the diary tracks the gradual erosion of democracy in Russia under Vladimir Putin, eventually leading to the Beslan school tragedy of September 2004, in which more than 340 civilians died.

Through interviews with youthful veterans ruined by their experiences in Chechnya; families whose sons, daughters, husbands and wives have 'disappeared' in the night; and those left destitute by the Kremlin's economic reforms, Politkovskaya paints a picture of a Russian state in terminal decline.

Who's it by

Born to Soviet diplomats in New York at the height of the cold war, Anna Politkovskaya was a journalist who campaigned for political freedoms and dedicated her life to highlighting the distinct lack of them in post-communist Russia.

A Russian Diary is the book Politkovskaya was working on when she was murdered in a suspected contract killing in the lift of her Moscow apartment on October 7th last year; her death sparking an outpouring of emotion and condemnation in the west.

The author of similarly polemic anti-Kremlin books A Dirty War and Putin's Russia, Politkovskaya was a writer at the liberal Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta up until her death.

A regular visitor to Chechnya, Politkovskaya received multiple death threats from ultra-nationalist and even more shadowy organisations throughout her career, but refused to defect.

More than 1,000 people, including her two daughters, attended her funeral in Moscow last year.

As an example…

"Why did Khodorkovsky come to grief? He was no different from the rest of those who have amassed fabulous fortunes in record time, no different from others who had the opportunity and the inclination. When he was a billionaire, however, he said, 'Stop! Yukos will become the most transparent and non-criminal company in Russia, using western business methods'. He began creating a new Yukos, but all around him people remained at large who had absolutely no desire for transparency, people whose very nature is to work in the shadows, away from the light. They set about devouring Yukos, because light is unwelcome in the midst of darkness." (from July 28th 2005).

What the others say

"Her version of history will always have an audience in the west, but Russia, one suspects, will continue to ignore her. She herself knew why: 'Our society isn't a society any more. It is a collection of windowless, isolated concrete cells. There are thousands who together might add up to be the Russian people, but the walls of our cells are impermeable,'" the Guardian.

So is it any good?

A Russian Diary, even without the grace of hindsight, is a singularly heartbreaking experience. Though the book's first and last entries predate Politkovskaya's murder by 34 and 14 months respectively, progressing through the diary is immensely distressing, because ultimately, you know how it will end.

And the further you read into the book, despite the thought's revulsion, Politkovskaya's death becomes painfully more inevitable; in the summer of 2004 her name is among 46 others posted on the website of an ultra-nationalist organisation as "foes of the Russian people".

From the start it is clear, as the title suggests, that she intended this book to provide a contemporary account of the plight of the Russian people, and as such references to her own personal experiences are rare.

This is not to say that Politkovskaya keeps her distance from Russia's plight; she travels to the far-flung corners of the federation, the virtual war zone of Ingushetia and, of course, Chechnya.

The book is scattered with countless mentions of people, typically human rights workers and suspected dissidents, 'disappearing' from their homes at night; their families informed several weeks later that there is a corpse waiting to be collected from the local morgue.

At the same time as these indiscriminate killings, Putin and his United Russia deputies in the Duma are progressively dismantling every political freedom afforded to citizens of the federation since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Voters are seduced with free vodka and the promise of their hot water pipes being turned back on if they vote for Putin's party in the 2003 parliamentary elections, and then the president himself is re-elected after his opponents are denied their constitutionally-afforded campaigning platforms.

Even Politkovskaya is surprised when one presidential candidate, with a precarious degree of populist support, himself 'disappears'; eventually turning up in Ukraine with no memory of the three weeks in between. His wife is furious and the Russian people laugh.

They laugh also, Politkovskaya writes, when the Committee of Soldiers' Mothers is denied the chance to become a political party when the authorities reveal 26 per cent of its signatories are 'unacceptable'.

If a quarter of a prospective party's signatures are deemed this way then its formation is blocked. 'At least it wasn't 25.1 per cent,' the Russian people laugh again, as they continue to sleepwalk into a police state.

It goes on: Putin has trouble in the provinces with locally-elected governors not toeing his line - for United Russia exists for the sole reason of supporting the big man, the president. His reaction? To do away with locally-elected governors entirely and to alter the law so he alone can appoint them. The deputies at the Duma, practically reduced to bureaucrats, comply and the general populace shrugs.

This is the Russia that Politkovskaya portrays, a country where conscript soldiers, fresh out of school, are sent to either die or be maimed in Chechnya, where impoverished 'heroes' of the federation have their privileges withdrawn to further line the oligarchs' pockets, where 39 activists are kept in cages for nine months for punitive damage to state property. And the list goes on, while at the same time Politkovskaya condemns the liberals and democrats for failing to unite and provide a serious challenge to Putin.

As it is known, Politkovskaya's words have always had infinitely more resonance in the west than in her own country, and this will certainly apply to A Russian Diary as well.

Upon her death a host of international leaders expressed their outrage and sorrow, Putin among them. He vowed that the "horribly cruel crime" would not go unpunished, but, speaking from Germany, added that her influence on politics in Russia had been "minimal… very minor".

Towards the end of the diary, with her death weeks away at the time of compiling, Politkovskaya is emboldened with a new found sense of optimism.

The state's show trial of the 39 National Bolsheviks is floundering, young liberals are beginning to find a voice of their own and Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former Yukos oil oligarch imprisoned for 'tax fraud', goes on hunger strike in solidarity for the mistreatment of his similarly jailed friend.

But in the book's epilogue, heartrendingly titled Am I Afraid?, Politkovskaya writes: "People often tell me I am a pessimist; that I do not believe in the strength of the Russian people; that I am obsessive in my opposition to Putin and see nothing beyond that.

"I see everything, and that is the whole problem. I see both what is good and what is bad. I see that people would like life to change for the better, but are incapable of making that happen, and that in order to conceal this truth they concentrate on the positive and pretend the negative isn't there."

Matthew Champion