‘She tried to normalise death’

An excerpt from the memoir of Anna Politkovskaya’s daughter, published in English for the first time

When Anna Politkovskaya was murdered on 7 October 2006, her daughter Vera was in the hospital, six months pregnant. Three months later, Vera gave birth to a girl and named her Anna Victoria.

On 5 October, two days before the 20th anniversary of the assassination, Anna Politkovskaya’s granddaughter, now a political science student at the University of Amsterdam, addressed the European Parliament and urged lawmakers to introduce emergency humanitarian visas for Russians who have left their country.

In 2023, Vera Politkovskaya published a book about her childhood, her memories and, above all, her mother: My Mother Would Have Called It War. It was first published in Italy, followed by German and French editions. As a matter of principle, the author has decided it will not appear in Russian. With the permission of Vera and her publisher, Rizzoli, Novaya Gazeta Europe is publishing an excerpt in English for the first time.

My mother was a difficult person in everyday life. Her sense of responsibility toward the family, her desire to give us the best, and her acute awareness of everything going on around her took all the strength she had. Looking back, I think the burden of family life came upon her too early.

One of my first clear memories is of my parents fighting.

It’s morning. My brother and I are in one room, and our parents are in another. It’s the weekend, and Dad is going somewhere — maybe fishing, maybe something else. Mom doesn’t want to let him go. They’re arguing furiously. My brother barely reacts, while I sit on my bed and wait to see how it will end.

Suddenly strange sounds start coming from my parents’ room. It sounds to me like furniture falling over. My father is shouting, my mother is shouting back, and I can hear that she is crying. The shouting gets louder, and my parents move closer to our room. For a couple of minutes I watch their quarrel in the hallway through the glass of the door. Then my father runs out of the apartment, and the front door slams.

...

My relationship with my mother was always complicated and ambivalent. Her character and the path she had chosen in life shaped every aspect of who she was. It wasn’t the case that she was one person at home and another at work or with friends. Her view of the world, and her judgements about how and why things ought to happen, all rested on the same foundation.

Before she threw herself into journalism completely, all her drive went into the family. I wouldn’t say she thought my brother and I were meant for some “special path”, but she had her own very clear idea of how we should grow up, study and develop, and investing in our education was the cornerstone of it.

The formula was very simple: if you don’t do what I tell you, you’ll have trouble with me. Naturally, this approach met with resistance, which at different stages of our lives was more or less severe.

It took my mother a while to realise that our childhood was over and that her direct influence on our lives was inexorably shrinking. She needed to find new ways of dealing with us. Her old, strict style of parenting no longer worked and only led to new conflicts. There were a lot of fights and mutual reproaches, but toward the end of her life all of that smoothed out, and we understood each other much better.

Her difficult nature showed in all of her relationships with the people close to her. At times she could be hot-tempered and completely unyielding.

She had friends who came to our home fairly regularly, including on birthdays, but there were very few of them, and over time they came less and less often.

Because of her heavy workload, in her last years my mother hardly had any chance to see them. She travelled a great deal, to Chechnya and to other countries. From her trips abroad, which became more frequent with each passing year, she often brought back pieces of decor for our apartment. She loved decorating it. Every wall was covered with paintings, reproductions of famous works, plates showing the cities and places she had visited, and family photographs. She also loved frogs, and everywhere she went she looked for frog figurines, toys or images of any kind, which she then scattered all around the house.

Despite how busy she was, there was one day a year when her loved ones always gathered at our home: her birthday. In her last years she no longer invited anyone specific to the celebration; she believed you shouldn’t have to invite those closest to you, because they will come on their own if they want to.

Her closest friends were two of her classmates, who had been with her since first grade. They stayed friends all their lives, and neither had anything to do with journalism. Perhaps that’s what helped them keep their friendship intact. Most journalists regarded my mother’s work with bewilderment, and often with outright hostility. Yet after her death, some of those same people suddenly expressed their admiration and became her “friends”. As so often happens in such situations, the number of sudden friends didn’t just grow exponentially, it came in a flood. It made me wince, because I knew the truth.

...

My mother looked at her possible fate from a purely practical point of view. She was very pragmatic in that way. What scared her about death was that it might catch her unprepared, before we, her children, were ready for it. There were no pompous or tearful speeches. In any case, they would have been useless. When my friends went home, their parents would say, “Want some ice cream?” My mom, on the other hand, would tell me, “The important documents are in this drawer,” or, “There’s money hidden over there.” She would look me straight in the eyes, and we would both stay silent for what felt like an endless number of seconds. Then she would always give me the same reason: “You never know.”

I knew that she had probably received yet another anonymous threatening phone call, or a warning from some “well-wishers”, or something else I didn’t know about. This happened constantly. She regularly told my brother and me what to do in the event of a tragedy. I understand now that from the outside this might sound terrible, but in reality it wasn’t dramatic at all. She was trying to normalise death. She didn’t trivialise it, but made it part of the possible price she would have to pay. I suppose she thought this would spare us the shock, which would have made everything even harder. She knew she would have to pay for the choice she had made, and sometimes she even joked about it.

Looking back, this strikes me as strange too, but my brother and I got used to it. It probably left a mark on both of us, but on the whole it didn’t get in the way of living.