Dear Reader,
On October 7, 2006—twenty years ago this week—the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya was murdered in the elevator of her Moscow apartment. She was shot four times: twice in the chest, once in the shoulder, and once in the head, at point-blank range.
We still don’t know for certain who ordered her assassination. But given her tenacious reporting on the rank corruption of the puny little psychopath who’d formally succeeded Boris Yeltsin as president of Russia in the spring of 2000, it is safe to assume that Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was ultimately responsible for her death. That Politkovskaya was gunned down on his birthday is, to me, more proof than coincidence.
What I didn’t realize is that Politkovskaya was born in New York. Her parents, both ethnic Ukrainians, were Soviet delegates to the United Nations. The family moved to Moscow in 1962, when Anna was four years old, and that’s where she grew up. But she was a dual citizen of Russia and the United States. (Back in 1958, birthright citizenship was still an inviolable right afforded by the Constitution.)
Her work was fraught with peril. Both Putin and the deranged Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, about whom she often reported, were cold-blooded killers. She knew her life was in danger. She could have left at any time—taken a job in New York or Washington. She was urged to do so by many people, including the FSB officer turned Putin antagonist Alexander Litvinenko, who’d fled to London in the fall of 2000.
She never did.
As she remarked to the Guardian, “The more I think about it, the more I would be betraying these people if I walked away. The only thing to do is take this to the bitter end, so that no one can say that when things became difficult, I ran away.”
No one can say that. And flight, sadly, did not save Litvinenko, whom Putin managed to have killed in London six weeks after Politkovskaya’s murder in Moscow.
In 2007, a posthumous collection of Politkovskaya’s writing, A Russian Diary: A Journalist’s Final Account of Life, Corruption, and Death in Putin’s Russia, was published. The last chapter in that collection is a short essay called “Am I Afraid?”
As the United States of 2026 is uncomfortably similar to the Russia of 2006—not least because the disgusting criminal in charge of the former is a fully owned subsidiary of the disgusting criminal still in charge of the latter—I found it instructive to read Politkovskaya’s essay not as a primary source about Russia in the 2000s, but as commentary on the U.S. in the Trump Redux.
She begins:
People often tell me I am a pessimist; that I do not believe in the strength of the Russian people; that I am obsessive in my opposition to Putin and see nothing beyond that.
I see everything, and that is the whole problem. I see both what is good and what is bad. I see that people would like life to change for the better but are incapable of making that happen, and that in order to conceal this truth, they concentrate on the positive and pretend the negative isn’t there.
In Russia, that “optimism” manifested in people making excuses for Putin, minimizing the evil and the corruption, and slinking back into defeatist mindset of life under the brutal autocracy that has ruled that country since Ivan the Terrible became the first tsar in 1547.
Here, the optimism hits different. In America, we are accustomed to fair elections. In America, we wax poetic on the virtues of democracy: of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In America, we believe that all people are created equal—even if our laws have rarely reflected this belief. In America, we expect, almost as an article of our national faith, that things will turn out well, because historically, they typically have. Or so we keep telling ourselves in history class.
“We’ll get ‘em at the polls” is pure American optimism. So is “The American people would never stand for that.” So are “We are all equal under the law” and “The moral arc of the universe bends towards justice” and “Donald Trump will die in prison.” So, for that matter, is “We shall prevail.”
Meanwhile, the Kremlin flavor of optimism—mendacious optimism; propaganda optimism; Orwellian “2+2=5” optimism—is evident in Washington every time the bloated POTUS opens his fat yap. Everything here is the biggest, the best, the strongest. We are winning all the time. We have never been stronger, never been more powerful, never been more feared by our enemies (even as we suck up to them at private State Dinners and two-hour phone calls). And so on. Things have never been better, don’t you understand, even as the very MAGA slogan, implying as it does a greatness that remains elusive, has not changed.
For Politkovskaya, pessimism manifested as a call to action: “The pessimistic forecast is not so easy to come by, but you can dig it out if you’re sufficiently persistent, and it makes you want to do something about changing the situation in Russia right now.” Because, as she writes, if things do not change, and change in radical ways, the country is—and I’m paraphrasing here—fucked.
The last three paragraphs of “Am I Afraid?” made my blood run cold, because what she describes is exactly what Trump and his minions have done to the United States—and, if not stopped, will continue to do, until what’s left will be an unrecognizable husk:
So far there is no sign of change. The state authorities remain deaf to all warnings from the people. They live their own life, their faces permanently twisted by greed and by irritation that anybody should try to prevent them from getting even richer. In order to head off that possibility, their priority is to cripple civil society. On a daily basis, they try to convince the Russian people that civil society and the opposition are funded by the CIA, the British, Israel, and for all anyone knows, Martian intelligence services, plus, of course the worldwide spider’s web of Al-Qaeda.
Our state authorities today are only interested in making money. That is literally all they are interested in.
If anybody thinks they can take comfort from the optimistic forecast, let them do so. It is certainly the easier way, but it is also a death sentence for our grandchildren.
That is where we sit, in the country of Politkovskaya’s birth, 20 years after her death: a cabal of greedy, soulless Nazi parasites, their Mar-a-Lago faces literally deformed, beholden to hostile foreign powers, enriching themselves at the expense of the American taxpayer, the global economy, world peace, and, because of the exacerbation of climate change brought on by their bottomless greed, human life on earth, with zero regard for anything other than their own fortunes. It’s enough to make you yearn for a job at the Martian intelligence services—but then, Elon Musk has already laid claim to the red planet, so that’s probably fucked, too.
Curiously, Anna Politkovskaya never answers the titular question. Was she afraid? If she wasn’t when she wrote the essay, she had to have been when they came for her in the elevator. But she never let fear stop her from doing what needed to be done to thwart the despotic little creep who’d hijacked the country she loved.
Am I afraid? Are you? We all are, sometimes. But that’s not the right question. Courage is not being unafraid. Courage is being afraid, but not letting the fear stop you. That’s the real question—not “Am I afraid?” but “Will I let my fear paralyze me?”
Unlike far too many of her Russian compatriots, Anna Politkovskaya did not let fear stand in her way. She paid for that choice with her life. But to her, it was preferable to die fighting for freedom than living in tyranny.
This is something we should all keep in mind as Election Day looms. The days ahead will demand great courage, great determination, and great faith in our country, in each other, and in the basic goodness and decency of humankind.
The dark forces will do anything and everything to stay in power. Come what may, we must not let them. We must stand together. We must prevail.
Anna Politkovskaya said it best: The only thing to do is take this to the bitter end.
We talked about AI on The Five 8 with former Indeed CEO Chris Hyams, of Guardrails Alliance:
Photo credit: Juulia Niiniranta. Anna Politkovskaya Memorial Day demonstration in front of the Russian Embassy in Finland, October 7, 2014.
