On October 7, 2006, Vladimir Putin's 54th birthday, the journalist Anna Politkovskaja was shot in the lift of her Moscow home. Anna's death was a personal tragedy: she had just learnt that she was to become a grandmother. But the murder is a political act, for Politkovskaja was the President's fiercest critic. Why was she shot in cold blood, this elegant woman who was always on the side of the weak and those who had no rights? Was it because of the stance she took against the war in Chechnya - a war that was virtually ignored in the world at large and yet became a turning point in Anna's life?