Extraordinary champion of ordinary people

Some years ago, I went to visit the offices of a small Moscow newspaper, Novaya Gazeta.   Novaya Gazeta has always led a precarious existence — it is one of the few publications that has consistently opposed the Kremlin — and that day the editor was particularly distracted. While I was talking to him, the telephone kept ringing: one of his reporters had been arrested in Chechnya. Since another Novaya Gazeta reporter had recently died in mysterious circumstances, and since yet another had been beaten up quite badly, he was worried. The Russian authorities, he said, were capable of anything.
That reporter, Anna Politkovskaya, was later released. But as it turned out, her editor was right to be worried. She kept writing about the Chechen war, even after it became too dangerous for almost everybody else. She kept criticising the Putin administration, whose KGB-era tactics were, she believed, encouraging Chechen terrorism, and as a result she received constant death threats.