The Hungarian-British writer Arthur Koestler, born in Budapest at the turn of the last century, became, over the course of his life, intimately familiar with the dangers of authoritarianism. It was the corroding effects of such rule on the human soul that preoccupied him as much as the unbridled concentration of power. “If power corrupts,” he wrote, “the reverse is also true: persecution corrupts the victim, though perhaps in subtler and more tragic ways.”

If Koestler is correct, and authoritarian regimes end up corrupting, along with themselves, their critics, then the Turkish literati have yet another reason to worry. For years, we have been journeying through a dark, narrowing tunnel of “illiberal democracy.” The ruling élite of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s party, the A.K.P., has refused to acknowledge that free elections are not enough to sustain a democracy. There are other necessary constituents: separation of powers, rule of law, freedom of speech, women’s rights and minority rights, and a diverse, independent media. Without these bulwarks, the ballot box alone only paves the way for “majoritarianism” at best and authoritarianism at worst.

The attempted coup in July, which left more than two hundred people dead, was shocking and wrong; it made everything worse. But it is one of the endless ironies of Turkey that the liberals and democrats who were among the first to oppose the putschists’ sinister attempts to overthrow the A.K.P. government would also become the first to be punished and silenced by that very same government. More than a hundred and forty journalists are in prison in Turkey today, making the country the world’s leading jailer of journalists—surpassing even China. Friends and colleagues have been exiled, blacklisted, arrested, imprisoned. The esteemed linguist Necmiye Alpay, who celebrated her seventieth birthday behind bars; the novelist Aslı Erdoğan; the novelist Ahmet Altan; the scholar Mehmet Altan; the liberal columnist Şahin Alpay; the editor-in-chief of the secularist Cumhuriyet newspaper, Murat Sabuncu, and his literary editor, Turhan Günay—the list of imprisoned writers and journalists is daunting, and we all know, deep down, that it could get even longer any day.

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Saturday, October 7th, was a marathon of disheartening tasks for Anna Politkovskaya. Two weeks earlier, her father, a retired diplomat, had died of a heart attack as he emerged from the Moscow Metro while on his way to visit Politkovskaya’s mother, Raisa Mazepa, in the hospital. She had just been diagnosed with cancer and was too weak even to attend her husband’s funeral. “Your father will forgive me, because he knows that I have always loved him,” she told Anna and her sister, Elena Kudimova, the day he was buried. A week later, she underwent surgery, and since then Anna and Elena had been taking turns helping her cope with her grief.

Politkovskaya was supposed to spend the day at the hospital, but her twenty-six-year-old daughter, who was pregnant, had just moved into Politkovskaya’s apartment, on Lesnaya Street, while her own place was being prepared for the baby. “Anna had so much on her mind,’’ Elena Kudimova told me when we met in London, before Christmas. “And she was trying to finish her article.’’ Politkovskaya was a special correspondent for the small liberal newspaper Novaya Gazeta, and, like most of her work, the piece focussed on the terror that pervades the southern republic of Chechnya. This time, she had been trying to document repeated acts of torture carried out by squads loyal to the pro-Russian Prime Minister, Ramzan Kadyrov. In the past seven years, Politkovskaya had written dozens of accounts of life during wartime; many had been collected in her book “A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya.” Politkovskaya was far more likely to spend time in a hospital than on a battlefield, and her writing bore frequent witness to robbery, rape, and the unbridled cruelty of life in a place that few other Russians—and almost no other reporters—cared to think about. One day at the Ninth Municipal Hospital, in Grozny, Politkovskaya encountered a sixty-two-year-old woman named Aishat Suleimanova, whose eyes expressed “complete indifference to the world,’’ she wrote in a typical piece. “And it is beyond one’s strength to look at her naked body. She’s been disembowelled like a chicken. The surgeons have cut into her from above her chest to her groin.’’ Two weeks earlier, a “young fellow in a Russian serviceman’s uniform put Aishat on a bed in her own house and shot five 5.45-mm. bullets into her. These bullets, weighted at the edges, have been forbidden by all international conventions as inhumane.’’

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