NYT : In a Risky Place to Gather News, a Very Familiar Story

In a Risky Place to Gather News, a Very Familiar Story

By STEVEN LEE MYERS | October 11, 2006

MOSCOW, Oct. 10 — The mourners stood in the rain, which fell heavily at moments on Tuesday, fulfilling their part in a ritual of sadness and anger and, politically speaking, inconsequence, which has become strikingly common in Russia today.

They gathered, in this case, on the western edge of Moscow for the funeral of Anna Politkovskaya, a tenacious, sometimes reckless, but always passionate journalist and human rights advocate, who died three days ago at the hands of, from all appearances, a professional killer.

Her murder has made her a symbol of what Russia has become, but it was only the latest in a series of them. She was 48; the freedoms that she used to make her post-Soviet career, to write openly and critically about the deeds of a new Russian power, are much younger. And, it would seem, equally fragile.

“Anna was, in my opinion, a glimpse of hope,” said Tatyana Ivanyenko, a doctor from Moscow who attended the funeral. “And now there is none.”

Unnatural death occurs with alarming regularity here, despite the carefully cultivated impression that President Vladimir V. Putin has presided over an era of stability, economic progress and resurgent national pride. Some say it occurs because of it.

“This state killed Anna Politkovskaya,” Grigory A. Yavlinsky, a once-prominent democratic leader, declared bluntly as the mourners filed out into a cold, gray afternoon.

Russia is unquestionably a dangerous place for journalists — less so than only Iraq and Algeria, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Thirteen of them have been killed since Mr. Putin came to power in 2000, a little more than two a year on average.

The killings — and the failure to solve them — have created an atmosphere of impunity and violence that extends beyond those whose writings or broadcasts anger those in government or business. That was also lamented here, inside an airy white-stone hall at Troyekurovskoye Cemetery.

Ms. Politkovskaya’s killing was the third mob-style assassination of prominence in the last month alone. Andrei Kozlov, the first deputy chairman of the Central Bank, who led efforts to clean up the dirty money of the country’s banking system, was killed as he left a soccer game on Sept. 13. Less than two weeks later, Enver Ziganshin, the chief engineer of Kovytka, a potentially lucrative gas field in Siberia at the center of a dispute with the government, was shot in the back and head at his bathhouse in the countryside.

None of the victims were radicals or revolutionaries, or, to use an old word, dissidents; that is, fringe figures operating outside the established law of the land. They were of the mainstream — representatives of the news media, the government, a major energy company — working at careers in the newly free, democratic and market-oriented country that the collapse of the Soviet Union promised.

After each death the ritual of mourning resumes, and little changes. The chief prosecutor, Yuri Y. Chaika, announced this week that he had taken the investigation of Ms. Politkovskaya’s murder under his “personal control,” fulfilling his own part of the ritual, as other prosecutors once took control of other killings, like that of the American journalist Paul Klebnikov in 2004, that nonetheless remain unsolved.

Russia’s ombudsman for human rights, Vladimir V. Lukin, noted Tuesday that three years ago he organized the funeral for one of Ms. Politkovskaya’s colleagues, the editor of Novaya Gazeta, Yuri Shchekochikhin, who suffered a fatal allergic reaction to an unknown substance assumed to be a poison.

“Now, it happens again,” said Mr. Lukin, one of the few government officials to attend the funeral on Tuesday, though he is hardly one of the highest rank.

Ms. Politkovskaya’s funeral, in fact, displayed the deep divisions in today’s Russia between those in power and those not. The mourners included her family and friends, colleagues and politicians, though almost all from outside the center of power, and several foreign diplomats, including Ambassador William J. Burns of the United States, whose governments have denounced her killing far more forcefully than Mr. Putin or any other senior government leaders here.

Mr. Putin, traveling in Germany, spoke about her death publicly for the first time on Tuesday, a day after the Kremlin reported that he assured President Bush in a telephone conversation that there would be a thorough investigation. He called her killing “a crime of loathsome brutality.”

Then he went on. “I think that journalists should be aware that her influence on political life was extremely insignificant in scale,” Mr. Putin said, according to the news agency Interfax. “She was known in journalist and human rights circles, but her influence on political life in Russia was minimal.”

Some of those at the cemetery agreed, though hardly in the sense that Mr. Putin intended. “Our press long ago lost any influence over society,” said Obdurashid Saidov, a journalist from Dagestan, a troubled southern republic.

Ms. Politkovskaya became famous for her investigations of the war in Chechnya and its messy, bloody consequences across the Northern Caucasus. Her reports — in Novaya Gazeta and in a book published in 2002 and called “The Second Chechen War” in Russian and “A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya” in its English translation — served like few others in Russia to challenge the official view of the conflict.

And yet, as the war ground on, as Russia moved on, and as some Chechen separatists carried out terrorist acts, attacking theatergoers in Moscow and school children in Beslan, fewer Russians seemed interested in reading about the brutalities of the federal forces that she exposed.

The motive for her killing remains a mystery, though few doubt it was related to her work. Alternative theories have emerged. Some have suggested a dark conspiracy by the Kremlin’s opponents to kill her in order to provoke public protests, like those that followed the killing of a prominent journalist in Ukraine, Georgy Gongadze, whose murder in 2000 became a rallying cry of the “Orange Revolution” that swept that country in 2004.

One proponent of that line of thinking seems to be Mr. Putin himself. “We have information, and it is reliable,” he said in Dresden on Tuesday, “that many people hiding from Russian justice have long been nurturing the idea of sacrificing somebody in order to create a wave of anti-Russian feeling in the world.”

The hall where Ms. Politkovskaya’s coffin lay Tuesday had a capacity of 1,000; hundreds more lined up outside. After a few short eulogies, they filed past, laying flowers in piles that grew high and higher, and then dispersed in the rain.