Dozens Mourn at Banned Meeting

By Sergey Chernov

Staff Writer

Published: October 10, 2008 (Issue # 1415)

Sergey Chernov / The St. Petersburg Times Mourners gather to remember slain journalist Anna Politkovskaya on Tuesday.

More than one hundred people came to mourn Anna Politkovskaya, the political journalist murdered in Moscow two years ago, on the second anniversary of her death, even though a memorial meeting had been banned by the St. Petersburg authorities.

According to democratic party Yabloko’s spokesman Alexander Shurshev, who applied for permission to hold a meeting alongside the party’s local leader Maxim Reznik, the administration refused to grant permission “due to seasonal maintenance works at the [planned] location requiring the use of machinery.” The meeting was planned to take place on Troitskaya Ploshchad on the Petrograd Side.

Although the first anniversary of Politkovskaya’s death was marked at the site, for this year’s commemoration the administration suggested the far-away 50th Anniversary of the October Revolution Square on Prospekt Metallistov instead.

“We just did not reply to that at all. Just nothing,” said Shurshev by phone on Thursday.

Despite the ban, mourners of different ages and social backgrounds went on Tuesday to the Solovetsky Kamen (Solovki Stone), a massive stone brought from Solovki island — the site of the first Soviet concentration camp — and laid on Troitskaya Ploshchad as a monument to the victims of Communist repressions.

No maintenance works or machinery were seen on the square at that time.

People brought flowers, candles, photographs of Politkovskaya and special memorial editions of Novaya Gazeta newspaper, for whom she worked, to the monument, which was established in 2002 and bears the inscriptions “To the Victims of the Communist Terror,” “To the Prisoners of Gulag,” “To Freedom Fighters,” and poet Anna Akhmatova’s line “I’d like to mention everyone by name...”

Although two big trucks with OMON special forces police were parked close to the site and a dozen policemen were present at the gathering, one capturing mourners’ faces on a video camera, no arrests were made.

“The police turned a blind eye to the gathering, while we turned a blind eye to the absence of maintenance work and machinery,” Shurshev said.

A frequent critic of the Kremlin, its Chechnya policy and then-Russian President Vladimir Putin, Politkovskaya was shot to death in her doorway on Nov. 7, 2006, which was coincidentally Putin’s birthday.

“I think that Politkovskaya’s murder caused more harm to the Russian and Chechen authorities than her publications,” Putin commented at the time of her murder, speculating it was a tactic by his enemies to discredit him rather than a consequence of her reporting.

Politkovskaya’s murder was condemned around the world.

Shortly thereafter ex-KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko claimed to have information about the journalist’s killers, but he died less than two months later of polonium poisoning in a London hospital.