A gathering in Moscow for Anna Politkovskaya murdered four years ago

Anna Stepanovna Politkovskaya was a Russian journalist, author and human rights activist well known for her opposition to the Chechen conflict and then-President of Russia Vladimir Putin. On 7 October 2006, she was shot dead in the elevator of her apartment building, an unsolved assassination that continues to attract international attention.

Politkovskaya made her name reporting from Chechnya. Her constant stream of articles after 1999 about conditions in Chechnya were turned into several books but Russian readers' main access to her investigations and publications was through Novaya gazeta, a Russian newspaper well-known in the country for its critical and investigative coverage of Russian political and social affairs. From 2000 onwards she received numerous prestigious international awards for her work. In 2004 she published a personal account: Putin's Russia.