Editor: everything now happening was predicted in her books

Sergei Sokolov, who edited Anna Politkovskaya at the Novaya Gazeta newspaper where she worked, delivered the verdict in remarks made ahead of the anniversary of her death, which falls on a Wednesday and marks 20 years since she was killed. Novaya Gazeta, the paper that carried her reporting, has been labelled a "foreign agent" by Moscow.

In Sokolov's reading, the course Russia has now taken was already set down on the page, in the books Politkovskaya published while she was still alive.

Sokolov recalled that nobody believed her back then, and that people dismissed her as exaggerating the dangers and fears. She warned that Russian journalists would have to show "total servility to Putin" or face death or prison, and she said Russia was "hurling back into a Soviet abyss".

Shot dead on Putin's 54th birthday

The murder happened in the lift of Politkovskaya's central Moscow apartment block on October 7, 2006, a date that fell on Vladimir Putin's 54th birthday. For Russian journalism, it became a turning point.

The gunmen who carried out the killing are behind bars:

• •Nobody has ever been named as the person, or people, who ordered the murder
• •Asked about the masterminds in 2021, Putin said his agencies "did everything to uncover these crimes"

Chechnya, the 2002 theatre siege and Kadyrov

Politkovskaya reported fearlessly from the war in Chechnya and charted Putin's rise, warning of his authoritarian tendencies even as the West welcomed and courted him. She documented war crimes on both sides - by the Russian army and by Chechen rebels - and pressed each to evacuate civilians. "What stood out in her was her tenacity – nothing could make her stray from the topic or idea she had," Sokolov recalled.

• •In 2002, she walked into a Moscow theatre seized by Chechen rebels to try to secure the hostages' release
• •"The terrorists had chosen me as a person they wanted to talk to. I couldn't refuse," she later said
• •More than 130 hostages died after special forces gassed the theatre and stormed the building

In her latter years, she was a fierce critic of Ramzan Kadyrov, then being groomed as Chechnya's future head. She called him a "little dragon" and said he had been granted a free hand to rule the war-torn region brutally in return for loyalty to the Kremlin. Kadyrov, in turn, branded her an "enemy of the Chechen people" and vowed she would "answer".

Twenty years on: censorship, war and her heirs in exile

Putin remains in power 20 years after Politkovskaya's death:

• •Moscow's war against Ukraine is in its fifth year and has killed hundreds of thousands
• •Repression inside Russia has reached levels unknown since Soviet times
• •Kremlin pressure has produced censorship on a scale unseen since the Soviet Union, and her school of journalism lies in virtual tatters

Her dispatches from both sides of the Chechnya front lines have taken on fresh relevance now that Russia is at war in Ukraine. In death, Politkovskaya has become an even more totemic figure - standard-bearer for a generation of investigative reporters she never met, all of them now working in exile. Russia's official narrative has all but erased her name, but for independent Russian journalists she remains an icon, and a standing warning of what the profession can cost.

Sokolov said he is certain that, were she alive today, Politkovskaya would definitely not be able to stay silent. Yegor Feoktistov, a 28-year-old exiled reporter, put it plainly: "If there was no example of courageous journalists and if everyone kept their heads down, then things will be even worse for Russian journalism". "Her fate always reminds you of what can happen – but it also gives you courage," he said.

Olga Churakova, another investigative journalist now working in exile, said she is surprised by the stream of people who still want to become journalists in Russia despite the dangers. Many of them name Politkovskaya as their inspiration, she said, and people still come and say: "Someone needs to do this job".