ASSASSINATED POLITKOVSKAYA'S DISPATCHES FROM CHECHNYA

Regarding the Chechnya connection for the two men associated with the Boston marathon deadly explosions, the assassinated journalist Anna Politkovskaya wrote dispatches from Chechnya that illuminate the fierce breakaway and resistance situation vis-a-vis Russia and of atrocities by Russian federal troops -- in her posthumously assembled book ironically titled “Is Journalism Worth Dying For? Final Dispatches”
Politkovskaya wrote graphically of the atrocities executed during the so-called Second Chechen War begun in 1999, one of the exposés that are said to have led to her assassination in Moscow. She also wrote “Putin’s Russia.”
She observed in the text:

“I hate battle-pieces. In paintings, as in life, detail is what matters most. It is the detail which gives the measure of our humanity. How we react to the tragedy of one small person reflects our attitude towards a whole nationality, and increasing the numbers doesn’t change things much.”

Her details of the brutality of the incursion by Russian troops are graphic and unadulterated as I re-read them. They describe another episode in the long story of the terrible inhumanity of humans that continues to beget more inhumanity.