The Sunday Times October 15, 2006

'I told her to leave Russia'
Anna Politkovskaya's London literary agent Toby Eady talks about her
assassination and her passion for uncovering the truth

In July, when I last saw Anna Politkovskaya, I told her she had to
leave Russia. I told her I really thought Vladimir Putin, the
president, would kill her. "I would only leave after Putin's gone,"
she said, obstinate as ever. "If I am killed, would my children have
to pay back my publishing advance?"

Anna's humour, black as it was, never left her despite the constant
threats to her life. She had been an investigative journalist with
Novaya Gazeta, a paper known for its critique of the Kremlin, since
1999 and had grown accustomed to danger. She focused on the human
rights abuses against the civilian population of Chechnya and her
trademark jaunty grey hair and glasses became well known in Russia.

Before her assassination last Saturday in Moscow at the age of 48,
she had already allegedly been thrown into a Russian dungeon and
threatened with rape, shot at in Moscow, and poisoned.

As a literary agent looking after mainly European authors, I first
met Anna when she came into my office in 2002. Her sister, Elena, who
is married to a Russian businessman and lives in London, had already
paid me a visit as her minder, to inspect me. She acted as a
translator for her younger sister, whom she guarded fiercely.

A German agent for her Russian publisher, who had first published her
journalism in book form, had sold the rights to many countries and
then disappeared with her advances. I said to her that
afternoon, "I've found out who took the money and who paid you what.
Do you want me to go to Moscow and meet the publisher and hang him
out of the window by his ankles until he pays up?"

Absolutely not, she said: "If he hadn't published them, no one would
have seen them. He had the courage to do that so please leave him
alone." Anna knew well how it felt to be a lone voice. We signed a
deal with Harvill Press at Random House and published Putin's Russia
in 2004, which delved into Putin's subversion of civil institutions.
This time she would have the protection of a global publishing house
with, crucially, its own legal team.

From this point on I had visits every four or five months from Anna
and her sister. One was a few months after she had tried and failed
to get to Beslan, to report from the school where 344 people had been
massacred by Chechen rebels on September 1, 2004. Her description of
what happened was truly chilling. She tried to get the first plane to
the scene but there was a long delay at the airport. When she finally
boarded she was suspicious of the men getting on behind her. She
was "claustrophobic with fear" and refused to eat, but as she was
thirsty she took a drink of tea. She fell unconscious and the next
thing she could remember was waking up in hospital.

It was a turning point for Anna. She had reportedly been threatened
by Russian soldiers, buried alive in Chechnya, shot at and
incarcerated, but poison was different. Now she was terrified, and
she told me she realised that it was not a case of if she would be
killed, but when. If she was to be followed that deliberately, into a
closed area like an aeroplane, what chance did she have? A gun is a
gun, if you're in a war zone and shot at, you make damn sure you're
not in a position to get shot at again, but poison is pervasive, it
can happen any time.

We had received a six-figure two-book deal from Random House and the
next step was to give Anna an international voice. The first, Russian
Diaries, will be published by Harvill next spring. In April we
discussed the second book. I had a new idea. In Russia, nothing is
personalised. There are no bylines, the articles are simply fed
through the censors and the property of the newspaper. But in the
West, to reach across to ordinary people to make them really
understand Russia, you have to be not just a prize-winning journalist
but a mother of two, a woman with a personal and social life. How did
it make her feel to have threats on her life? Who was trying to kill
her? "Your experiences were so exceptional that you can't just be the
continuity in your stories," I said, "you've got to become the
story." She went away to think about it. It was, after all, a big
step for a woman who already saw herself as "marked". She would be
entering the global arena as a personality.

Anna's marriage had fallen apart under the strain of her frequent
reports from Chechnya, but she was a vibrant, voluptuous and forceful
woman, connected to life. One of our main topics of conversation was
her daughter, Vera.

She didn't like the man Vera was living with and thinking of
marrying. Then the relationship broke down but her daughter still
wanted his baby, what did we think?

Anna was intrigued by the idea of putting more of her life into her
work. She agreed to think about this proposal, to tell the story, not
just of Chechnya and Russian politics, but of her own tremendous
courage. On July 24 she was back in my office. Things had got worse
in Russia. Nevertheless she was determined she would write a draft
and a summary of this new book by this month and deliver the book by
the end of the year.

That was the last time I saw her. She never delivered the first part.
Her father had died so she had decided to stay with her family in
Russia.

Life, for Anna's loved ones, goes on. Her mother, old and frail, is
in hospital as she has been for many weeks. Her sister is calm. They
are Russian. They shrug. It is impossible to understand the legacy of
years of a communist regime. It's tempting to give Anna Politkovskaya
western attributes: to say that she was bloodyminded, or fearless.
But she was driven by a real desire for human justice. They, unlike
us, have never lived in a comfort zone.

Anna said: "I live in the present, noting what I see and hear." It is
lucky for the sake of truth that she did.
Toby Eady was talking to Vanessa Jolly