Anna Politkovskaya
Reported the war in Chechnya from the ground for seven years until she was shot in her own lift
Anna Mazepa was born in New York, where her Ukrainian parents were Soviet diplomats, and grew up in Moscow. She studied journalism, married the television presenter Alexander Politkovsky and spent years on the features pages, writing about everyday life. In 1999, when the second Chechen war began, she joined the small independent paper Novaya Gazeta and asked to go there.
Over the next seven years she made dozens of trips into Chechnya, usually alone, and came back with detailed accounts of filtration camps, the torture of detainees, extrajudicial killings and the theft of aid, naming units and officers. She also wrote about the young Russian conscripts sent to fight there. In 2001 she was detained by troops in the mountains, held in a pit and subjected to a mock execution. In 2002 hostage-takers in the Moscow theatre siege asked for her as a negotiator, and she carried water in to them. In 2004, flying to Beslan to try to mediate during the school siege, she drank tea on the plane and collapsed with severe poisoning.
She knew she was a target and kept going, though friends said she found the constant fear exhausting. Her books, including A Small Corner of Hell and Putin's Russia, were published abroad and largely ignored at home.
On 7 October 2006 she was shot dead in the lift of her apartment block in Moscow. Five men, including the gunman and a former police officer who organised surveillance, were eventually convicted. The courts never established who had ordered the killing.