HRWIFF. Letter to Anna.

In Vladimir Putin's Russia today, you can observe the aftermath of the seizure of power by a former KGB leader (who has already passed official authority to a designated successor) and the rise of a Kremlin oligarchy that some of us thought had finally passed into oblivion with fall of communism. The Russian parliament has ceased to be a place for political debate. Russia has crushed an insurgency in Chechnya with extreme brutality and installed a government loyal to Moscow and is supporting armed insurgencies against its neighbors in Georgia. The journalists who bring this news to the public can expect to fear for their lives, with good reason. Anna Politkovskaya was assassinated on October 7, 2006. She has not been the only one.

Remember the days when George W Bush said that he looked into Vladimir Putin's soul when Putin was down on Bush's Texas ranch, and saw that Putin was "a good man"? He also said that about Scooter Libby. Can you believe there was a time when people took Bush seriously? The late journalist Anna Politkovskaya looked at Putin's Russia and saw something else.

Letter to Anna [site], Eric Bergkraut's heartfelt documentary screening at the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, is about Politkovskaya's journalism and her assassination in 2006 and is bookended into a letter that the Swiss filmmaker writes to his late Russian friend, who had already figured in Coca: The Dove from Chechnya, Bergkraut's 2005 doc about a Chechen woman who filmed human rights abuses. Framing his film as a letter to a murdered friend is a tender conceit, but the very notion of it seems to miss the point. Anna Politkovskaya, who revealed abuses by the Russian government and military, was the last person who needed to be told about her own life or the gruesome details of the stories that she wrote week after week. It was Russians and the rest of the world who needed to be informed, Politkovskaya would argue.

Try finding much news about Russia in the US press right now - an important exception would be The New Cold War by Edward Lucas of the Economist, published in the US earlier this year. Another exception was the photograph on the front page of the New York Times Sunday which showed newly-comfortable Russians bearing their flesh to the Mediterranean sun in Turkey. It's almost as hard to find reporting from Iraq.

Politkovskaya wrote for the Novaya Gazeta, an independent Moscow newspaper that exposed the atrocities of the Russian war in Chechnya and reported on the selling of that war to the Russian public. One way of rallying public opinion behind the government was to implicate Chechens in crimes that cost Russian lives. Bombings of apartment buildings in Moscow in September 1999 that killed 300 Russian civilians are now thought to have been the work of the FSB, the former KGB. (Think of the Reichstag fire.) Politkovskaya publicly condemned the war in Chechnya as genocidal (a term that bedevils Washington these days) and traveled regularly to Chechnya, where she obtained photographs and videotape of Russian atrocities. Her sources were Chechens who documented the war autonomously, and former Russian soldiers who felt guilty about their roles in the abuses. She ended up with more material than she could use.

The footage that Bergtraut shows here can be grim - dead mutilated bodies, grieving mothers, and video of prisoners being taken naked from one holding vehicle and forced into another. The assumption was that the next stop was execution. It was the kind of evidence that alerted Politkovskaya's readers to what their government was doing in Chechnya, and alerted the Russian government that Politkovskaya could be brought to the top of their enemies list.

Soon Politkovskaya became part of her own stories. When Chechen terrorists attacked the Nord-Ost Theater in Moscow in October 2002 and held the audience hostage, she was brought in to negotiate, and disappointed the Chechens by showing her sympathy with their hostages. Before she could help with negotiations, Russians commandos intervened, killing 129 in the audience with a gas that has still not been identified, and shooting all the Chechen hostage-takers. Politkovskaya's editor says on-camera that the theater hostage-taking was a hoax, a caper set up by a Chechen working for the Russians that went horribly awry.

Things would get worse. When Chechens struck a school on the first day of classes in Beslan in 2004 and held children and their teachers without food or water for three days, Politkovskaya was flown to the site by the government, but fell sick on the plane after eating something poisonous. Once again the Russians would storm the building, and hostages would be killed.

Politkovskaya was taken hostage by Russian troops in Chechnya in 2002 and held underground in a pit. She said it was an opportunity to see how captives were confined. She was also subjected to a mock execution, but later released.

Bergtraut's doc, which played in a tribute to Politkovskya during the Berlin Film Festival, but not as part of the festival's program, takes us through some of the stories that she covered, with great detail from the documentation she revealed, and far too much footage of the late journalist walking through Moscow. Narration is by Susan Sarandon.

At the end of her life, which was terminated on Putin's birthday in 2006, Politkovskaya was looking into torture committed by Russians in Chechnya. At that time, Russia was sustaining the sort of public shame that the United States has endured after the Abu Ghraib photos exposing torture by US troops in Baghdad had been shown around the world. Clearly, she had gotten too close.

The campaign against whistle-blowers like Politkovskaya and Gary Kasparov, and the use of poison against enemies like Politkovskaya and the former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko suggest a pattern. (The Litvinenko story is told in Poisoned by Polonium by Andrei Nekrasov and by a forthcoming Hollywood feature based on a book by Litvinenko's widow and Alex Goldfarb.) For now, Letter to Anna, while more testimony than cinema, is an essential reminder of the kind of people who are in the Kremlin, ruling prosperous Russia.

From another newly prosperous country, Brazil, comes testimony at the HRWIFF about the young criminals and their punishment in Behave. More about that in a forthcoming dispatch.

-David D'Arcy

Update, 6/19: "Russian investigators yesterday charged four men in connection with the murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya, adding that the preliminary inquiry into her death was now over." Luke Harding reports for the Guardian.

Posted by dwhudson at June 17, 2008 12:11 PM