Anna Politkovskaya

Anna Stepanovna Politkovskaya (30 August 1958 – 7 October 2006) was a Russian journalist, author and human rights activist known for her opposition to the Chechen conflict and Russian President Putin.

Anna Politkovskaya, 2005

Quotes

• Anybody trying to do anything worthwhile in Russia at the moment is moving toward the left. [Mikhail] Khodorkovsky is correct, although all the democrats condemned his thoughts from prison. Russia's Left March is a fait accompli, which also rules out any Russian Orange Revolution. There will be no splendid revolutionary breakthrough with oranges, tulips, or roses in Russia. Our revolution, if it comes, will be red, because the Communists are almost the most democratic force in the country, and because it will be bloody.
  • A Russian Diary: A Journalist's Final Account of Life, Corruption, and Death in Putin's Russia, New York: Random House, 2007, p. 339.
  • See also: left-wing politics,

• [It] is we who are responsible for Putin's policies ... [s]ociety has shown limitless apathy ... [a]s the Chekists have become entrenched in power, we have let them see our fear, and thereby have only intensified their urge to treat us like cattle. The KGB respects only the strong. The weak it devours. We of all people ought to know that.
  • Putin's Russia

• My heroes are those people who want to be individuals but are being forced to be cogs again. In an Empire there are only cogs.
  • As quoted in Anna Politkovskaya: Putin, poison and my struggle for freedom (15 October 2004), The Independent.

• Tragically, our most active democrats are on the Left. I cannot bring myself to vote Communist because the distance between their progressive and repressive instincts is too short, but Putin's regime is a great recruiting ground for the Left, particularly among the young.
  • Interviewed by Marjorie Farquharson, "Into the Future", Index on Censorship 4 (2005), p. 121.

• We are hurtling back into a Soviet abyss, into an information vacuum that spells death from our own ignorance. All we have left is the internet, where information is still freely available. For the rest, if you want to go on working as a journalist, it's total servility to Putin. Otherwise, it can be death, the bullet, poison, or trial - whatever our special services, Putin's guard dogs, see fit.
  • As quoted in "Poisoned by Putin: The horror of Beslan was made still worse by the intimidation of Russia's servile media" (9 September 2004), The Guardian, United Kingdom: Guardian News and Media Limited

• We have no philanthropists and [Mikhail] Khodorkovsky's imprisonment is a warning to others. He set up the Open Russia Foundation and financed opposition parties, environmental organisations and human rights. Vladimir Putin has said that Russia will not allow foreigners to finance our civil society, but now we have no domestic investors to do it, which is a tragedy. If we continue like this, 100 years from now there will be no civil society in Russia.
  • Interviewed by Marjorie Farquharson, "Into the Future", Index on Censorship 4 (2005), p. 121.
  • See also: civil society.

External links

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