Forget, repress, overlook, erase. The Moscow regime would prefer if the 15th anniversary of the murder of investigative journalist and human rights activist Anna Politkovskaya could somehow be ignored. In the Kremlin, people get annoyed when asked why the people behind the execution have still not been caught and punished. Your Russia is just what Politkovskaya wrote before her death: a country with the “most corrupt judiciary in the world”.
That was not always so. Even in 2006, the year she was murdered, there was still hope that Russia could develop into a democracy. There were the beginnings of a civil society. Anyone who loves Russia hurts to see what has become of this hope. Russia developed into a dictatorship.
Parallels to Soviet rule
Sure: it’s better today than in the USSR. But the parallels to Soviet rule can hardly be denied. The Russian government is persecuting, poisoning and murdering those who work for freedom, human rights and a life in dignity. The completely arbitrary prison sentences imposed on Alexej Navalny or Ojub Titiev, the murder of Boris Nemtsov, and house arrest against Kirill Serebrennikow are just the best-known examples; at the local level there are hundreds of others making less headlines.
DW Chief Correspondent Miodrag Soric
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Anyone who has proclaimed violence as their method must make the lie their principle. What Alexander Solzhenitsyn once wrote about the USSR applies to Russia today. Anyone who dares to write the truth about the conditions in the country lives dangerously. Which is why most journalists bypass or gloss over those topics that could displease President Putin and his entourage: rampant corruption, falling living standards, fake parliamentary and presidential elections, rural exodus, the disintegration of infrastructure, the departure of hundreds of thousands of often well-educated people.
Anna Politkovskaya is different. She wrote about the atrocities of the Chechnya war, the corruption among the military and secret service people. Thereupon the state-controlled press insulted her as a polluter, traitor to the fatherland as a subversive force in the service of foreign countries.
She wasn’t intimidated
She met the definition of a patriot: someone who is ready to make sacrifices for the common good; in other words, the opposite of the Kremlin propagandists who enrich themselves at the expense of the people. Anna Politkovskaya was threatened with death several times. But she wasn’t intimidated. She could have lived a comfortable life in the West. A temptation that she resisted and which ended up paying a heavy price.
Was Anna Politkovskaya’s sacrifice in vain? More generally, were the sacrifices made by Russia’s human rights activists such as Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov and hundreds of others in vain? Only cynics and absolute materialists can affirm this. But those who have not completely silenced the voice of their conscience know that it is heroes, moral role models like Anna Politkowsjaka, who make life more humane, more just and thus more worth living. That is why the world will continue to remember the murdered civil rights activist – despite all the Kremlin’s propaganda screams.
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