ANNA POLITKOVSKAYA, an award-winning reporter on Chechnya for the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta and one of Russia’s first serious female investigative journalists, dedicated her career to covering what other parts of the Russian media either ignored or misreported.

She told the stories of people, in Chechnya and the Caucasus, who had experienced the horrors and privations of two brutal wars, and a “peace” that was just as cruel. She investigated stories of widespread “extrajudicial killings”, rape and torture in post-war Chechnya, as well as the use of collective punishment and rape as Russian weapons in war.

She also looked at the violence within the Russian army, reporting on dedovshina — a system of regular beatings of junior by senior soldiers that are almost ritual and often fatal. In her reports she cut through the complexities of international and domestic politics and local power rivalries.

She was born Anna Mazepa in 1958 in New York, where her parents were diplomats at the UN. Their position meant that her childhood was more free than that of many Soviet citizens: her parents had not only a knowledge of the world beyond the Iron Curtain, but also access to banned books, which she read voraciously. She graduated from Moscow State University in 1980 with a degree in journalism and started working with the newspaper Izvestia.

In 1998 another newspaper, Obschaya Gazeta, sent her to Chechnya to interview President Maskhadov. That was the first of her many visits to Chechnya, Daghestan and Ingushetia, most of which she reported on for Novaya Gazeta, which is known for its controversial and critical coverage of the powers that be in both Yeltsin’s and Putin’s Russia.

She was motivated not by political conviction but by the determination to report what she saw accurately. It did not take long before the Russian forces saw her as persona non grata in Chechnya: in February 2001 she was arrested and accused of breaching strict laws that control media coverage of the conflict, after which she was expelled; and in October that year she moved to Vienna to escape the many death threats she had received in Moscow. But, because there was work still to be done, and almost nobody ready to do it, she returned. She had already paid a personal price for pursuing her career: her marriage buckled under the pressure of her many trips to the war zone and ended in 1999.

During the Nordost Theatre siege in Moscow in 2002 the hostage-takers asked that she assist in negotiations, after which she offered support to the victims’ families and investigated the Russian authorities’ controversial use of gas in ending the siege. This led some to say that she was more a campaigner than a journalist, but she never compromised her journalistic analysis for political purposes.

Later, during the Beslan school siege, she was, allegedly, poisoned on her way to help with the negotiations.

As somebody who refused to be silenced by bribery or threats, Anna Politkovskaya was for many in power an awkward presence on the media scene. Her most recent book, Putin’s Russia, (2004), a biting analysis of Russia today, was not published in Russian.

Her other books include A Dirty War: A Russian Reporter in Chechnya (2001), a compilation of dispatches written in 1999 and 2000, and A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya (2003), which followed the Chechen conflict up to 2002.

For her outstanding reports from Russia’s forgotten front line and her dedication to the highest journalistic standards, she won the Golden Pen Award from the Russian Union of Journalists in 2000, the OSCE Prize for Journalism and Democracy, and the 2004 Olof Palme Prize as a “symbol of the long battle for human rights in Russia”.

She was working on an article for today’s edition of Novaya Gazeta, about torture in Chechnya, when she was shot dead.

She is survived by her son and daughter.

Anna Politkovskaya, journalist, was born on August 30, 1958. She died on October 8, 2006, aged 48.