Aware
by Denise Levertov

When I opened the door
I found the vine leaves
speaking among themselves in abundant
whispers.
                   My presence made them
hush their green breath,
embarrassed, the way
humans stand up, buttoning their jackets,
acting as if they were leaving anyway, as if
the conversation had ended
just before you arrived.
                                               I liked
the glimpse I had, though,
of their obscure
gestures. I liked the sound
of such private voices. Next time
I'll move like cautious sunlight, open
the door by fractions, eavesdrop
peacefully.


Denise Levertov, "Aware" from This Great Unknowing. Copyright ©1999 The Denise Levertov Literary Trust, Paul A. Lacey and Valerie Trueblood Rapport, Co-Trustees . Used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. (buy now)

Today is the birthday of Russian journalist Anna Stepanova Politkovskaya (books by this author), author of Putin's Russia and A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya.

Anna was born in New York City in 1958 while her parents, who were Ukrainian diplomats, were at the United Nations, but she grew up in Moscow, graduating from the Moscow State University's school of journalism in 1980 with a thesis on the Russian and Soviet poet Marina Ivanova Tsvetaeva. Anna married and had two children and settled down to the business of becoming a fearless, award-winning reporter who would speak for the victims of conflict even in the face of great personal risk.

Anna began her career as a reporter and editor for the accidents and emergencies section at a long-running Russian newspaper Izvestia then moved to another paper where she wrote about social problems, in particular the plight of refugees. But it was at Novaya Gazeta, a strongly investigative Russian newspaper that was critical of the post-Soviet regime, that Anna came into her own.

She was highly critical of Vladimir Putin, the former KGB lieutenant colonel who had become the second president of the Russian Federation. As she wrote of him in a later article, "Poisoned by Putin," it was under him that Russia was:

“[H]urtling back into a Soviet abyss, into an information vacuum that spells death from our own ignorance ... if you want to go on working as a journalist, it's total servility to Putin. Otherwise, it can be death, the bullet, poison, or trial — whatever our special services, Putin's guard dogs, see fit.”

During the Second Chechen War, which began in 1999 when Russian forces entered Chechnya to end its de facto independence and reestablish Russian federal control of the territory, Anna distinguished herself reporting on what she called "state versus group terrorism," documenting torture, mass executions, kidnappings, and the sale by Russian soldiers of Chechen corpses to their families so that they might be given proper Islamic burials. She came to the conclusion that the only response one could possibly expect to such treatment would be more militant resistance, more terrorism, and the recruitment of more resistance fighters.

Anna reported directly from the killing fields, putting herself in harm's way, exposing what she called "medieval barbarity" in all its red and vivid brutality. In 2001, in the course of investigating punitive raids by the Russians on Chechen families, she was detained by Russian military officials who beat her, threatened horrific acts on her children, staged a mock execution of her with a rocket launcher, and forced her to drink poisoned tea to make her sick. Anna received numerous death threats, at least nine according to a colleague at Novaya Gazeta; she never denied being afraid, but her personal sense of responsibility and concern for her informants and for the people she spoke for would not allow her to give up or run away. She never spent more than a few weeks of her life outside of Russia, and though she had a passport and a U.S. visa, she apparently never even considered leaving Russia to report from a safer location. She said once, during a 2005 press conference in Vienna, that, "People sometimes pay with their lives for saying aloud what they think ... I am not the only one in danger."

In 2004 Anna was poisoned as part of what has come to be seen as a triple-whammy against free press in Russia. En route to cover the Beslan school hostage crisis, Anna, who had taken nothing that day because in her own words, "war has taught me that it’s better not to eat" before a conflict, was given a cup of tea and was unconscious within minutes. She later woke in a regional hospital where her doctors told her she had been poisoned and that the tests that had been performed at the airport were already destroyed. A second journalist who reported on Chechen war atrocities and who had also suffered a kidnapping by Russian forces was detained and jailed en route to Beslan, the third hit coming when the editor of Izvestia was sacked following that paper's graphic accounts of the Beslan massacre.

On the afternoon of October 4, 2006, Anna returned to her central Moscow flat from a shopping trip with a load of bags and parcels. She dropped the bags in her apartment and then took the lift back down. As the lift doors opened she was shot four times in the chest and once in the head at point blank range, and was found by a neighbor, lying on the floor with the handgun and empty shell casings beside her. She was 48.

Anna's murder by all accounts appeared to be a contract killing. And in a page straight out of Ian Fleming, two years later Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB and FSB officer turned journalist who spoke against Putin for Beslan and accused him of acts of terrorism and of ordering the death of Anna Politkovskaya, was poisoned and killed by the rare and radioactive isotope polonium-210. He had apparently been poisoned by a pot of tea.

It's the birthday of the journalist Molly Ivins (books by this author), born in Monterey, California (1944), who said, "Satire is the weapon of the powerless against the powerful."

It was on this day in 1962 that 88-year-old, four-time Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Robert Frost (books by this author) plunged into his goodwill tour of the Soviet Union. He really wanted to be able to meet with Soviet Prime Minister Nikita Khrushchev. Frost said that he could envision "the Russian and the American democracies drawing together," their distinctly separate ideologies eventually meeting in the middle.

The goodwill tour was arranged and in late August the crew set off. Frost spent his days in the USSR giving poetry readings and interviews and lectures and otherwise being a very public persona. His readings were immensely popular with enthusiastic audiences filling venues. Frost would burst out into spontaneous recitations of his famous works wherever he went.

For most of the trip it was uncertain whether he was going to get a chance to meet with Khrushchev, which he wanted so badly. Then, toward the final days, he got word that such a meeting had been arranged and he would get his big wish. He flew to Crimea and he was so incredibly excited that he felt to sick to his stomach — he reported having terrible stomach cramps. He was going on 90, and there was talk of canceling the meeting, but Frost insisted that it take place. Khrushchev sent his own personal doctor ahead to attend to Frost. He was diagnosed with a case of nervous indigestion.

Khrushchev ended up coming into the bedroom at the guesthouse where Frost was resting and it was there that, at the height of the Cold War, the leader of the Communist world and the aging American poet had their famous meeting. Each man praised the other man's work. They talked of the future of capitalism and the future of socialism. Frost told Khrushchev: "A great nation makes great poetry, and great poetry makes a nation,” and then Frost daringly took a stab at discussing one of the Cold War's central issues: He urged Khrushchev to reunite East and West Berlin. Khrushchev declined and explained to Frost why it was important for the Soviet Union to keep it how it was. The two men talked for an hour and a half.

Frost died just about five months after his trip to the USSR. At the dedication of the Frost library in October of 1963 John F. Kennedy delivered a moving eulogy, where he said:

"Our national strength matters, but the spirit which informs and controls our strength matters just as much. This was the special significance of Robert Frost. He brought an unsparing instinct for reality to bear on the platitudes and pieties of society. His sense of the human tragedy fortified him against self-deception and easy consolation."

Research note: Quotes from Robert Frost in this entry, and a more extensive account of his trip to Russia, can be found in Jay Parini's biography Robert Frost: A Life (1999). The excerpt from Pravda, originally in Russian, was translated by poet F.D. Reeve, who went along on the trip with Frost and wrote about it in his book Robert Frost in Russia (1964).

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

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