The following is bits and pieces of an article that was found in Anna Politkovskaya’s computer after her death and is addressed to readers abroad. Politkovskaya was an investigative journalist in Russia that was shot and killed at point blank range in the elevator of her apartment building. It is from the book, “Is Journalism Worth Dying For: Final Dispatches.” I read the book on a flight from Los Angeles to London and decided to include here this excerpt, because her passion and determination inspire me more than I can explain on a Tumblr post.
What Am I Guilty Of?
“Koverny,” a Russian clown whose job in the olden days was to keep the audience laughing while the circus arena was changed between acts. If he failed to make them laugh, the ladies and gentlemen booed him and the management sacked him.
Almost the entire present generation of Russian journalists, and those sections of the mass media which have survived to date, are clowns of this kind, a Big Top of kovernys who job is to keep the public entertained and, if they do write about anything serious, then merely to tell everyone how wonderful the Pyramid of Power is in all its manifestations.
Journalists and television presenters have taken enthusiastically to their new role in the Big Top. The battle for the right to convey impartial information, rather than act as servants of the Presidential Administration, is already a thing of the past. An atmosphere of intellectual and moral stagnation prevails in the profession to which I too belong, and it has to be said that most of my fellow journalists are not greatly troubled by this reversion from journalism to propagandising on behalf of the powers that be. They openly admit that they are fed information about enemies by members of the Presidential Administration, and are told what to cover and what to steer clear of.
What happens to journalists who don’t want to perform in the Big Top? They become pariahs. I am not exaggerating.
I loathe the current ideology which divides people into those who are “on side,” “not on side,” or even “on the wrong side.” If a journalist is on side, she or he will receive awards and honors, and perhaps be invited to become a Deputy in the Duma. Invited, mind, not elected.
Today a journalist who is not on side is an outcast. I have never sought my present pariah status and it makes me feel like a beached dolphin. I am no political infighter.
I will not go into the other joys of the path I have chosen: the poisoning, the arrests, the menacing by email and over the Internet, the telephoned death threats. The main thing is to get on with my job, to describe the life I see, to receive visitors every day in our newspaper’s offices who have nowhere else to bring their troubles, because the Kremlin finds their stories off-message. The only place they can be aired is in our newspaper, Novaya gazeta.
What am I guilty of? I have merely reported what I witnessed, nothing but the truth.
”
- Anna Politkovskaya, Is Journalism Worth Dying For?

































