Anna Politkovskaya

(1958 - 2006)

Born in 1958 in New York City, Anna Politkovskaya took her first newspaper job in 1980 at the Soviet Union’s paper of record Izvestia. In the late nineties she began reporting on the conflict between Russia and Chechnya, which had become an independent republic in 1997. Her stories about human rights violations on both sides won her numerous international journalism awards. In 2005, speaking at a Reporters Without Borders conference in Vienna, she said, “People sometimes pay with their lives for saying aloud what they think.” Less than a year later, she was discovered shot dead in the elevator of her Moscow apartment building.