"A couple of years ago, at a memorial service for the great Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya put together by PEN, I had the honor of interviewing onstage one of Politkovskaya’s friends, the human-rights activist Natalia Estemirova. Politkovskaya, who was murdered at her home in Moscow in 2006 (as Michael Specter and Keith Gessen have written in The New Yorker), did her best and bravest work in Chechnya for the newspaper Novaya Gazeta, one of the few remaining outlets with the audacity to continue publishing the truth about Russia in the Age of Putin. In Chechnya, one of her closest friends and sources of information was Natalia."
Another friend of Anna's died. When this story broke, months ago now, I remember reading several accounts of Ms. Estemirova for each and every scrap of information—and the detail that devastated me the most was that she was probably kidnapped and murdered just after she sent her teenage daughter off to school. I asked once on this blog, imagine if your mother was Ingrid Bergman in Autumn Sonata. I ask it again, here with more force: what if your mother was Natalia Estemirova?
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