Nature Weeps As A Heroine Is Buried

Neither cold weather, nor heavy rain, nor the wary eyes of police patrols could stop them. Last Tuesday, thousands of mourners trudged grimly along the kilometer-long path from the nearest bus stop to the Troyekurovskoye cemetery on the edge of Moscow. They had come to pay their respects to journalist Anna [an error occurred while processing this directive] Politkovskaya, who had been assassinated three days earlier.

The political overtones were palpable. "Nature weeps when they bury an honest person," said a middle-aged woman in the crowd. The grief over a journalist murdered for her fearless coverage of war crimes in Chechnya and high-level corruption in Russia brought together a range of people who, in past decades, would never have found themselves in the same company — not voluntarily, anyway. Back in Soviet times, former kgb General Alexei Kondaurov chased dissidents. Now a maverick Deputy, opposed to what he sees as President Vladimir Putin's increasingly authoritarian regime, Kondaurov came to pay homage to a woman he had never met but whom he had long admired for her courage and integrity.

One of his former adversaries was standing just 10 m away: Maria Rozanova, a living legend of the Soviet dissident movement. The trial of her late husband, writer and thinker Andrei Sinyavsky, and his colleague Yuli Daniel back in 1966 marked the beginning of the dissident era of Soviet history. Soon after Sinyavsky's release from the Gulag in 1971, Sinyavsky and Rozanova settled in Paris where in 1978 they launched Sintaksis, a famous dissident magazine. It was a forum for the free flow of ideas and open discourse that in the U.S.S.R. were confined to home kitchens — which is just where they happen in Russia today.