Abstract
am a pariah". This is how Anna Politkovskaya defines herself in the beginning of a posthumous article published by The Guardian on October 14th, 2006. Seven days before, on October 7th, around 5 pm, she was murdered in her flat in still non-clarified circumstances. Her death occurred while she was working on an article dealing with torture in Chechnya. Anna Politkovskaya was a Russian journalist born in 1958 from a healthy family, whose father was a diplomat. "I was a girl from a diplomatic family, a reader, a bit of a swot; I didn't know life at all." She became a journalist under the communist regime, which enabled her to travel throughout the country. Indeed, journalists were provided with an authorization to circulate freely in the country, which was something exceptional under the communist regime. During the period of Perestroika, Anna Politkovskaya switched to the independent press.
