Published: 20 May 2022
Last updated: 4 March 2024
Journalist Zoya Sheftalovich arrived in Sydney as a child refugee from Ukraine. She tells Steve Meacham about how she digs beneath the surface of Putin’s lies
ZOYA SHEFTALOVICH WAS an aspiring writer studying journalism and law when she introduced herself to one of the most fearless and uncompromising investigative reporters of the past 50 years.
That took considerable chutzpah.
Russian journalist and human rights activist Anna Politkovskaya had already survived at least one assassination attempt ordered by the Kremlin (poison in her Aeroflot tea: sound familiar?) and was attending the 2006 Sydney Writers’ Festival to publicise her new book, Putin’s Russia.
Politkovskaya had made her international reputation through covering the initial incompetence of the Russian military forces, followed by the brutal extermination tactics during the Chechnya wars from the late 1990s to the early 21st century. That was after residents of the former independent country had a brief chance to escape the rapidly self-destructing USSR in 1991.
Many commentators see parallels between the tactics then prime minister Vladimir Putin used when he prised power from the ailing president Boris Yeltsin in 2000 and those we watch in horror being enacted on our TV screens in Ukraine now.
Zoya’s interview with Politkovskaya, which won her the first of two nominations for the Walkley Awards (Australian journalism’s equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize), is a textbook example of “shirt-fronting” a formidable foe.
A mother of two grown-up children, Politkovskaya wasn’t welcoming. Student journalism was beneath her. Yet Zoya, who speaks fluent Russian, persevered with her questions.
That interview, says Zoya - now a contributing editor at the influential political website Politico (where the draft US Supreme Court opinion on Roe V Wade was leaked) - “was one of the last Anna ever gave. She was murdered in the lift of her block of Moscow flats in October 2006, shot at point-blank range”.
