Her unflinching reporting for the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta on the Chechen War’s human-rights abuses, corruption, and brutality made her one of Russia’s bravest journalists.
I met Politkovskaya a few times, in Moscow and in New York. (The Nation and her newspaper Novaya Gazeta have long had good ties—my husband, Stephen Cohen, and I befriended Novaya’s brave editor Dmitri Muratov in 1993 a few weeks before he founded the paper.)