The Blind Spot

In Russian, podsnezhnik means “going under the snow.” But its true meaning has nothing to do with weather. According to a Russian friend, it’s an aphorism for being assassinated. Podsnezhnik was exactly what happened to renowned journalist Anna Politkovskaya two weeks ago. And with four bullet shots, Russia’s long road to Western-style public discourse took another step backward.

Anna was a great asset to Russia’s dwindling public sphere. Even her friends say she was not easy to bear, but harsh critics hardly are. Born in New York to Soviet diplomats from Ukraine, she decided to study in the motherland, graduating as a journalist from Moscow State University in 1980. Almost immediately, she focused on the disfranchised: the old, the poor, and refugees. She once declared she aimed at “reviving Russia’s pre-revolutionary tradition of writing about our social problems.”

But circumstances would soon change that; Chechnya came into Anna’s world.

Chechnya is a federal territory subject to the Russian Federation. Rich in natural resources, the area is a historical hotspot that once featured power struggles between Cossacks, Ottoman Turks, and bizarrely, Buddhist Kalmyks. Chechens eventually converted to Islam and ever since have vehemently resisted Russian control. Invariably uprising once a generation, they even collaborated with Nazi invaders in the ’40s. Comrade Stalin was so enraged about this betrayal that he called for genocidal mass deportations—and actually scattered millions of Chechens around the Soviet Union—yet the Chechen nation survived the dictator.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, Chechens yet again declared the independence of the Ichkeria Republic, although only the Taliban regime in Afghanistan recognized it. In the first Chechen War of the ’90s, the post-perestroika Russian army was unable to break Chechen will. Forced by demoralized soldiers and angry public opinion, President Boris Yeltsin signed a ceasefire. The second, ongoing Chechen War began under Vladimir Putin’s leadership, with a much stronger military. In a battleground too obscure and too dangerous for Western journalists, the military launched total war against the rebellious Chechens. In order to keep Putin’s popularity ratings high, the Kremlin tried very hard to make Chechnya a blind spot in their media.

But circumstances soon changed that; Anna came to Chechnya.

Amidst religious tensions, guerrilla warfare, and human rights violations, Anna was the only journalist unafraid of asking questions and writing answers. She brought the Russian military excesses to the Russian public sphere. Almost raped, almost deported, and almost killed several times, she reported summary executions, torture, and starvation. During the famous Moscow theatre kidnapping in 2002 that ended in tragedy, the Chechen terrorists only trusted Anna to mediate with the police authorities.

But in Russia, the Kremlin treats the media as a powerful weapon, to be purchased, coerced, or driven out. Partly spawned by the Chechen conflict, the government has been using proxies like its oil behemoth, Gazprom, to acquire media outlets for years. Examples of this include the NPV television network and Izvestia, a leading newspaper. Anna wrote for the Novaya Gazeta, which is one of the last bastions of dissent in Putin’s Russia, partly owned by Nobel Peace Prize winner Mikhail Gorbachev.

Uncompromising, Anna was truthful to both sides. She wrote about under-armed and underfed Russian conscripts and about ailing Chechen civilians. She wrote about Chechens terrorizing Russian populations and Russian torture camps for irregular guerrilla fighters. No wonder passionate fan mail vied with vivid death threats in her letterbox.

Anna heavily criticized Muslim extremism, but she also dug up cases of Russian intelligence services falsely incriminating innocent civilians in the war zone. Her dissent sought to convince Russians their freedoms were the worst victim of the Chechen war.

Maybe that’s why on Oct. 7, those four shots from a Makarov pistol ended her life in a dark, silent elevator. Unsurprisingly, investigators found the weapon next to her. In the assassin guild, workers use their tools only once.

In academic theory, nothing escapes the public opinion, and there are no blind spots. In Russia, people go podsnezhnik and the government creates blind spots.

Paradoxically, the writer and her subject were doomed to the same fate: Anna became Chechnya. In the outskirts of the public sphere, silence still reigns autocratic and unchallenged.



Pierpaolo Barbieri ’09, a Crimson editorial editor, is a history concentrator in Eliot House.