From: MSN NicknameEagle_wng  (Original Message)    Sent: 8/29/2007 2:07 AM
Tuesday, 28 August 2007, 12:24 GMT 13:24 UK
Moscow Diary: Silenced critic
The BBC's James Rodgers describes the impression Anna Politkovskaya made on him, as Russia digests the prosecutor general's revelations about her murder. He also talks to a Bolshevik who not only reveres Lenin and Stalin but also praises the late Diana, Princess of Wales. His diary is published fortnightly.

MEETING WITH A MURDER VICTIM

Anna Politkovskaya
Anna Politkovskaya remains influential even in death

She was risking her life. She must have known it.

I met Anna Politkovskaya twice. The first time we talked for more than an hour - mostly about her work in Chechnya. I was not living in Russia at the time. I had not been to Chechnya for some years.

It was a summer afternoon. We drank tea in the sunshine. It could not have been further from the cruelty and misery of war in the Caucasus.

I was impressed by her minute knowledge of every detail of the conflict and her range of contacts among all parties to it.

The next time I saw her was a couple of months later.

It was now the autumn of 2004. At the beginning of September, she had been taken ill while travelling to Beslan to cover the siege at the school there.

She was sure that she had been poisoned.

It was my impression on our second meeting that she seemed much more cautious than previously. She may well have still been suffering from whatever noxious substance had landed her in hospital.

The news that 10 people have been arrested in the investigation into her death has reignited all the debate here about who might have ordered her killing.

In essence, her supporters seem convinced that she was killed as a result of her work. The authorities here prefer the theory that "the person who ordered her killing is abroad", as the Prosecutor General, Yuri Chaika, put it.

Unravelling the riddle is the kind of task Anna Politkovskaya might well have taken on herself.

The political dimension her murder has taken on means she will be influential even in death.

BOLSHEVIK PRAISE FOR A PRINCESS

Iskra Myachina is the living history of her country.

Iskra Myachina
Iskra Myachina is still proud about the USSR - "the beautiful country"

I went to interview her for a report about the last years of the Soviet Union.

Her story is worth telling on its own.

She was born in 1923. Her name almost betrays her age. It means "Spark". It is the title which Lenin gave to the newspaper he edited in exile. Lenin wanted the paper to act as the catalyst which would bring about the revolution he was convinced that Russia needed.

Iskra was born the year before Lenin died. Like many Bolsheviks, Iskra's parents gave her a name which belonged to the new era he had founded.

Now approaching her 84th birthday, Iskra remains a communist. She says that the reforms introduced by the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, destroyed a "beautiful country" - ie the USSR. She is convinced that communism will eventually triumph, although she does not expect to live to see the day.

Of course, Iskra is not alone among octogenarians in this country who believe that things were better under communism. Most of the Russian Communist Party's electorate, such as it is, tend to be elderly. They are the generation who saw little reward for the hardships they suffered.

What made her such a rare living example of her country's history is that her grandparents were born serfs: the property of the aristocrats on whose land they lived.

Russia only abolished this medieval, feudal system in 1861.

    
They were surprised, when I told them that I was a communist, that I didn't have horns, a tail, and hooves!
Iskra Myachina, recalling her first visit to the US

Iskra's parents lived through the Revolution which swept away the Russian aristocracy, and the monarchy which stood at its head, forever.

Iskra saw the Soviet Union become a superpower.

In 1961, just 100 years after Tsar Alexander II had liberated the serfs, the USSR put a man into space. Russia had gone from the Middle Ages to the space age in just one century.

Thirty years after that, Iskra's "beautiful country" ceased to exist.

While it lasted, she was proud of it. She remains so to this day. As a trusted member of the Communist party, she was permitted to travel abroad at a time when it was out of the question for ordinary Soviet citizens.

"They were surprised, when I told them that I was a communist, that I didn't have horns, a tail, and hooves!" she recalled of her first visit to the United States.

The only 20th Century leaders she admires are Lenin and Stalin. She dismisses every other occupant of the Kremlin as either a weakling or a traitor.

There was one other public figure for whom she seemed to have unlimited praise: Diana, Princess of Wales.

This week, across the world, people are thinking of Princess Diana on the 10th anniversary of her death.

They include Iskra Myachina, self-styled "old Bolshevik", who lives on Lenin Avenue in Moscow.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6966543.stm