Anna Politkovskaya

Anna Stepanovna Politkovskaya (; 30 August 1958 – 7 October 2006) was a Russian investigative journalist who reported on political and social events in Russia, in particular, the Second Chechen War (1999–2005). She was found murdered in the elevator of her apartment block in Moscow on 7 October 2006, Vladimir Putin's birthday. For seven years, she refused to give up reporting on the war despite numerous acts of intimidation and violence. Politkovskaya was arrested by Russian military forces in Chechnya and subjected to a mock execution. She was poisoned while flying from Moscow via Rostov-on-Don to help resolve the 2004 Beslan school hostage crisis, and had to turn back, requiring careful medical treatment in Moscow to restore her health.

Her post-1999 articles about conditions in Chechnya were turned into books several times; Russian readers' main access to her investigations and publications was through Novaya Gazeta, a Russian newspaper that featured critical investigative coverage of Russian political and social affairs. From 2000 onwards, she received numerous international awards for her work. In 2004, she published Putin's Russia, a personal account of Russia for a Western readership.

On 7 October 2006 (the 54th birthday of Russian president Vladimir Putin), she was murdered in the elevator of her block of apartments, an assassination that attracted international attention. In 2014, five men were sentenced to prison for the murder, but it is still unclear who ordered or paid for the contract killing. Another source states that she was born in Chernihiv region of Ukraine. the daughter of Ukrainian Soviet diplomats at the United Nations, Stepan Fedorovich Mazepa (1927–2006) from Kostobobriv, and Raisa Aleksandrovna (; 1929–2021) from Kerch in Crimea. Her father was ethnically Ukrainian and had attended a Ukrainian-language school in Chernihiv before the 1941 Nazi invasion of the USSR. He met her mother at a Russian-language night school in Kerch after the war while serving in the fleet. By 1952, her father was admitted to study at an institute in Moscow, and her parents married there. Her father was appointed to the Ukrainian delegation at the United Nations during the Khrushchev era. He became a founding member of the Special Committee against Apartheid in 1962, and served as its secretary as late as 1974.

Her parents bought an apartment in central Moscow in 1962 The faculty head at the time was , a close friend of the Mazepas and their frequent guest in New York. She married fellow student Alexander Politkovsky in 1978; by 1981 they had two children, Ilya and Vera. At first Alexander was better known, joining TV journalist Vladislav Listyev as one of the hosts on the late-night TV-program Vzglyad. Apart from her childhood years, Politkovskaya spent no more than a few weeks outside Russia at any one time, even when her life came under threat. She was a U.S. citizen and had a U.S. passport, although she never relinquished her Russian citizenship.

Journalistic work

Beginnings

Politkovskaya's initial employment was with Izvestia, the organ of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union, in 1982. According to her ex-husband in 2011, it was a brief internship in the mailroom