Is Journalism Worth Dying For?: Final Dispatches (36 page)

That is the main surmise about the causes of the car accident. Nobody will ever be able to prove that it was a genuine accident. Even if it was, nobody would believe it.

More generally, in the now eternal absence of Terkibayev the unquestioned and liquidated, I personally will never believe that the secret services are not involved in organising terrorist acts. They have done everything they could to torment me with the belief that they are. If there is another hostage-taking, the first question that will spring to mind will be, who is behind it? Which of those supposed to protect us are actually orchestrating the terrorists?

ONE MONTH BEFORE THE
NORD-OST
INQUIRY ENDS, THE STATE AUTHORITIES BURY ANSWERS TO THE MAIN QUESTIONS, AND THROW TRUTH TO THE WINDS

January 19, 2004

At the end of a two-hour meeting [between the head of the official investigation into the
Nord-Ost
hostage-taking and victims and relatives], I had to intervene and remind Mr Vladimir Kalchuk about the truth of the Terkibayev affair.

His reaction was bizarre. He told me to get lost and to stop writing to him, otherwise he would “hint” to the
Nord-Ost
victims that my son’s mobile telephone number had been discovered in the memory of the phone the terrorists were using, “and then we will see what they will do to you. They may well be interested to know exactly what kind of personal links you have with the terrorists, you and your son …”

In view of this, I will have to persist with my reminders to Mr Kalchuk. Firstly, negotiations needed to be conducted during the siege, which I did. Secondly, the person I chose to help me was indeed my son, Ilya Politkovsky, and help me he did, courageously, conscientiously and openly trying to save, among others, the life of his close friend, Ilya Lysak, a musician in the
Nord-Ost
orchestra. Lysak was inside the occupied auditorium and used his personal connection with my family in order – equally courageously and heedless of the possible consequences – to facilitate negotiations. It was he, who today is still extremely ill, who handed his mobile telephone to the terrorists, and they used
it to talk to me and my son, to agree the exact time I would enter the occupied building. They also used it to talk to Sergey Yastrzhembsky, the President’s Aide.

I am sure the overwhelming majority of people would have done the same in the circumstances. Apparently the individual entrusted with leading the inquiry into the
Nord-Ost
tragedy would not.

^*
Date of posting on the
Novaya gazeta
website.

^*
A Tsarist police spy who organised deadly terrorist acts, even assassinating the Tsar’s uncle to entrap his colleagues in the Socialist Revolutionary Party.

Anna, starting out

Raisa and Stepan Mazepa with daughters Anna and Elena, New York, 1962

At Moscow School No. 33, 1971

The three schoolfriends: Masha, Anna, and Elena

Anna graduates from secondary school, 1975

Marriage, April 1978

A family: Alexander, Ilya, Anna and Vera, summer 1980

The children. Anna’s favourite photograph

At a party with her husband Alexander, early 1990s

With Alexander and Martyn the Doberman, late 1990s

With her sister Elena, London, 2002