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“I think the duty of doctors is to give health to their patients, the duty of the singer to sing, and the duty of the journalist is to write what this journalist sees in reality” wrote Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian reporter and human activist who was found shot dead on Saturday, 7th October in the elevator of her apartment block in central Moscow.
From June 1999 to 2006, she wrote columns for the biweekly Novaya Gazeta. She published several books about Chechnya, life in Russia, and President Putin’s government, most recently (2004) the book Putin’s Russia.
The name of Anna Politkovskaya is not an isolated item on the victim’s list. According to an article posted on November 11st 2004 by the association Peace Reporter, Russia is “one of the most dangerous country to practise journalistic profession.”
Enrico Piovesana, columnist for Peace Reporter, declares that “just last year, eight journalists have been killed . Twentyone in all, since Putin, KGB ex-leader had became Russia president (2000)”.
Anna Politkovskaya, called “the Russia’s lost moral conscience”, has died in the name of free press, a corollary for every democracy worthy of this name. Ms Politkovskaya’s 2004 book, Putin’s Russia, is not only a row denunciation of brutality inside the Russian Army in Chechnya, but also a dusky tinted picture of a Russia that is turning into a country similar and similar to what it was before the perestroika. The book starts where the Ryszard Kapuściński’s Russia ended.
Imperium is the title, 1994 the publication year, Kapuściński the name one of the greatest reporter. He was a Polish man and reading his biography I can bet that there isn’t a place in the world where he hadn’t been nor a crucial political event whose he hasn’t seen and then written about. In his book, Imperium, Kapuściński take us by hand to have a long journey through the illimitated Asian lands and across last years of the Russian Empire, from 1958, till 1990’s.
Russia is an hard topic to talk about, expecially if you are Polish. Kapuściński goes to the heart of the big empire, in Moscow, to trace a centrifugal traject and reach all ethnies and landscapes, across Siberia, to give us a unique page, a treasure of memory, pain, frozen cities and consciences, esotic idioms spoken under a never sparing sky: a human page.
Ryszard Kapuściński, reporter for PAP-the Polish Press Agency-, offers us vivid descriptions, human portraits: every word is a stroke, a nuance, on the picture of his literary journalistic reportage. A man who has travelled all around the world to make all the world knows; he did it for the truth’s love and sake, to be witness. In his suitcase a ballpoint pen and a block notes, a few and selected book, as travelling fellows. Just one piece of his bibliotheque could never miss: The Histories by Herodotus.
Herodotus, a Greek historian who lived in the 5th century BCE is Kapuściński’s model. According to him Heodotus was the first reporter in the Human history because he was the first to travel a lot and then to describe in a mirable way, in a richness of digressions, people and culture he met from Mediterranean to Black see.
Kapuściński’s thirst for discovering makes him a modern Odysseus, the one living in Dante’s Alighieri lines of the Hell. The one burning into flames to pay the cross of Hercules’ pillars, the limit to the human knowledge. In the culture Odysseus is the symbol of discover, of culture, of the human wish to go as faraway as our forces consent.
Ryszard Kapuściński has died. It was in January 2007, the 23rd of that cold month. I was in my room with a Polish friend. We were having a chat while sipping our hot cup of tea. Suddently the news crossed the air and Karolina, my friend, broke into a troubling exclamation. I had no idea who the radio was talking about. I just needed few instants and a glance to her blue eyes to understand that not only Poland had lost a special man.
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