How Muscle Works in Moscow
was spending an unremarkable Saturday afternoon running errands. When she arrived home, she took what groceries she could carry out of her car and up to her seventh-floor apartment before heading back downstairs for the rest. As the elevator reached the ground floor and the doors shuddered open, a man in a baseball cap stepped forward and shot the 48-year-old dead. The person who ordered her assassination has never been found, but there’s little doubt about why someone might have wanted her dead. Politkovskaya spent years exposing human rights abuses, corruption, and the misuse of power. It is a beat that has proved lethal for many, or protec-tion, from the violent political underbelly of post-Soviet Russia.
