Putin opponents mark journalist’s slaying
MOSCOW – Critics of Russian President Vladimir V. Putin gathered in a central Moscow square Sunday to honor a slain investigative journalist and call on citizens to unite in her name to fight for greater democracy.
About 2,000 protesters gathered on a cold, drizzly day to hear opposition politicians and human-rights leaders praise the courage of Anna Politkovskaya, who was gunned down in her apartment building exactly one year earlier.
Former Prime Minister Mikhail M. Kasyanov, now a top opposition leader, said Politkovskaya “ranks among Russia’s greatest spiritual leaders” alongside late Nobel Peace Prize winner Andrei Sakharov.
Kasyanov, who has made clear that he intends to run for president next year, warned that with controls tightening over election procedures and the erosion of media freedom, Russians must fight to protect their country from sliding back toward totalitarianism.
Politkovskaya was a fierce critic of Putin and his policies in war-torn Chechnya, where she believed the effort to suppress a separatist insurgency had led to massive human rights violations. The Russian president suggested last year that she had been killed by his opponents to make Russia and its leadership look bad – a comment that enraged her admirers.
Russian Prosecutor General Yuri Chaika, announcing arrests in the case in August, said the journalist was murdered by a Chechen-led contract killing gang working together with former and current officers of the Interior Ministry and the Federal Security Service.
Politkovskaya often had written about criminal interactions between gangsters and security officials.
Lyudmila Alexeyeva, chairwoman of the Moscow Helsinki Group, a prominent human rights organization, told Sunday’s crowd: “They murdered her because she was fearless. She was fighting against lawlessness, against violence and against lies.”
Despite the alleged involvement of Russian security officials, Chaika supported Putin’s initial supposition and declared at his August news conference, without offering evidence, that Politkovskaya’s murder resulted from a plot initiated by exiled opponents of the Kremlin.
Among those who respected Politkovskaya, that statement has prompted deep skepticism as to the willingness of authorities to conduct an unbiased investigation aimed at finding the real instigators of her death.
“We will never learn the truth about the murder as long as the current authorities are in power,” said Alexei Zemlyanikin, 20, a student who attended the rally. “But it seems that they are planning to cling firmly to power for years to come.”