I have been buying and reading Penguin books for about seventy years. They were both a pleasure, and an important part of my education. The Penguin Classics series introduced me to Homer, Aeschylus, Plutarch. Their Pelican nonfiction series included such classics as Gordon Childe's What Happened in History - I still have my copy, printed fifty-six years ago.
Not that the products were always accessible. When in 1960 Penguin issued Dr D.J. West's book Homosexuality, at the time of a British debate about decriminalization, I was curious. Not long afterwards I went to Dymocks bookshop in central Sydney, which had some copies. I would have been seventeen or eighteen at the time. The sales assistant took a look at me, and refused to sell the book. I was too young, he said. Afterwards, I realized he might have been warned by his manager to restrict access to the book. At the time, homosexual acts between consenting adults were still crimes in Sydney.
I was reminded of all that when I picked up another interesting Penguin in a bookshop a few days ago, a new publication called The Essential Anna Politkovskaya. Anna isn't remembered much now, but twenty years ago she was briefly a global celebrity. The cover blurb describes her as 'One of the great, heroic investigative journalists of the modern era', and I suppose that is true enough, as cover blurbs go. The book translates into English a variety of her pieces, especially from the journal Novaya gazeta, from the period we now see as the early years of the Putin dictatorship.
It's grim stuff. Many of Politkovskaya's vivid reports describe, in particular cases, the corruption and disorganization of the Russian state, including its armed forces; the widespread poverty and disillusion of the general populace; and the indifference and evasiveness of those who held official power. A very bitter essay concerned Putin directly. Politkovskaya saw him as a mediocre Soviet secret police (KGB) official who had arrived at supreme power in the post-Soviet chaos, more or less by chance. Driven personally by a lust for power, and using the remnants of the Soviet security state as his base, Putin was re-creating the stifling political atmosphere of the Soviet Union. The regime operated through corruption, violence, and systematic lying; the people were tired and apathetic.
The largest group of reports in the book concerns the Russian war in Chechnya. That's a small republic in the borderlands between Orthodox Russia and Islamic south-west Asia. Chechnya has seen a couple of hundred years' warfare as successive Russian regimes - Tsarist, Communist, and post-Communist - tried to impose their rule over a resistant Muslim population. In 1999 another round in this struggle began, just as Putin came into power, and it rapidly got worse, much worse. Military occupation by an ill-motivated conscript army; pervasive racism; carpet bombing of Chechen towns and cities; counter-insurgency 'anti-terrorist' operations in the villages; assassinations and atrocities on both sides; out-of-control mercenary troops and jihadist militias; official lying about what was happening. Eventually, installation of a puppet government. (More recently, that government has sent troops to join the Russian attack on Ukraine.)
Politkovskaya went to Chechnya and its region, and witnessed some of the war directly, interviewed people about the rest. Her reports remind me strongly of the harrowing journalism about the US military assault on Vietnam in the 1960s, and the later US occupation of Iraq.
Then it came to an end. The reporting, that is, not the violence. Politkovskaya was shot down in her apartment block in Moscow, in October 2006. No-one doubts that the regime was behind the murder, though of course there is no legal proof. The regime controls the courts. Politkovskaya is not the last of Putin's critics to be, as the American secret police say, terminated with extreme prejudice.
