Requiem For A Short-Lived Dream

Obscure Topic Alert

She was brave beyond belief. So ran the first sentence of Anna Politkovskaya’s obituary in the Economist. Regular readers of the magazine that likes to call itself a newspaper will know that the magazine is not given to exaggeration and hyperbole – if medieval England’s butlers had been locked up in a room and ordered to bring out a magazine every week, their writing style would probably be very much like that of the Economist.

It takes a lot to win the Economist’s unqualified admiration, the magazine specializes in seeing three or four sides of every issue where a regular person would barely manage to see two. And so, the strong language of the murdered Russian journalist’s obituary served to convey the sense of profound loss and anguish that the magazine felt. It also succeeded in giving me goose-bumps and bringing a few hot angry tears to my eyes – that this happened to such a person and that it will go unpunished.

I’ve been wanting to write about this for some time – just never got around to it…but it keeps coming back to haunt me. Anna Politkovskaya’s death is old news – so if you don’t remember it or never heard of it, its not really surprising. We can thank the localization – a really good euphemism for moronization – of all news for that. Anna Politkovskaya was a Russian journalist who was murdered a couple of months back; she was 48, not that much younger than my Mom, a well-known journalist who’d become famous for reporting from the frontlines of the wars in Chechnya. She was respected for reporting the truth…often truth that shone a terrible light on Vladimir Putin’s government. On the night she was shot point blank, at close range, in the elevator block of her apartment, she was working on another Chechnya story that exposed alleged rights violations by the Russian army.

Her death, in my mind, was also the clearest signal yet, that the dream of democracy in Russia is largely dead. It came after several other dissident journalists and editors had been murdered and was followed by the radiation poisoning of another dissident in London and the killing of another journalist just last month.

The government that the immensely popular Putin is running seems to be the offspring of an illicit affair between plutocrats and the mafia. Putin with his quiet purge, is more frightening to me than Zimbabwe’s brutal and clownish Mugabe. It takes a special kind of dictator to order hits on specific, identified individuals versus masses of faceless protestors …you’d have to be cold-blooded enough to be sure that their faces wouldn’t come back, like Banquo’s ghost, to haunt you in your sleep. The fact that Putin seems unperturbed, as ever, is scary. (Of course, none of this is to say that Mugabe isn't the tyrant he is or that he hasn't ordered hits on dissidents)

There are those who will point to Putin’s popularity to justify Russia’s direction and other cynics who will trot out a dictator’s favourite adage – “Democracy is not for everyone – specially not for ________ " (fill in country’s name – Iraq, Afghanistan, Burma, China, Russia etc). The popularity argument is very weak – Hitler’s government was damn popular too in Germany at one point and he led the country into Poland. Or closer home – take Laloo Prasad Yadav who single-handedly ruined Bihar, or even a certain American president who recently won a popular 're'-election (Do I really need to say what happened after that?). Nope - popularity doesn't convince me that Putin deserves being cut some slack.

The second argument might have carried more weight – after all each country is different and the same system (i.e., democracy) need not be suitable to all. But the reason it falls apart is because the people who claim that democracy is not for their country are almost always the ones who stand to directly gain power and money in a dictatorship. Let the whole population – the poor, the dispossessed, the wretched and the depressed – march in the streets demanding a dictatorship and then I might think there’s something to it. Curiously enough, I can’t think of one instance of that having happened. Can you?

But these are theoretical debates. What’s tangible is, is Anna’s absence from the newspaper pages for those readers who drew courage from her (unfortunately I wasn’t one of them) and what's tangible is Russia’s absence from the ranks of democratic countries.

Anna – Rest in Peace – there are those who didn’t know you, who mourn you, even if many of your own countrymen don’t.