THE EDITOR’S PRESENTATION

Arriving in the Kremlin in 2000, Vladimir Putin had promised to introduce a “dictatorship of law” in Russia. The former KGB officer committed to end corruption, to bring back Chechen irredentism to reason, to offer every citizen a decent standard of living… But if there is a dictatorship in Russia, it is the one exercised by an ruthless power that only cares about the law when it arranges it, Anna Politkovskaia explains in this disturbing chronicle of a drifting country. Over the days, the Novaïa Gazeta journalist, one of the last independent press bodies, is making a terrible observation of “poutinization”. Far from being peaceful, Chechenia is more than ever an illegal zone. The “vertical of power” crushes any opposition worthy of this name, not hesitating to rig the elections. All over the territory, a corrupt bureaucracy is plundering the citizens. At the top of this “neosoviet” system, a man: Vladimir Putin. How much more time will the population, disgraced and desperate, let it be? If there is a revolution in Russia, it will not be pink as in Georgia, nor orange as in Ukraine. She will be blood red, predicts Anna Politkovskaia.

Anna Politkovskaïa has illustrated herself by her reports for Novaïa Gazeta and her works on the war in the Caucasus. His book Chechenia, the Russian disgraced (Folio Documents #24) was crowned by the Letter Ulysses Award for the Art of the Great Reporting in 2003 and by the Grand Prize of Her Readers in 2004. Anna Politkovskaïa was murdered in Moscow in October 2006.

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