Anna Politkovskaya’s last interview was with RFE/RL’s Russian Service, just two days before she was gunned down in Moscow. The date of the interview, October 5, 2006, was also the birthday of Ramzan Kadyrov, then Chechnya’s prime minister, and it was a particularly significant birthday: now aged 30, he could legally run for president.
Kadyrov was the target of much of Politkovskaya’s most critical reporting, and in this interview Politkovskaya expresses her forthright view of a man she calls “a Stalin of our times,” dreams of a day when Kadyrov will stand trial, and talks about the subjects of much of her work – the victims of torture and abduction in Chechnya.
