Murdered Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya was an undeniably courageous journalist, but maybe a little bit of cowardice would have kept her alive, argued a journalist on CBC  Radio's Dispatches.

Terry Gould recently returned from Moscow. He looked into the case of Politkovskaya, who was the apparent victim of a contract-style killing last month (he's working on a book about journos who defy death threats in dangerous countries). The interview starts 7:42 into the broadcast (the RealAudio file can be found here).

What he found was that Politkovskaya, a mother of two, had a public and private side. A supremely brave journalist, she snuck into Chechnya more than 50 times to document Russian abuses there, exposing the perpetrators by name.

But for Politkovskaya, merely documenting the abuses wasn't enough: She also excoriated figures like Russia's President Vladimir Putin and Chechnya's pro-Moscow Prime Minister Ramzan Kadyrov (who has his own private militia and is the son of former Chechen President Akmad Kadyrov, who was assassinated in 2004).

"In one sentence, she called ... Kadyrov moronic, stupid, ignorant and Satanic."

However, despite being beaten, imprisoned and even poisoned, she kept going back to Chechnya, Gould said.

"Now, her private side exacerbated all this risk-taking ... She was impossible to get along with, and she never cultivated in Russia what's known as a kryshi, which means a "roof." Someone who protects you in dangerous circumstances and who is more powerful than your enemies."

Everyone in Russia requires a kryshi, from politicians and journalists to street-corner flower sellers, Gould said.

Host Rick MacInnes-Rae asked Gould if having a kryshi meant compromising on one's journalism to get what one wanted.

Gould gave a quick lesson in realpolitik to the veteran public-sector journo (who, having survived decades in the political quicksand of the Corpse, should know better).

"I must say it does. Rick, we all have kryshis in our lives. You're not going to go in and insult the boss. There are ways to do it so you compromise less, but everybody's got to serve somebody in life. Anna wouldn't serve anybody."

While Kadyrov may have been moronic, stupid and Satanic, "you want to leave him a little bit of humanity and dignity ... if you humiliate (such people), and they're verging on psychopaths to begin with, then more you're often than not going to spark in them a rage (that could make them kill you). And I've found in these countries you can get around that by turning the volume down from 10 to seven."

Part of what made Politkovskaya so difficult was the effect on her of the horrors she'd been exposed to in Chechnya, Gould said. He said she would argue with everybody, including terrorists.

"The only ones she didn't fight with, and showed infinite compassion to, were the endless victims of the Chechen war she wrote about, and literally the victims she put her life on the line to rescue."

Politkovskaya was a child of privilege, born in New York City in 1958. Her Ukrainian parents were Soviet diplomats.

However, Gould said Politkovskaya was also a child of the Mazepa clan, a fierce band of Ukrainian warriors who fought Peter The Great in the early 18th century (Note: They were Cossacks - Bill D).

"Even today, when they heard Anna was a Mazepa, they stepped back," he said. "To a Russian, it was as if they found out her maiden name was Attila. And when she opened her mouth, they'd step back in further."

Another anomaly is that Politkovskaya wasn't always a crusading investigative reporter. She started her career in journalism as a celebrity reporter.

"Then came the big change in her life. In August 1996, she decided to do a human interest cover shoot of big-eyed Chechen children entering a Moscow school. What Anna saw when she went to that refugee centre changed her life and her journalism forever. She swooshed in only to come face-to-face with these wretched, traumatized people ... and that's the day she stopped writing about the petty rivalries of fashionable people."

Gould said while the people he spoke with don't believe Putin was directly responsible for Politkovskaya's death, the people below him have virtual impunity to do whatever they want.

Since 1992, 42 journalists have been murdered in Russia, with no convictions. Thirteen have been killed since Putin came to power in 2000, including Politkovskaya. Two others from her paper Novaya Gazeta have been murdered.

"Anna's not the first. She's not going to be the last," he said.

"But the lesson I was learning was simple, and her colleagues agree with this:  If you're going  live in a country where barbarians are regularly murdering journalists with impunity, you have to leave the killers a little bit of dignity.

"If you have no roof, no kryshi like Anna did, you can expose, but you really shouldn't humiliate."

Dispatches played an excerpt of a 2004 interview the BBC did with Politkovskaya:

I am absolutely sure that risk is usual but (part) of my job as Russian journalist.

But I cannot stop because it is my duty. The duty of doctors is to give health to their patients, the duty of singer to sing. The duty of journalist to write what this journalist sees in the reality. It is only one duty.

The interview is on the Dispatches website but is also available as a downloadable podcast next Tuesday.

This 2004 Guardian profile gives some insight into Politkovskaya. Some excerpts:

Her seriousness is not just her frown, her severe glasses and full head of grey hair. It's the tension, anger and impatience in her whole body, making clear that her sense of the continual injustice being perpetrated in her homeland never leaves her, that she can't shut it out in a way almost all British journalists, even the campaigning, radical kind, can.

It's a surprise, then, to see her start to laugh and make fun of the Guardian's photographer when he gets her to pose for him. "Photographers always do that," she says, in her hesitant English. "They get people to do things they don't normally do." The photographer gets quite annoyed and you realise that Politkovskaya is still young (she's 46). And still hopeful. The author picture on the back of her new book, Putin's Russia, is so self-consciously tragic, and its subject matter so bleak, that I ask her whether she thinks it might take generations for her country to become truly free.

"I wouldn't ever want to say it would take generations," she says. "I want to be able to live the life of a human being, where every individual is respected, in my lifetime."...

The second Chechen war began by costing Politkovskaya her marriage. She returned home to Moscow one day in 1999, fresh from reporting on a long-range Russian rocket attack in Grozny which had hit a market and a maternity hospital, killing scores of people, including women and children, to hear her husband tell her: "I can't take this any more." Recently, it almost cost her her life, when, on her way to Beslan in the early hours of the school hostage crisis, she was slipped poison in a cup of tea. In between, she has experienced countless death threats from Russian troops, Chechen fighters and the other, more shadowy armed groups operating in the margins of the war. The kidnappings, extrajudicial killings, disappearances, rapes and tortures she has reported on in Chechnya have left her convinced that Putin's policies are engendering the terrorists they are supposed to eliminate.

"To this day there's torture in any FSB branch in Chechnya, like the so-called 'telephone', where they pass an electric current through a person's body. I've seen hundreds of people who've been through this torture. Some have been tortured in such an intricate way that it's hard for me to believe that it was done by people who went to the same sort of schools that I did, who read the same textbooks."

Politkovskaya has no regrets about the times she has stepped outside the role of reporter in recent Chechen terrorist attacks - as a negotiator in the Moscow theatre siege, and as a would-be negotiator at Beslan, before she was poisoned. "Yes, I went beyond my journalistic role," she says. "But it would be quite wrong to say that doing so was a bad move from a journalistic point of view. By setting aside my role as journalist I learned so much that I would never have found out being just a plain journalist, who stands in the crowd along with everyone else."