Marked for Death by Terry Gould

Author:Terry Gould
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781582438573
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2018-05-16T00:00:00+00:00

Galina Mursalieva placed her palms a few feet apart, showing me the distance she’d sat from Anna for seven years. She was Anna’s age, with raven hair, huge dark eyes and a warm, patient manner. We were sitting in the Pyramid Café, in central Moscow, not far from the offices of Novaya Gazeta. “I knew she wasn’t the kind of person who could come back from Khatuni untouched,” Mursalieva said. “Chechnya had a psychological impact on her, and it just built up every trip. Everyone is saying she was a brave soldier, she was not afraid of anything. But she was actually terrified. We were not as close as sisters, but we had a fellowship, and she showed me signs no one else saw.”

I asked her what signs she had seen.

“After she wrote an article about what went on in Khatuni, she received hate mail from so-called patriots. Her hands started to shake and she would cry hysterically and just keep saying, ‘How can they say these things? How can they think these things?’ Because the things they wrote were shameful and sadistic. They said, ‘You’re an enemy of the Russian people, and it won’t be good enough to kill you.’”

The official reaction to Anna’s article on what she’d endured was just as unsympathetic. The United Group of Forces in Chechnya, which included Ahmad and Ramzan Kadyrov’s militia, issued a terse press release calling her allegations “a lie and a provocation”—implying that if she returned to Chechnya she might be treated worse.

And yet within weeks she began planning her next trip, all the while writing articles that used her ordeal as an example of the even more egregious abuses thousands of Chechens had experienced. She included in her catalogue of victims six young men who were hauled out of their pits in Khatuni, informed “they had nice asses” and then raped by Russian soldiers.

“How did she get the courage to overcome her fear and continue on the same path?” I asked.

“Anna never became a grown-up,” Mursalieva explained. “She could giggle a lot like a little kid, get angry a lot like a kid—her first reaction always dominated her, whether it was laughing or crying, just like a kid. So she took all these children’s habits into her adult life and she stayed a child, so much so that it hurt. And like a little child that doesn’t learn to be realistic about the dangers of doing something, she would go back to do the thing that terrified her.”

I asked if Anna received satisfaction from the love and gratitude of Chechens, quoting a passage she had written in A Small Corner of Hell: “When these people find out you’re a journalist they cling to your clothing, hands and feet, as if you’re a magician, as if something essential depended on you.”

“No, she was not motivated for herself,” Mursalieva commented. “She only mentioned that it was pitiful to see people so needy. My feeling is that Anna couldn’t stand to see suffering, suffering upset her very much, and so she always tried to stop it.

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