By CELESTINE BOHLEN - The New York Times

Anna Politkovskaya doesn't think of herself as a war reporter. When colleagues all over the world rushed this fall to cover the war in Afghanistan, she wasn't even tempted. "I looked inside myself, and I understood I had no desire to go," she said during a recent visit to New York.

And yet, for the last two years, Ms. Politkovskaya, who writes for the Russian weekly newspaper Novaya Gazeta, has been in the thick of a war, the latest one waged by Russia in the southern region of Chechnya. Often she has been a solitary witness to a conflict in which there is no victory and no defeat, just a steady stream of misery and death, brutality and betrayal.

Other reporters, mostly foreign, have been to Chechnya intermittently to write about the devastation in the capital, Grozny; the atrocities in villages where Russian troops have run amok; or about underpaid, untrained Russian soldiers.

But the difference is that Ms. Politkovskaya is working for a Russian newspaper at a time when the Russian government has actively discouraged any independent reporting on the war. As a result, most other Russian reports are sporadic and tilted toward the official line. But she has gone back to Chechnya again and again, trying to perfect a method of war reporting that is difficult in the best of circumstances: getting both sides of the story.

"I have to go because nobody else is going, and if nobody goes, then no one will know what is happening," Ms. Politkovskaya said. "Even when you write what is happening, people don't believe you. But I figure if I have convinced 10 people of the truth, then I have done my job."

She has been publicly lambasted by government spokesmen and handled roughly by the state security police. Her editors have received phone calls from the Kremlin, and television producers have suddenly (and inexplicably) canceled her appearances on state-supported stations. Yet she has continued to report, even though, as she says, "In my soul, I am not a war reporter."

Since the fall of 1999, she has made 26 trips to Chechnya; her last was in September. If it weren't for a particular widely reported death threat from a persistent major in the Russian Interior Ministry forces, she would probably be there now, tromping through the snow that covers the Caucasus Mountains, following up on the letters she gets from people who want her to tell their story.

But instead she is in limbo. The death threats from the major, whom she accused of assisting in murder and torture in Chechnya, forced her to leave Russia for a time. She and her editors have tried to file charges against him, but so far, she said, no case has been brought.

She was in the United States promoting her book, "A Dirty War: A Russian Reporter in Chechnya," translated by John Crowfoot (Harvill Press) and distributed in the United States by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Ms. Politkovskaya, 43, a tall, thin woman with glasses and graying hair, was not one of the many Russian journalists who covered the first war, from 1994 to 1996, when there was still public sympathy in Russia for the Chechen independence fighters. That was before the region collapsed into lawlessness, and reporters, among hundreds of others, were kidnapped by bandit- warlords. In those years, she was writing about orphans, prisoners, the handicapped and others whose situations taboo subjects in the Soviet era only got worse in the early years of capitalism and democracy.

In Chechnya, her focus from the start was civilians, innocent people caught in a nightmarish conflict. She actually began with the dead, writing about the bodies of Russian soldiers from the first war, which, because of mismanagement and greed, were still unidentified years later at a laboratory in Rostov-on-Don.

Most of her reporting is about ordinary citizens Chechens, Russians, Dagestani and Ingush who were made helpless by war. (The last two groups, from regions bordering Chechnya, have also been dragged into the nightmare.) She has written articles about Chechen refugees who live huddled in unheated railway cars, of a conductor from St. Petersburg who gives them her paltry bonus, of a local bureaucrat who comes to visit them in a silk tie, white shirt and perfectly polished shoes.

Ms. Politkovskaya's most famous tale was of the ordeal of the inhabitants of an old-age home in Grozny who were prevented for a time from leaving the bombed-out city by both Chechen and Russian officials, whom she described as equally cynical and corrupt. In this case, as in others, she led a one-woman crusade, publishing her telephone number to rally support and money from strangely indifferent readers. She makes no apologies for overstepping the bounds of the objective reporter: her mission involves more than facts.

"My goal is to knock on doors until someone listens," she said. But in the last chapter of her book, she acknowledges how hard that can be, even in her own circles in Moscow. "Everyone is tired of this war," she writes. "When you tell even very close friends and relatives on your return about that other world, you are met with disbelief . . . `There she goes again, making up these hellish stories.' "

Last February she traveled to the mountainous region of Vedeno to investigate reports of Russian troops holding Chechen prisoners in deep pits. After interviewing the villagers, she went to the local Russian base to see the commanding officer, who, to her amazement, told her the truth. "I simply asked the commander why the soldiers behaved this way," she said. "This is ordinary journalism: you ask one side, and then the other."

As she left the base, she was intercepted by Russian intelligence officers, who accused her of spying. She was held for three days, during which she was verbally abused and physically threatened. She was deliberately placed in the line of fire and was finally released only because two villagers who saw her being arrested informed Memorial, a Russian human rights group.

"When they released me, they said it was because there was a big noise in Moscow," she said. "I was lucky, because the worst in Chechnya is to disappear." She said she later learned that the two men who saved her were denounced and killed.

Now that Russia has joined the United States' war against international terrorism, there are signs that the government is looking for ways to negotiate an end to the war in Chechnya. As a gesture of solidarity with its Western allies, it has sent emergency aid to Afghanistan to help civilians and has obliquely acknowledged that civilian casualties should be avoided.
But still, Ms. Politkovskaya has her doubts about the lessons learned in Chechnya. "In our society, there is still a traditional view: `One life more, one life less, what's the difference,' " she said. "It requires a certain healthiness of the whole society to think differently. And no society has ever become healthy through war."