Anna Politkovskaya was a Russian journalist, writer and human rights activist. She was born in 1958 in New York and killed in 2006 in Moscow. She studied journalism at Moscow State University and worked as a reporter for Izvestiya Newspaper from 1982-1993. Then she worked at Obshchaya Gazeta from 1994-1999 and wrote reports on social problems and refugees. In 1999, she started working as investigative reporter with Novaya Gazeta.
Politkovskaya provided critical reports of the Chechen war and condemned abuses by Russian military forces. She met officials and military commanders and visited hospitals and refugee camps in Chechnya during the war and criticized the tyranny and corruption in the Russian ruling system. She wrote several books including A Dirty War: A Russian Reporter in Chechnya in 2001 and Putin’s Russia/Life in a Failing Democracy in 2004. In 2007, her work, A Russian Diary subtitled A Journalist’s Final Account of Life, Corruption, and Death in Putin’s Russia was published by Random House, which was written during 2003 and 2005.
Anna Politkovskaya received several death and rape threats. She was detained by military officials in Chechnya in 2001 when she was providing investigative report and she was poisoned in 2004, when she wanted to travel to North Caucasus to act as mediator for Beslan school hostage crisis. In 2005, she expressed in a freedom of press conference in Vienna that “People sometimes pay with their lives for saying aloud what they think. In fact, one can even get killed for giving me information. I am not the only one in danger. I have examples that prove it.” She was murdered in the elevator of her apartment’s building on October 7, 2006.
Politkovskaya received 18 awards for her works for human rights, freedom of expression, and journalism from different national and international organizations including Amnesty International, Norwegian Authors Union, International Women’s Media Foundation, UNESCO etc. The College of Europe named the 2007-2008 academic year in her honor. The Anna Politkovskaya Award by RAW in WAR (Reach All Women in War), and a journalism prize of “Anna Politkovskaja” by L’internationale in Ferrara, Italy were established in her honor.