Culture | Back Story

Anna Politkovskaya knew that tyranny respects no borders

A timely tribute to a martyred critic of the Kremlin

Back Story
Photograph: Damir Sagolj/Signature Entertainment
|4 min read

“The entrance is well adapted for murder,” Anna Politkovskaya wrote in 2003, “with dark corners in which you are your own rescue service.” She was describing the building in which a fellow journalist had been bludgeoned, but also foretelling her own assassination three years later. The shooting in her apartment block is the inexorable ending of “Words of War”, a new film about her life and fate. Politkovskaya’s story and warnings are vital even now, amid the carnage in Ukraine. Especially now.

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This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline “The journalist and the murderers”

From the May 17th 2025 edition

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