MOSCOW: With her frail build and glasses, Anna Politkovskaya could not have looked less like the typical war correspondent. Yet when she was gunned down in a lift this weekend she died as she had lived — bearing witness to Russia’s darkest problems.

“She was incredibly brave. Much more brave than many, many machos in armoured Jeeps surrounded by bodyguards,” her newspaper, the bi-weekly Novaya Gazeta, wrote on the front page of a special issue to be published on Monday.

“She took any injustice, regardless whom it involved, as a personal enemy.”

For years, Politkovskaya, 48, seemed invincible, braving death threats, and in 2004 claiming to have survived poisoning by the secret services.

While almost the entire Russian media buckled under Kremlin pressure, she doggedly broke the two biggest taboos in the country — criticising President Vladimir Putin and investigating the gruesome conduct of the war in Chechnya.

She wrote passionately about the cruelties inflicted on Chechnya’s civilians by both Russian forces and Chechen guerillas, detailing horrific examples of the abductions, torture, summary executions, and vast corruption that have characterised the decade-long conflict.

In a trademark article published in 2002 by Novaya Gazeta, Politkovskaya wrote of a heavily pregnant Chechen woman who lost her baby after being forced by Russian soldiers to stand against a wall for a long period.

“Things cannot get worse,” she wrote at the end of the article. “We have lost all sense of the morality and restraint we were taught in less tumultous times. Something more vile and loathsome than we could ever imagine has erupted from the murkiest depths of our souls.”

The impact of such work was limited. Her readership was mostly restricted to the urban intellectuals buying Novaya Gazeta, while her books, which contain searing reportage from Chechnya and angry broadsides against Putin, are better known in translation abroad than in Russia.

However, Politkovskaya was unstinting, combining journalism with human rights campaigning and putting herself in direct conflict with powerful people rarely criticised in the Russian media.

“My notes are written for the future. They are the testimony of the innocent victims,” she wrote in her book “A Dirty War: a Russian reporter in Chechnya”.

In what proved her final interview, she told US-run Radio Liberty last Thursday that she would be appearing as a witness in an abduction and torture case directly implicating the Kremlin’s controversial local strongman in Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov.

Kadyrov, a political protoge of Putin who has assumed control over most of Chechnya, has always denied being involved in torture. But Politkovskaya lambasted him in the interview as “Stalin of our times”.

She has been equally scathing about Putin, a former KGB colonel who came to power in 2000 promising to win the war against Muslim Chechnya’s separatist forces. He remains highly popular across the country, although critics say this is in part because of the tame media.

In her book “Putin’s Russia”, Politkovskaya said the president was “crushing liberty” and in the Washington Post newspaper last April, she warned: “We are using Stalin’s methods again, this time to fight terrorism.”

Police say they suspect that the contract-style shooting of Politkovskaya on Saturday was linked to her “professional duties”. Colleagues say there is no doubt.

“This crime cannot have been anything but politically motivated,” Lydmilla Alexeyeva at the Moscow Helsinki human rights group said.

According to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, Politkovskaya was the 42nd journalist to be killed in Russia since the Soviet collapse, and the 12th in a contract-style murder since Putin came to power in 2000.—AFP