Looking from the inside

Anna Politkovskaya is arguably Russia’s finest journalist, a woman unafraid to document her country’s excesses, not least the ongoing chaos in Chechnya. Hew new book on Putin – already questioned by a Russian blogger – is reviewed here by the Moscow Times.

She charts a moral and spiritual degradation not unfamiliar to many old Communist regimes. She is no fan of the previous system, however. “I have wondered a great deal about why I am so intolerant of Putin,” Politkovskaya writes. “What is it that makes me dislike him so much as to feel moved to write a book about him? I am not one of his political opponents or rivals, just a woman living in Russia. Quite simply, I am a forty-five-year-old Muscovite who observed the Soviet Union at its most disgraceful in the 1970s and 1980s. I really don’t want to find myself back there again.”

Text and images ©2024 Antony Loewenstein. All rights reserved.

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