Anna Politkovskaya one year later

HOW she would have relished the farcical investigation into her own murder. Anna Politkovskaya's speciality was exposing the brutality and blunders of Russian officialdom, and the crude and greedy politicisation of what should be the neutral exercise of state power. Only modesty would have prevented her penning some bitter words about Vladimir Putin's dismissal of her "marginal" role and mocking the authorities' insistence that her murder was ordered by Russia's enemies (who else, after all, has an interest in discrediting the Kremlin?).