Iran's Women Fight for Freedom

When I first read Anna Politkovskaya, I was almost startled by her no-nonsense prose, her preoccupation with facts, whether they were about Russia's crimes in Chechnya or Vladimir Putin and corruption in the prime minister's regime, brutality and boorishness against Russian citizens or even the shortcomings of the Russian people whose rights she so ardently defended. She spared no one, not even her allies. The poetry of her prose was matched by her passion for truth. Her facts were lovingly gathered and made to march, leading us to the terrible truth of the realities she revealed. And it was that single-minded commitment to truth, and her demand for justice, that made her so dangerous to the tyrants in her country and inconvenient to leaders of western democracies.