Strongman, The

the lift of her apartment block in Moscow. The murder stunned people around the world – but not, apparently, Vladimir Putin. At first he gave no reaction at all. Then, four days later during a trip to Germany, he finally responded to a reporter’s question by dismissing her as essentially unimportant.
    It was, he said, ‘a disgustingly cruel crime’ and her killers should not go unpunished. But he added: ‘Her impact on Russian political life was only very slight. She was well known in the media community, in human rights circles and in the West, but her influence on political life within Russia was very minimal. The murder of someone like her, the brutal murder of a woman and mother, was in itself an act directed against our country and against the Russian authorities. This murder deals a far greater blow to the authorities in Russia, and in Chechnya, to which she devoted much of her recent professional work, than did any of her publications.’ It was one of Putin’s more grotesque utterances: Politkovskaya’s death, he was saying, was actually aimed against him , and would have a greater effect than her insignificant writings had. He lamented the murder of ‘a woman and mother’, not of the journalist.
    I once asked his spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, whether Putin had read much of Politkovskaya’s work. ‘No,’ he replied, shaking his head as if to underline that she wasn’t worth reading. But it is hard to believe that Putin did not know of her work. She worked for the most prominent opposition newspaper, Novaya gazeta , co-owned by ex-President Mikhail Gorbachev. Her articles contained stinging criticism of human rights abuses in Russia and particularly of Putin’s war in Chechnya. She had negotiated with the hostage-takers in the Dubrovka theatre crisis, and might have done the same during the Beslan school siege had she not been poisoned on the plane as she flew down from Moscow (another unexplained crime). Leaders of other countries condemned her murder and demanded a thorough investigation. The State Department described her as ‘personally courageous and committed to seeking justice even in the face of previous death threats’.
    Yet the Kremlin was unmoved.
    Suspicions automatically fell on the leadership of Chechnya, and specifically its prime minister, Ramzan Kadyrov, whom Politkovskaya had fiercely criticised for human rights abuses. Some speculated that people loyal to him might have killed her for revenge, others that his enemies killed her to cast suspicion on him.
    Kadyrov became prime minister of Chechnya, and later president, following the assassination of his father, Akhmat Kadyrov, whom Putin had installed as a pro-Russian president by means of a rigged election in 2003. Both had previously been on the rebel side – the elder Kadyrov was the mufti, or religious leader, of Chechnya under its separatist leader, Dzhokhar Dudayev, and had even called for a jihad against Russia. I once had tea with him in a house in rebel-held Chechnya in 1995. I recall that he asked rather disarmingly whether the British people were generally converting to Islam. The Kadyrovs later reversed their anti-Russian stance, however, and supported the war launched by Putin against the insurgents in 1999. Ramzan’s militia, known as kadyrovtsi or Kadyrovites, acquired an unsavoury reputation – accused of torture, abductions and murders. Moscow installed first Akhmat, then Ramzan, as ‘quisling’ leaders – Chechens loyal to Moscow – under a new strategy to pacify the republic.
    In the wake of the Chechen terrorist attack on the school in Beslan, the Kremlin deputy chief of staff, Vladislav Surkov, gave this explanation of Russia’s strategy towards Chechnya: ‘The solution is complex and hard. And we have begun to put it into practice. It entails the active socialisation of the northern Caucasus, the gradual creation of democratic institutions and the foundations of civil society, of an effective system of law and order, and of industrial capacity and social infrastructure, the overcoming of mass unemployment, corruption and the collapse of culture and education.’ In reality, Kremlin policy amounted to the surrender of the republic to the loyal Ramzan Kadyrov, allowing him to enrich himself and run the place as he pleased so long as it was kept inside the Russian Federation. Kadyrov professes ‘love’ for Putin and calls him his ‘idol’. He renamed the main street in Grozny, the capital, Putin