Graduated from the Journalism Department of Moscow State University and took her first job at the Soviet paper of record, Izvestia.
In 1980, Anna Politkovskaya completed her studies at the prestigious Journalism Department of Moscow State University, one of the Soviet Union's premier institutions for training writers, editors, and propagandists for the state media apparatus. Her graduation thesis reportedly focused on the poetry of Marina Tsvetaeva, hinting at a literary sensibility that would later inform her powerful, narrative-driven investigative reporting.
Following graduation, she secured a position at Izvestia, one of the two dominant newspapers of the Soviet Union (alongside Pravda) and the official organ of the Soviet government. Working at Izvestia placed her at the center of Soviet journalism, though the tightly controlled press of the era offered little room for the independent, adversarial reporting she would become famous for decades later.
This early career step was formative: it gave her professional grounding in journalistic craft and access to the institutional world of Soviet media, which she would later leave behind entirely in favor of the far riskier, independent path of investigative war reporting. The exact day of her graduation and hiring is not documented in available sources, only the year 1980.