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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