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Elena Kudimova,
Anna’s sister, at the
PEN Award ceremony |
Putin's Russia was awarded the inaugural PEN Literature in Translation
Prize, 2010 at a ceremony at the Free Word Centre in London on 8
November 2010.
The citation reads “The Writers in Translation Committee has chosen
Putin's Russia for its intelligence, lucidity, fearless commitment to
the higher ideals of freedom of speech, and the quality of its
translation.”
The award was established to celebrate the best book from the first five
years of English PEN’s Writers in Translation programme. More about Putin’s Russia |
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Nothing But the Truth is a defining collection of Anna Politkovskaya’s
best writing for Novaya gazeta, published between 1999 and 2006. Her
dispatches demonstrate the great breadth of her reportage, from the
Chechen wars to domestic Russian affairs, the Moscow theatre
hostage-taking in which she became involved, the Beslan school siege,
and pieces about politicians, oligarchs and ordinary citizens.
She gives illuminating accounts of interviews and encounters with
western leaders including Lionel Jospin, Tony Blair, George W. Bush, and
exiled figures including Boris Berezovsky, Akhmed Zakayev, and Vladimir
Bukovsky. Her non-political writing is also represented here, revealing
her delightful personality, as are international reactions to her
murder.
“Like all great investigative reporters, Anna Politkovskaya brought
forward human truths that rewrote the official story. We will continue
to read her, and learn from her, for years.”
Salman Rushdie
“The risks she took were terrifying but the intense reality she portrays
is breathtaking.”
Jon Snow
“Her murder is a ghastly act, and an attack on world
literature.”
Nadine Gordimer
“Beyond mourning her, it would be more seemly to remember her by taking
note of what she wrote.”
James Meek
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Suppression of freedom of speech, of expression, reaches its savage
ultimate in the murder of a writer. Anna Politkovskaya refused to
lie, in her work; her murder is a ghastly act, and an attack on world
literature.
Nadine Gordimer
It is a
blow to the entire democratic, independent press. It is a grave crime
against the country, against all of us.
Mikhail Gorbachev
Putin is
re-elected as president in farcically undemocratic circumstances and yet
Western leaders, reliant on Russia's oil and gas reserves, continue to
pay him homage. Anna, however, offers a chilling account of his
dismantling of the democratic reforms made in the 1990s. Independent
television, radio and print media are suppressed, opposition parties are
forcibly and illegally marginalised, and electoral law is changed to
facilitate ballot-rigging. Yet she also criticises the inability of
liberals and democrats to provide a united, effective opposition and a
population slow to protest against government legislative outrages.
Clear-sighted, passionate and marked with the humanity that made Anna
Politkovskaya a heroine to readers throughout the world, "A Russian
Diary" is a devastating portrait of contemporary Russia by a great and
brave writer.
Publishers Weekly, May 2007:
Internationally known as one of the few Russian journalists fearless
enough to report Russian news independent of Kremlin spin, she was a
relentless and vociferous critic of Putin, reporting on his abuses in
the Chechen war and his attempts to retract Russia's fledgling
democratic freedoms.
Covering December, 2003 to August, 2005, Politkovskaya records
with dismal and sardonic exactitude the encroaching power of the State,
dismantling private businesses, shuttering media outlets and squeezing
more money out of its citizens, practically plunging the country into
Communist-era conditions. Both the farcical policies and individual
crimes of the government are documented and scrutinized: instituting
life sentences for suicide bombers, as well as the attempted cover up of
the killing of an 18-year-old private soldier beaten to death by his
superiors.
Rounding out the bleak scene are opposition parties that prove
fractious, disorganized, craven and predictably willing to sacrifice
principle for power. Politkovskaya suffers nobly—and
eloquently—in this semi-daily account, yet one must wonder how similarly
she would have suffered amidst the capitalist excesses of the West.
A rare and intelligent memoir—if an entirely depressing one—this will
give readers a detailed look into Russia's everyday march towards
totalitarianism.
Also by Politkovskaya
• Putin's Russia |
