Abstract
Anna Politkovskaya warned the world about Putin. As
I ‘M A THEATRE critic, not a political commentator. But I’m a critic partly because I believe that the theatre can offer vital political commentary.
Surveying the output on our major stages, one question that has puzzled and alarmed me for years is: where is Anna Politkovskaya’s influence? With the invasion of Ukraine, her protracted absence feels particularly shaming, and retrospectively concerning.
Politkovskaya worked tirelessly to present a damning dossier of evidence about the entrenched criminality and barbarity of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s regime. The journalist spoke with countless people whose lives had been ruined by the actions of a man she dared dismiss as “a typical lieutenant colonel in the Soviet KGB” and she made statements loaded with warning about what lay ahead.
In 2002, she won the Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Award for most courageous defence of free expression.
In her book Putin’s Russia (2004), she explicitly declared: “Putin has, by chance, got his hands on enormous power and has used it to catastrophic effect … He believes he can do anything he likes with us, play with us as he sees fit, destroy us as he sees fit … In Russia we have had leaders with this outlook before. It led to tragedy, to bloodshed on a huge scale.”
Anna Politkovskaya attends the 2005 Hay Festival in Wales, the year before she was assassinated
CREDIT: Kathy deWitt/Alamy
She gathered testimonies, at considerable risk, and was gunned down outside her Moscow flat in 2006 – a case that has never been adequately resolved.
Her murder caused an international outcry and cemented her reputation as a courageous chronicler of the darkening post-Soviet era.
For this unassuming investigative journalist to be widely translated and much garlanded gave her rare prestige while she was alive and, in theory, a posthumous capacity to shape the debate.
It might seem odd to liken her to the Greek mythological figure Cassandra – the priestess blessed with the gift of prophecy, doomed never to be believed – but in the UK at least, where heeding and acting on those warnings might just have prompted a decisive, robust response from the West, it’s as if she invited chitchat rather than a concerted call to arms.
But her harrowing, unflinching descriptions about the conduct, or rather savage misconduct, of Russian forces during the Second Chechen War and its aftermath – the apocalyptic razing of Grozny, the gross, even genocidal, violations of human rights – are the blueprint for what has taken place in Mariupol, and what was presumably intended to be replicated right across Ukraine: the subjugation and ruination of an entire population. But she wasn’t given the cultural weight needed to swing mass opinion here.
She talked of her stigmatisation in Russia as “the madwoman of Moscow”, where the empathy she showed others, and her arguably feminine gravitation towards the least powerful victims of oppression, was held as some sign of a psychological weakness. Did we unwittingly allow a similarly sexist censorship to downgrade her personalised vignettes as “colour pieces”?
Much of her writing is so vivid it would have made a swift and potent transition to the stage. A decade ago, I pulled together a script of excerpts with a view to finding a theatrical platform for them. I put that project aside in the naive belief that big institutions would have registered the possibilities, and necessity, of mounting something.
Hindsight is an easy thing, but Politkovskaya’s journeys to hell and back need due acknowledgement, and articulation, even now – especially now.
In an ideal world, just as there’s a spirit to rename UK streets after Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky, so London’s Moscow Road looks like the perfect candidate for Politkovskaya-isation.
But let’s hear it, literally, for her writing. It would be better late than never for her work to be aired somehow, verbatim or not, in theatres. As far as Putin and Russia are concerned, we’re not remotely out of the woods yet.
And few explained how we got into them better than she did.
It’s Nice to Be Deaf
September 1999.
We are lying on withered autumn grass.
To be more precise, we want to lie on it, but for most of us all that’s left is the dusty Chechen ground.
There are too many of us – hundreds, and there are not enough amenities for everyone.
We are the people caught in the bombing.
We didn’t do anything wrong; we were just walking toward Ingushetia along the former highway, which is now all torn up by armoured vehicles.
Grozny is behind us.
We run as a herd from the war and its battles.
When the time comes, and you have to hit the ground face down, assuming a foetal position, trying to hide your head, knees and even elbows under your body – then a kind of false, sticky loneliness sneaks up on you, and you start to think, ‘Why are you crouching? What are you trying to save? This life of yours that no one but you cares about?’
Why is it false?
Because you know perfectly well that this isn’t really true; you have a family, and they are waiting and praying for you.
And it’s sticky because of the sweat.
When you’re clinging to life, you sweat a lot.
Some people are lucky, though.
When they feel that death is near, all that happens is that the hair rises on their heads.
Still, there is loneliness.
Death is the one situation where you can never find companionship.
When the diving helicopters hover over your bent back, the ground starts to resemble a death bed.
Here are the helicopters, going for another round.
They fly so low that you can see the gunners’ hands and faces.
Some say that they can even see their eyes. But this is fear talking.
The main thing is their legs, dangling carelessly in the open hatches.
As if they didn’t come to kill, but to let their tired feet get some fresh air.
Their feet are big and scary, and the soles almost seem to touch our faces.
The barrels of their guns are squeezed between their thighs.
We’re frightened, but we all want to see our killers.
They seem to be laughing at us crawling comically down below – heavy old women, young girls, and children.
We can even hear their laughter.
But no, this is just another illusion; it’s too noisy to hear that.
Automatic weapon fire whistles in the air around us, and someone always starts to wail along.
Has anyone been killed?
Wounded?
‘Don’t move. Don’t raise your head. That’s my advice,’ a man next to me says.
He dropped to the ground right where he was, in his black suit with a white shirt and black tie.
My neighbour Vakha starts talking non-stop.
This is a good thing; it’s better to talk now than to be silent.
Vahka is a land surveyor from Achkhoi-Martan, a big village not far from Ingushetia.
In wartime Chechnya, everyone is afraid of everything.
This morning, Vakha left his house wearing his suit and carrying his folder as usual, so as not to attract attention, as if he were going to work.
In fact, he had decided to flee.
‘Every time,’ Vakha mumbles, because you can’t help mumbling with your mouth pressed to the ground, ‘every time the helicopters come, I take my folder, get out some paper, and pretend to write. I think it helps.’
People nearby start to laugh quietly.
‘How can paper help? What are you talking about?’ a tiny, skinny man to his left mutters in a loud whisper, spitting out dirt.
‘The pilots see that I’m working, that I’m not a terrorist,’ the land surveyor retorts.
‘And what if they think just the opposite? That you’re taking down their license plate numbers?’ a female body in front pipes up, gingerly shifting a bit. ‘I’m all numb. When will this all end?’
‘If they think that, then you’re done for.’
We can’t see who says this. He is behind us.
And it’s a good thing: his words are tough, sharp and pitiless, like an axe.
‘There you go again. Enough of that.’
An old man’s voice cuts the tough guy short.
Then he asks Vakha, ‘Show me your folder, please. I’ll tell the others.’
The bodies, who have been silenced by the tough guy, are eager to clutch at straws again, to enjoy an unexpected gift of momentary happiness, the last for some.
‘Go ahead, show us…’
‘We’ll all get these folders.. ‘
‘The Russians will run out of them…’
‘Putin will wonder, why are all the Chechens running around with folders duing the war? They should be carrying automatic weapons.’
‘And he’ll give out folders to the Feds too. All of Chechnya will be carrying folders.’
‘Vahka, what colour should the folders be?’
The helicopters don’t stop circling around.
The children’s crying shakes the ground that is studded with people, machine guns are shooting – why don’t they shut up for just a moment? – and the explosions of falling mines croak the whole time, introducing a banal note into our stay on the death bed.
That’s all we need!
Still, people joke around.
Vakha defends himself meekly.
‘It’s all in Allah’s hands,’ he says.
‘But say what you want, I’ve never been wounded with this folder. Not in the first war, and not in this one. It’s always helped me.’
‘So you had the folder in the first war too?’ someone bursts out laughing, in a kind of nervous spasm.
‘Then why are you lying on the ground, man? Why don’t you get up?’ Vakha is tired of that.
‘Everyone’s lying on the ground. Why should I be the one to get up? Why should I make myself into a target?’
A woman stands amongst the rubble of a bombed building in Grozny, Chechnya, in the early 2000s. At this time, Russian control was being re-established in the region.
CREDIT: Jenny Matthews/Alamy
‘But you have your folder.’
It’s the old man who cut off the tough guy, who, by the way, has been silent ever since.
The old man laughs somewhere behind us, if you can call body movements and raspy sighs against the ground laughter.
‘You don’t know how lucky you are, man; they might think you’re counting us. And that means you’re on their side.’
Vahka is silent now; it’s not time for jokes.
Everything in its place.
He starts blowing dust from his dirty black sleeves, breathing from somewhere under his body.
After all, this is the only thing he can do in the foetal position we’ve been forced to assume.
In twenty-four hours, Vakha and his magic folder will be destroyed, blown up by a mine about a mile from where we are now lying.
He’ll take just a few steps away from the road into an untidy, unharvested field from that first wartime autumn.
There were already too many mines to count, and everyone to a man, including soldiers and militants, was wandering around Chechnya without a map of the minefields.
It’s like playing Russian roulette.
Vahka walks to that side not because he has to, but simply because he’s exhausted from waiting.
The line to the passport check-point was too long.
It consisted mostly of us jokers, the new family he’d prepared to die with the day before, lying on a different field.
Now dead, Vahka lies on a field again, but this time fearlessly, with his wounded face looking up and his hands spread wider than they’ve ever been in his life.
The left hand is about ten yards from his black jacket, which has been torn to pieces.
The right hand is a bit closer, about five steps away.
And Vakha’s legs are quite a problem: they disappear, most likely turning into dust at the time of the explosion and flying away with the wind.
His folder with its blank sheets of paper meets the same fate.
It saved him from the helicopters, but it can’t save him from the mines.
Then two soldiers carefully approach Vakha from the checkpoint with the long line. One of them is young and scrawny; he looks like he’s fifteen years old, and his helmet and boots are too big.
The second is a bit older and bigger, well-built, with his hands in the pockets of his camouflage pants.
The first starts crying softly, dirtying his face as he wipes his tears, and turns around, not having the heart to look.
The second smacks him on the back of the head, and the first soldiers shuts up immediately, like an alarm clock that’s been turned off with a slap of the hand so that a person can continue sleeping in the morning.
The Chechens in line buy an ‘emergency reserve’ big black plastic sack for ‘Cargo 200’ from these soldiers’ lieutenant.
Then they gather Vakha’s remains and spend quite a while discussing where to bring them.
To his mother, wife, and children in the camp at Ingushetia?
Or to his empty house in Achkhoi-Martan?
Reason prevails – the body should be brought to Achkhoi, of course.
It will be buried there anyway, in the family cemetery. So why waste money lugging it to Ingushetia?
You need to bribe a lot of people to get there.
At the Kavkaz checkpoint, the border between this war and the rest of the world, you need to pay twice, once each way.
And you’d have to pay two or three times as much for a corpse, depending on the commander’s mood that day.
…. But for now, Vakha will be alive and well for 24 hours.
And we continue to lie on the field on the outskirts of Gekhi, hoping to get away from the helicopters, and almost believing in a happy future.
After all, it’s only the beginning of the war, the first days of October 1999.
It seems to us that the fighting won’t last too long, and that the refugees will soon be able to return to their homes.
All we have to do is survive this day, and things will straighten themselves out.
At one point, Vakha becomes bolder – after all, when there is danger for too long, everything gets to be dull and boring.
Ignoring the helicopters, he suddenly turns over onto his side.
And in a normal human way, without earth in his mouth, he begins to talk about his family – his six children, who had left Achkoi a week ago for Ingushetia along with his mother, wife, and two unmarried sisters.
They’re the ones he’s trying to make his way to.
Off to the side, Gekhi is being bombed.
Probably as fiercely and continuously as Konigsberg was in World War II.
Vakha turns face down again.
‘There were so many refugees from Grozny gathered there – a real nightmare,’ he says, distracted from the topic of his family and engrossed in the rhythm of the attackers’ mounting, irrational bombing of their own people.
‘Thousands, probably. In the last bombing, a week ago, a hospital was destroyed, and the sick and wounded were taken away. Where will they take the wounded now?’
The women are quietly wailing, and shushing the children so they don’t wail, as if the children weren’t people too.
The splashing sounds emitted by the weapons swarm around us from all sides, not letting our minds rest.
Although it’s been only about half an hour since the beginning of the helicopter attack, it seems like half a day, enough time to recall most of your life.
People gradually start to lose their self-control.
Cries of desperation can be heard; men are sobbing.
But not all of them.
Among us are some thirteen – or fourteen-year-olds.
They are excitedly and joyfully discussing which weapon is being used at a given moment.
And what else can they do besides demonstrate their thorough knowledge?
They’ve been learning modern weapon terminology their whole conscious lives, since the Chechen war began, for nearly ten years.
Between the teenagers and us, a little boy is quietly crawling around. He is probably six years old, thin and sad-looking.
He isn’t screaming, crying, or grabbing his mother, but looking around thoughtfully and saying, ‘It’s nice to be deaf’ in a simple, calm, even everyday voice.
As if he were saying ‘It’s nice to play ball’.
Right then the ‘hail’ overtakes us.
There is no greater torture for a person’s hearing, not to mention life, in war.
The hail comes from the late twentieth-century version of the Katyusha rocket launcher.
It whistles and hisses for a long time.
But if you can already hear it, that means it’s past you, and death, though it was nearby, has chosen someone else for the time being.
And you laugh about this.
The hail turns you into an inhuman beast that has learned to rejooice in someone else’s misfortune.
The boy, who is lying comfortably on a grass bush pillow despite the circumstances, sums it up this way:
‘The deaf can’t hear any of this. And so they’re not afraid.’
Vakha quietly pulls the boy closer, hugs him, and gives him some candy from the pocket of his black jacket.
‘What’s your name?’ Vakha asks, crying softly.
‘Sharpuddin,’ the boy answers, surprised to see a grown man crying.
‘It would be even better, Sharpuddin, if we could become blind, mute and stupid.’ Vakha’s eyes dry up under the boy’s gaze.
‘But we’re not. And yet we have to survive anyway.’
The helicopters fly away after about five minutes, and the hail falls silent. The raid is over.
People begin to pick themselves up at once and shake themselves off.
Someone praises Allah.
The field becomes lively.
The women run to look for trucks for the wounded, and the men carry the dead to one place.
A day and night pass.
The boy, Sharpuddin, goes up to the men who are collecting Vahka’s remains in a black bag, and silently begins to help them.
They sternly shoo him away like a dog, for his own good, but his mother objects.
She says that her son was the last child that Vakha caressed in his life.
And then Sharpuddin is allowed to help.
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