Book description
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.
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
Putin's Russia
,
A Russian Diary
and
Nothing But the Truth,
collected reportage. Anna Politkovskaya was murdered in Moscow in
October 2006.
