Jon Snow (journalist)

"Reading Anna Politkovskaya's A Russian Diary in the knowledge of her terrible end – at the hands of an assassin in the stairwell of her Moscow apartment block – it seems to foretell that she could not possibly be allowed to live."

"As I read A Russian Diary I wondered what on earth we have embassies in Russia for. How did it happen that our leaders so steadfastly ignored what they knew Putin was up to? Was it the hunger for gas? For the riches of the outrageous post-Communist sell-off of Russian state assets and manufacturing resources, through which our financial institutions participated in the rise of the thieving oligarchs? Or was it the blind desire to keep Russia 'on side', whatever the cost to her own impoverished people?"

"By 2002, Putin was taking full advantage of the Bush-Blair 'war on terror' as cover for Moscow's wholesale crackdown in Chechnya. Anna became increasingly isolated. She reported the extra-judicial killings, kidnappings, rapes, torture and dissapearances that characterised the Russian forces' methods as they struggled to contain the Chechen War, and she often reported these alone. Increasingly Anna felt, and wrote publicly, that Putin's policies actively nurtured the very terrorists they were supposedly designed to defeat. Threaded through these accounts is her deep conviction that Putin's path to the presidency was shaped around, and dependent upon, his pursuit of the Chechen conflict. She even links some of the specific torture practices that she uncovers in Chechnya to those extolled by the KGB and its successor the FSB in their training manuals."

"For many of us who continue to aspire to the highest standards of journalism, Anna Politkovskaya will remain a beacon burning bright, a yardstick by which integrity, courage and commitment will be measured. Those who met her over the years can testify that she never allowed her feet to leave the ground, never basked in fame or celebrity. She remained modest and unassuming to the end."

"I must confess that I finished reading A Russian Diary feeling that it should be taken up and dropped from the air in vast quantities throughout the length and breadth of Mother Russia, for all her people to read."