Remembering Anna

The most dreadful day of my life, 7 October 2006, was also a Saturday — the day Anna Politkovskaya was killed.

At our morning meeting today, I wanted to tell my colleagues a little about her; our team is very young, and most of our journalists were just children in 2006. But as the name of our media outlet-in-exile includes the words “Novaya Gazeta” — Anna continues to be a part of us.

Anna was intensely alive. And she was scared. But she continued her work. And she was probably very lonely, because her work was war. She lived in war, even as she walked down the corridor of our Moscow offices. All the while we, her colleagues and other people in general, did not want to live in war.

A lot of journalists of my generation — aged just 20 years old when Anna was killed — left journalism following her death. I left, too. But then I returned. Many of them were overwhelmed by pain and disappointment. Need I explain why? Since then, 17 years have passed. Those who killed Anna remain in power. There is still a war going on.

The pain will not go away. But there exists another catalyst — for me, at least. A quiet rage that is like fuel, offering me strength on my hardest days. When you learn, for example, that a missile hit a cafe in a tiny Ukrainian village during a memorial service.

Through this pain and rage, I am able to understand our colleague Olga Musafirova, Novaya-Europe’s correspondent in Ukraine. Her rage is definitely not quiet, but it is certainly her fuel, and ensures she too does her job well.

They may have killed Anna Politkovskaya, but they did not stop her. The days of those who killed her, however, are numbered.