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  • Published: 1 September 2010
  • ISBN: 9781407018287
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 368

A Dirty War

A Russian Reporter in Chechnya




'My notes are written for the future. They are the testimony of the innocent victims of the new Chechen war, which is why I record all the detail I can' - Anna Politkovskaya

The Chechen War was supposed to be over in 1996 after the first Yeltsin campaign, but in the summer of 1999, the new Putin government decided, in their own words, to 'do the job properly'. Before all the bodies of those who had died in the first campaign had been located or identified, many more thousands would be slaughtered in another round of fighting.

The first account to be written by a Russian woman, A Dirty War is an edgy and intense study of a conflict that shows no sign of being resolved. Exasperated by the Russian government's attempt to manipulate media coverage of the war, journalist Anna Politkovskaya undertook to go to Chechnya, to make regular reports and keep events in the public eye.

In a series of despatches from July 1999 to January 2001 she vividly describes the atrocities and abuses of war, whether it be the corruption endemic in post-Communist Russia, in particular the government and the military, or the spurious arguments and abominable behaviour of the Chechen authorities. In these courageous reports, Politkovskaya excoriates male stupidity and brutality on both sides of the conflict and interviews the civilians whose homes and communities have been laid waste, leaving them nowhere to live, and nothing and no one to believe in.

  • Published: 1 September 2010
  • ISBN: 9781407018287
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 368

About the author

Anna Politkovskaya

Known to many as 'Russia's lost moral conscience', Anna Politkovskaya was a special correspondent for the Russian newspaper Novaya gazeta and the recipient of many honours for her writing. She is the author of A Dirty War, Putin's Russia and A Russian Diary, and a collection of works, Nothing But the Truth. Anna Politkovskaya was murdered in Moscow in October 2006.

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Praise for A Dirty War

If you haven't done so yet, read Politkovskaya's books: A Dirty War and Putin's Russia

Independent

One of the most respected and feared journalists in the world...Despite death threats, she defied state intimidation with dispatches that investigated the true nature of the Russian occupation and documented atrocities against the Chechen people

Daily Telegraph

Politkovskaya chronicles the deathly thud of the Russian war machine and the anguished cries of those crushed in its tread...[She] was awarded Amnesty's prestigious Global award for human-rights journalism. Maybe there is yet hope that the truth will out

Guardian

Read this book to discover the true nature of the Russian state under Putin, a state where corruption, torture and murder are franchised out to his friends and the friends of his friends... Its assault on the Russian state is electrifying

Observer