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Freedom of Belief
3 min read

A tale of two Septembers

The recent conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh is already a twice forgotten war. Forced to flee twice, Anush Petrosyan describes the experience.

Anush Petrosyan is a writer now based in Armenia. She is originally from Nagorno-Karabakh.

A sunset dramatically silhouette's a ruined tower and people at its base.
A September 2023 sunset over Stepanakert.

The ethnic cleansing of 100,000 Christian Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh has left Armenians around the world questioning the world order that allows dictators to have their way without impunity.  

 Following Azerbaijan’s brutal war of September 2020, the people of Karabakh were subjected to a complete blockade of their region – an exclave of Armenia in Azerbaijan. In the small stretch of land where Armenians had fought for independence following the collapse of the Soviet Union, civilians were being kidnapped, the elderly were dying for lack of basic healthcare, and schools were closing due to no heating gas. To the outside world, Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev was speaking of peace and integration. Inside the region, experts were warning of genocide by starvation.  

In September 2023, Azerbaijan at last got what it wanted - the territory of Karabakh without Armenians. After an attack that left hundreds of people dead, Azerbaijani forces moved into the region as people began to flee to Armenia, forever leaving their homes and homeland.  

This is the story of Anush Petrosyan. A native of Shushi, Karabakh, which Azerbaijan took control of in 2020. Since then, Anush had been living in the Armenian-controlled Karabakh capital of Stepanakert, which she was forced to evacuate during the ethnic cleansing.  

In September 2020, I left my birthplace in Shushi, Artsakh (Nagorno Karabakh) with a strong conviction that I would be back soon. 

In September 2023, I left Stepanakert, my new hometown, with only the hope of staying alive. 

 

In September 2020, I had a father. He drove us to Yerevan in our own car. 

In September 2023, I no longer had a father… A kind person from Martakert, Artsakh, who I had not met before, agreed to evacuate my mother and me to Yerevan in his car. 

 

In September 2020, I left Shushi when there were still some people in the city. 

In September 2023, I was among the last to leave Stepanakert. The hotel where we had been living as refugees from Shushi for the last three years was empty. I had never seen the streets of Stepanakert look so desperate. There were stray dogs roaming, and those without cars and were waiting for public buses to come and evacuate them. 

 

In 2020, we left behind the harvest of my father's garden in Shushi, and an abundant life. 

In 2023, we left a few kilos of buckwheat, rice, and potatoes in our hotel room in Stepanakert. Food we had managed to get a hold of during a nearly year-long brutal blockade. 
 

In 2020, I left Shushi with dreams in my heart. I had not been broken yet, I had no personal loss, and I was confident I’d be back. 

In September 2023, I left Stepanakert with a sense of uncertainty about my life and my future. I had lost a homeland, my father, and I was lost in my own life. 

 

I have written much about Shushi since the September 2020 Artsakh War. I left a whole life and a garden of violets there. 

But I haven't written a single line about Stepanakert since the violence and ethnic cleansing of September 2023. Maybe one day I will write about this cozy city and its beautiful stadium where I would jog and regain a sense of peace. 

 

In September 2020, for the first time in my life, I felt how alone and powerless a person can be.  

In September 2023, for the second time in my life I felt how alone and powerless a person can be. 

 

In September 2020, I started to realize that in any hopeless situation a person should put their hope only in themselves and God. 

In September 2023, I became convinced that in any hopeless situation a person should put his hope only in themselves and God.  
 

I went through hell twice, or through different stages of hell.  It is difficult to say which hell was worse.... I am only afraid to imagine that there are people whose hell has been more hellish than mine. 

 

But in the midst of hell, I came across the most compassionate people, who made me feel God’s presence in this absurd world of ours. 

Voices of Artsakh is a new series developed in collaboration with The Armenia Project, an educational non-profit in Armenia, that features the stories of the refugees who were forced to flee Nagorno-Karabakh (also known as Artsakh). These personal essays will focus on their experiences, and life after Artsakh as they try to rebuild new homes following the ethnic cleansing from their historic lands.

Review
Culture
Film & TV
Freedom of Belief
Politics
4 min read

Anna Politkovskaya took on the Kremlin and she paid the ultimate price

The Russian journalist who became a martyr for truth

Simon is Bishop of Tonbridge in the Diocese of Rochester. He writes regularly round social, cultural and political issues.

A journalist wearing a body armour and a helmet looks defiant
Maxine Peak plays Anna.
Rolling Pictures

While truth recedes as a global public good, a war on journalists is taking shape. In 2024, the Committee to Protect Journalists recorded the highest number of journalists killed since collecting data thirty years ago. A large number of these were killed in Gaza, but there were deaths elsewhere: in Mexico, Syrian, Pakistan, Haiti, Myanmar.  Many more than these at least 124 journalists were physically threatened and abused online; an unknown number have been imprisoned and abused by state authorities, shadowy militias or criminal gangs. 

The illiberal tide is more powerful than the flow of liberal ideas today in the unregulated online market of opinion. A groundswell of distrust in so-called mainstream media has been effortlessly generated by sources with no obligations to impartiality and fewer professional standards round fact checking and evidence gathering. While every news source needs to be assessed for accuracy and fairness, the labelling of journalists as ‘enemies of the people’ by President Trump in his first term strayed into language used by the world’s despots. Territory occupied for many years by Vladimir Putin’s Russia. 

The 2025 film Words of War tells the story of Anna Politkovskaya, reporter for the Russian independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta who rose to fame, and therefore to the attention of the Kremlin, through unvarnished despatches from the first Chechen war that uncovered terrible war crimes. Moscow learned its lesson for the second war in Chechnya by declaring the whole region off limits to reporters. For Politkovskaya, this provided an extra incentive to be there, returning to the country over forty times to document ever more awful crimes of disappearance, rape, and torture. 

‘I witness very grave events and no-one else is reporting on them. I can’t not write about it’, Politkovskaya told the BBC’s Sarah Rainsford when they met. The meeting ended with some blunt Slavic advice: instead of interviewing a journalist about the war in Chechnya, the interviewer should be going there herself.   

Words of War has an unreal quality to it. The actors are English, but the scenes are entirely Russian. It is a reminder of Armando Iannucci’s dark comedy The Death of Stalin and even shares an actor in Jason Isaacs, who swaps General Zhukov’s blunt Yorkshire accent for the more cultured tones of Politkovskaya’s anxious husband, Sasha.  

Politkovskaya was a force of nature, and a devout Christian. She knew the kind of people she was messing with and what they were capable of, but she carried on the same, driven by an implacable will to truth. On flying to cover the appalling school siege at Beslan in 2004 – a scene the film begins with - she became violently ill, almost certainly a targeted poisoning like Alexei Navalny suffered on a plane over Siberia. 

I get intimidating calls, people hovering in my hallway, she observed. There’ve been so many threats, there was a time when my editors decided my life really was in danger.  But I’m used to it.  If the FSB is so opposed to me, it only proves that what I’m doing is effective. 

On October 7, 2006, Anna Politkovskaya was shot dead as she entered her block of flats with a handful of groceries. It was Vladimir Putin’s birthday. Five men were eventually found guilty of organising and carrying out the murder, but the person who ordered the killing was never found out. Speculation round how high the order came from is, in a way, superfluous: this is the nature of Russia’s state in the twenty first century.     

Elena Kostyuchenko is a millennial writer who features in the film as a young Novaya Gazeta intern and was inspired by her contact with Politkovskaya, ensuring a legacy in a younger generation: 

She was the first person I saw when I came to the Novaya Gazeta editorial offices. Tall, radiant, with silver-white hair, flying down the hall. I didn’t recognise her. I was just struck by her beauty. 

Stalin’s alleged mantra: no person, no problem, remains barely deniable Kremlin policy. The late politicians Boris Nemtsov and Alexei Navalny are simply the highest profile of a large cohort of individuals barely known in the west who have opposed Putin with stunning levels of bravery. Caricaturing Russians as corrupt, rapacious and violent – as well as being a lazy trope - is to abuse the names of an untold number who retain their dignity, integrity and agency. 

New histories are written in nations where regimes fall, but whether they tell a truthful story about the past depends on the environment the new authorities allow. The human rights group Memorial began this work in the early post-Soviet era, only to be shut down by Putin’s police officers. Words of War should have been made in Russia by Russians. One day maybe it will be, and Anna Politkovskaya will be seen across Russia for what she is: a martyr for truth.  And not an enemy of the people. 

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