The weekly program electrified the country by daring to challenge the official Kremlin version of events, and it made him an instant celebrity.
In 1990, Anna and her family allowed a Russian filmmaker and crew to share their apartment for six weeks. The resulting documentary, entitled
Her sister Elena told me that Anna was “a crazy mom, very involved with her children,” and that is evident in the film. In one scene, daughter Vera is playing the violin, accompanied on piano by Anna, who insisted that both her children learn music from an early age. (Anna’s friends laughed at their memories of arriving at the door to her apartment and hearing her loud, exasperated voice from inside, “That note isn’t right. Play it right.” It was Anna the perfectionist, but also Anna the realist. On camera, she says that if anything happened to her, Ilya and Vera could earn a living on their own, even if that meant “playing in some restaurant.”)
As the documentary unfolds, Anna is at turns frightened out of her wits about Alexander’s safety while he is on a perilous assignment and chafing that she is stuck at home with domestic chores. Sometimes the dangers follow him to their apartment. Soviets not happy with his reporting leave threats on the family answering machine, including this one from a male caller: “Think about your children. You have two of them, I think.”
Questioned by the filmmaker, Marina Goldovskaya, Anna declares, not entirely convincingly, that she has learned to live with the fear. “I can’t cry twenty-four hours a day,” she says. Should her husband be imprisoned, she adds, friends have invited her and the children to live with them in the countryside far away from Moscow.
As his television career flourished, Alexander began drinking more heavily. Part of it was the lifestyle that came with his fame; when he and Anna were at a party or a restaurant, people rushed to shake his hand and toast him with celebratory rounds of vodka. But she detested his liking for alcohol, especially when nights on the town ended with him being quite drunk, and she felt it was poisoning their marriage.
Anna also fretted over her career ambitions. She had begun writing feature stories for a small newspaper, work that she found less than satisfying. She wanted a career in television like her husband. But he was doing everything he could to block her way, she told friends. In fact, the main problem with their marriage was that neither she nor Alexander was willing or able to play a supporting role to the other, not for any extended period, anyway. Both wanted to be Number 1.
The making of the documentary revealed a preoccupation with her appearance on camera. She was nearly blind without her spectacles, but if she wore them during the filming, no one would notice her best feature—her large dark eyes. What should I do, she wondered aloud. She ended up appearing without eyeglasses throughout the film.
In 1995, she and her husband were shaken by the murders of two friends in Moscow. The television superstar Vlad Listyev, to whom Alexander was especially close, died after being shot outside his house by unidentified assailants, in March. Five months later, the second friend, a forty-six-year-old banker named Ivan Kivelidi who drove around town in a Cadillac and a cowboy hat, went into convulsions in his office, and died. Police said the culprit was a highly lethal poison, either smeared on his telephone or poured into his tea.
Anna’s halting career as a writer began to brighten three years later, when she joined the staff of
It is hard to overstate Chechnya’s extraordinary place in the Russian soul, firmly lodged there after centuries of writing by novelists and poets—Mikhail Lermontov, Alexander Pushkin, and Lev Tolstoy, among others—who romanticized that disorderly southern region. By the 1990s, it was also a seductive place for war correspondents from around the world, and Anna would be no exception. After her first trip there, Chechnya became “a dragon in her blood,” said Elena Morozova. “She didn’t want to live without it.”
Anna did not immediately return to Chechnya. She found a new job at a scrappy biweekly called
The hectoring tone of the tobacco commentary illustrated Anna’s lifelong habit of lecturing to people. She told boys whom she heard cursing in public that they were “infringing on my rights. I don’t want to hear that language.” When the boys responded with the equivalent of “Go to hell,” friends pulled her away before the confrontation could worsen. Elena Morozova recalled the sermonizing that three drunks had to endure after asking for money. “I know that if I give you money, you’ll just buy vodka,” Anna told them. “And look how [awful] you look.” Elena decided that her friend had a messiah complex.
Another companion, Yevgenia Albats, remarked on Anna’s stubbornness. Friends often accused Yevgenia of unwillingness to compromise, “but next to Anna, I am the most compromising person on the planet,” she said.
But Anna also was a stickler for ethical behavior. After the
In August 1999, more than a thousand Chechen militants crossed into the neighboring Russian republic of Dagestan to support a small Islamic uprising. Russian forces pushed back, forcing the Chechens’ commander, Shamil Basayev, to retreat. Then came the bombings of the four apartment buildings in Moscow and elsewhere, and the launching of the Second Chechen War by Russia’s new president, Vladimir Putin. Anna’s editor at
She made no pretense at objectivity. She seemed to see nothing heroic on either side, and focused almost exclusively on casualties of the war—innocent civilians whose lives were destroyed, hapless Russian soldiers flung into deadly combat. In one of her earliest dispatches, about a man named Vakha who had been blown up in a minefield, she wrote: “Now dead, Vakha 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 to dust at the time of the explosion and flying away with the wind.”
Her husband, Alexander, told Anna that he was not pleased with her absences and the danger she was facing. But after all the years of living in his shadow, she had no intention of stopping. Within a year, in her mid- forties, Anna hit her stride as a war correspondent, distinguished not only for her unapologetic irony and sarcasm, but also for a willingness to go to places where few others dared venture. Her career became forever intertwined with the callousness of the Chechen war and the conduct of Putin, its chief prosecutor.
At turns she sympathized with and castigated the Chechen leadership. She wrote increasingly accusatory stories about the Chechen prime minister, Ramzan Kadyrov, whose political career was launched after his pro- Moscow father, Akhmad, was killed in a bombing by Chechen opponents. While Anna thought Akhmad was brutal, she thought worse of Ramzan, whom she called “psychopathic and extremely stupid,” the “deranged” leader of a torture-and-murder paramilitary force. She ridiculed his loyalty to Putin. “What kind of qualifications do you need to be a favorite of Putin?” Anna wrote. “To have ground Chechnya beneath your heel, and forced the entire republic to pay you tribute like an Asiatic bey, is evidently a plus.”
Her salary wasn’t much, and her newspaper’s circulation wasn’t large. But its readers were passionate, especially the dwindling number of liberals who admired Anna for writing regularly on painful subjects that most of the population seemed happy to ignore. And she relished the attention that came her way. Even official Russia— especially agencies dealing with foreign policy and security in Chechnya and the Caucasus as a whole—read what she wrote and took it seriously. As she became known as an expert on Chechnya, “she started liking it,” her
