Anna Politkovskaya: Putin's Russia

Reviewed By CATHERINE MERRIDALE

Anna Politkovskaya is probably the best-known and most fearless of Russia's radical journalists. She reports the corruption and criminal connections of the new elite, the hypocrisy of bureaucrats, and above all, the endless horror of the Chechen war.

In this new book, her target is Vladimir Putin himself, the grey-faced former secret policeman who rules Russia like a pin-striped Tsar. The reporting is brave, the style raw. This is not a book that aims to please. Instead, it strikes like a slap on the face. Its author wants us to get angry.

Politkovskaya does not attack Putin by discussing his policies in chronological order. Instead, she picks a series of linked themes, beginning with the Russian Army. She builds her case like a lawyer, adducing evidence and submitting a string of files.

The first defendant is an officer, Yury Budanov, who raped and strangled a Chechen girl, Elza Kungaeva, while on duty in the "zone of anti-terrorist operations". This man, we learn, expected to walk free. When his case came to trial, the whole of Russia seemed to sympathise with him.

Only the intervention of an enlightened judge (as well as Putin's own anxiety on the eve of an election) swung the court and led to a guilty verdict.

One of Budanov's defences was that stress had rendered him briefly insane. The clinic that offered this convenient diagnosis was the Serbsky Institute, which earned notoriety under Brezhnev for consigning dissidents to the psychiatric ward. The expert who saw Budanov, moreover, was a stalwart from the dark old days, Tamara Pechernikova, a woman with a knack for diagnosing schizophrenia in free-thinkers.

As Politkovskaya observes, "Bad history, like cancer, tends to recur, and there is one radical treatment: timely therapy to destroy the deadly cells. We have not done this." It is a theme to which she returns repeatedly.

Putin, the KGB man, has surrounded himself with cronies from the Soviet past.

These people have not changed their authoritarian habits. They should have been exposed when communism collapsed, Politkovskaya argues; there should have been public debate. The only way to deal with incipient tyranny is to expose it, before it is too late. That, together with her demand for international justice, is Politkovskaya's credo.

The problem is that communism's other legacies litter the path to freedom. Poverty is one. Beyond the glamour of the capital, most Russians remain very poor.

Politkovskaya visits a submarine base in Kamchatka. Here, engineers and specialists - even an admiral - go hungry while their fleet decays to rust. Investment in this arm of Russia's defences is no longer a priority.

Nor is the preservation of forests, the future of the environment, or the health and job security of citizens. Politkovskaya suggests how the economy is run. Her portrait of the Urals mafia, and of its stranglehold on industry and wealth, is one of the most chilling sections.

But the most telling is her account of the fate of Chechens in today's Russia. After the theatre siege of October 2002, police swooped on Moscow's Chechens in search of "instigators" and "conspirators". They needed arrests. A common trick was to frame a victim with a packet of heroin.

The tale recalls the darkness of the Soviet past. But it should sound alarm bells for today. Most Russians are neither corrupt nor vicious. It is their negligence, their fatalism, their individual lack of power, that allows abuses to continue. Politkovskaya wants us to see clearly, not to shrug and mutter that it's all a mess.

The Chechen war continues because people shrug.

The tone of this book can irritate. But what it says about hypocrisy, racism and the war on terror should have resonances for us all.

* Catherine Merridale is professor of contemporary history at Queen Mary College, University of London.

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