Anna Politkovskaya was an outspoken journalist, a critic of Vladamir Putin. On October 7th she was bringing in groceries from her car when a masked gunman shot her execution-style in the elevator of her apartment building.

Her parents were Ukrainian Soviets who worked as diplomats at the United Nations. She was born in New York, and was writing about ‘human rights’ issues in Chechnya. The piece she was working on before she died will be published shortly.

She was even honored at a dinner for the Committee to Protect Journalists in New York. I guess the only people who are honored by that organization, and protected by that organization, are the ones whose politics are ‘politically correct’. She chronicled killings, torture, rape, kidnappings and disappearances of Chechen civilians at the hands of Russian troops and security forces. So it would appear that if you’re complaining about ‘human rights violations’, you’re in the right camp to belong to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Although in retrospect their honoring her had little to do with her protection, as it turns out.

The Times Online has a piece called “The Woman Who Shamed Moscow”, probably the best piece I’ve read on this thus far.

At the height of the war in Chechnya, Politkovskaya was detained by Russian security forces for three days. She was held in a pit without food and water and endured a mock execution

There was also an attempt on her life when she was heading to Beslan around the time of the Beslan terrorist attack on the school. Politkovskaya was apparently poisoned but survived.

No word from the Kremlin on her death, which isn’t surprising, considering that in one of her books called “Dirty Russia”, she claimed Vladamir Putin was rolling back democracy and clamping down on media freedom.

Oleg Panfilov, director of the Moscow-based Centre for Journalism in Extreme Situations, said that a few months ago unknown assailants had tried to break into a car being driven by her daughter, Vera.

At a time when most of Russia’s press has been muzzled by the Kremlin, Politkovskaya was a relatively rare dissenting voice.

She delivered regular warnings that the country was drifting back to a Soviet-style dictatorship. She also wrote critically about the arrest and trial of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the oil tycoon jailed after falling out with the Kremlin.

I’m not certain of her politics, or her parents’ history at the United Nations, but I am certain of the political climate in Russia at present. As much as we want to think that the iron curtain fell, there are many indicators which show us what is really going on there. The surgical removal of critics of Putin’s regime is but one.