by Anna Politkovskaya.

Random House. 369 pages. $25.95.

By G. Wayne Miller
Journal Staff Writer

When Russian Federation president Boris Yeltsin handed over power to the little-known Vladimir Putin in 1999, longtime Russia observers wondered how a former KGB agent could emerge from the shadows to continue his country down the path of true democracy.

The answer, as Anna Politkovskaya chillingly relates, is: he couldn’t.

Under Putin, who has another year left as president, civil liberties are being extinguished. Opponents of the Putin regime are beaten, kidnapped, tortured, and killed. The free press is disappearing. Elections are rigged, the courts are corrupt, and poverty, with its attendant depression and alcoholism, deepens. The terrible strife in Chechnya continues on and on.

A Russian Diary: A Journalist’s Final Account of Life, Corruption, and Death in Putin’s Russia is a chronicle of events across the federation from December 2003 to August 2005. Politkovskaya, a special correspondent for the newspaper Novaya Gazeta, one of the few major media outlets that remained unfettered during that period, had long been a critic of Putin — and something more. She had the courage to keep telling the truth, a mission many Russian journalists have forsaken.

And so, while other reporters kept to their trendy circles, the middle-age Politkovskaya traveled her vast land to interview peasants, workers, orphans, widows, soldiers, veterans, dissidents, editors, government officials, and mothers of children who died in the infamous Beslan siege. Most were afraid, or in despair. What is there to live for in a country that eats its own?

Politkovskaya mounts a convincing argument for Putin as latter-day Stalin — not with polemic, but with often gruesomely-detailed accounts of atrocities. The book is rife with examples. I’ll cite one: Yevgeny Fomovsky, 18, a strapping Army private who died after six weeks of service, a fact his mother learned when a military telegram arrived claiming he had committed suicide, “advise place of burial immediately, date of dispatch of coffin to be notified separately.” Relatives managed to view the young man’s body in a mortuary, and found a ravaged corpse. “ ‘His whole body had been beaten, his head was covered with bruises,’ ” Fomovsky’s aunt told Politkovskaya. “ ‘It was soft to the touch as if there were no bones there, they had all been broken.’ ” Other soldiers later confided that army sergeants (with the blessing of their generals) had intended not to kill Fomovsky, only to teach him a lesson — he had dared to complain about being forced to march miles in undersized shoes.

And what was the response to this murder? Silence — from the government, and from fellow citizens.

Politkovskaya seeks to prick the Russian conscience: How can a people who resisted Hitler’s mighty army, losing nearly 30 million lives in the process, simply roll over for Putin?

The immediately obvious answer is that with this oligarchy, a minority flourish: fellow-travelers, bureaucrats, and the emerging upper class, some of whom, capitalizing on Russia’s enormous natural resources, have become billionaires

But Politkovskaya poses an ultimately bleaker, explanation: that subservience is too thick in Russian blood to be removed. With the exception of the early days of Lenin’s Bolshevik Revolution and the giddy period under Gorbachev and early Yeltsin, most Russians have essentially lived as serfs since Ivan The Terrible, in the mid 1500s.

Politkovskaya does hold out hope that things could change. She sees evidence in the few prominent dissidents who remain active inside Russia, notably Gary Kasparov, the chess grandmaster-turned-politician. And, of course, there are courageous voices like Politkovskaya, who knew her writing put her life in danger but refused to be cowed.

On Oct. 7, 2006, as A Russian Diary was going through final English translation and editing, Politkovskaya was shot dead in the elevator of her Moscow apartment. Leading Putin critic Alexander Litvinenko, an expatriate who had warned Politkovskaya of threats against her life, accused Russia’s president of ordering the killing. A short while later, Litvinenko himself fell ill and died, after being poisoned with radioactive polonium. No one has been charged with either murder. Old KGB types still know their business.

A Russian Diary is a landmark achievement. It is a chilling reminder of the importance of the freedoms Westerners sometimes take for granted, and of the extraordinary bravery of people who openly defy tyrants.

gwmiller@projo.com