Her Own Death, Foretold

Is that enough to make someone vow to kill you? The answer is as simple as the morality encouraged by Putin. "We are merciless to enemies of the Reich." "Who is not with us is against us." "Those who are against us must be destroyed."

"Why have you got such a bee in your bonnet about this severed head?" Vasily Panchenkov asks me back in Moscow. He is the director of the press office of the troops of the Interior Ministry, but a decent man. "Have you nothing better to worry about?" I am asking him to comment on the events in Kurchaloi. "Just forget it. Pretend it never happened. I'm asking you for your own good!"

But how can I forget it, when it did happen?

I loathe the Kremlin's line, elaborated by Surkov, dividing people into those who are "on our side," "not on our side," or even "on the other side." If a journalist is "on our side," he or she will get awards, respect, perhaps be invited to become a deputy in the Duma.

If a journalist is "not on our side," however, he or she will be deemed a supporter of the European democracies, of European values, and automatically become a pariah. That is the fate of all who oppose our "sovereign democracy," our "traditional Russian democracy." (What on Earth that is supposed to be, nobody knows; but they swear allegiance to it nevertheless: "We are for sovereign democracy!") I am not really a political animal. I have never joined any party and would consider it a mistake for a journalist, in Russia at least, to do so. I have never felt the urge to stand for the Duma, although there were years when I was invited to.

So what is the crime that has earned me this label of not being "one of us"? I have merely reported what I have witnessed, no more than that. I have written and, less frequently, I have spoken. I am even reluctant to comment, because it reminds me too much of the imposed opinions of my Soviet childhood and youth. It seems to me that our readers are capable of interpreting what they read for themselves. That is why my principal genre is reportage, sometimes, admittedly, with my own interjections. I am not an investigating magistrate but somebody who describes the life around us for those who cannot see it for themselves, because what is shown on television and written about in the overwhelming majority of newspapers is emasculated and doused with ideology. People know very little about life in other parts of their own country, and sometimes even in their own region.

The Kremlin responds by trying to block my access to information, its ideologists supposing that this is the best way to make my writing ineffectual. It is impossible, however, to stop someone fanatically dedicated to this profession of reporting the world around us. My life can be difficult; more often, humiliating. I am not, after all, that young at 47 to keep encountering rejection and having my own pariah status rubbed in my face. But I can live with it.

I will not go into the other joys of the path I have chosen, the poisoning, the arrests, the threats in letters and over the Internet, the telephoned death threats, the weekly summons to the prosecutor general's office to sign statements about practically every article I write (the first question being, "How and where did you obtain this information?"). Of course I don't like the constant derisive articles about me that appear in other newspapers and on Internet sites presenting me as the madwoman of Moscow. I find it disgusting to live this way. I would like a bit more understanding.

The main thing, however, is to get on with my job, to describe the life I see, to receive visitors every day in our editorial office who have nowhere else to bring their troubles, because the Kremlin finds their stories off-message, so that the only place they can be aired is in our newspaper, Novaya Gazeta.

Translated from the Russian by Arch Tait.