It is a journalist, Vera Politkovskaia, who pays tribute to a journalist, her mother Anna Politkovskaia, a great reporter for the newspaper Novaia Gazeta murdered in the stairwell of her apartment building on October 7, 2006 in Moscow as she returned from shopping. That day, Vera was 26 years old and she did not believe the threats: “I said to myself ‘she’s so popular, so well known, they won’t do it’ and then I was wrong, dictators always make sacrifices to consolidate their power.” Vera Politkovskaia, 43 today, says these words in a book of interviews released Tuesday February 21 in Italy, titled A mother and whose daily Corriere della Sera publish long excerpts.
She describes a mother she and her grandfather always asked when she was leaving”it’s dangerous ?” and who replied “It’s necessary”a journalist who has always bothered Vladimir Putin of course but also his readers “because my mother wanted to tell the truth, and the truth often isn’t good news, whether it’s the fate of soldiers during the war in Chechnya, the deaths, the lives of poor people, or corruption“. In summary, what Anna Politkovskaia said to the Russians is that many problems are not necessarily the result, as repeated and still repeated by the TV channels, of “the decadent West“.
“Tell the truth at all costs”
Reading his lines, we understand that 16 years later, nothing has changed, his death and the warnings that went with it have been forgotten. Terrible irony: it was nevertheless one of its great principles: “the only way to protect freedom, she saidis to fight lies and tell the truth, no matter what, no matter what”. Years passed, Vera stayed in Moscow, she had a daughter. And then the invasion of Ukraine began and the name Politkovskaia again became dangerous to carry, until receiving death threats. So she left, in a safe place that she prefers to keep secret.
A departure like a heartbreak. “I never wanted to leave, Russia is the country of my mother’s murderers, of course, but it’s also mine”. It was therefore with the hope of returning that she packed her bags, for an exile which nevertheless gave her one thing: the possibility of writing more freely, of speaking more freely and at the end of being able to release this book”writing, adds Vera, to honor the lesson my mother taught me to be brave and always call a spade a spade, including dictators.“