Shot in the dark

A little over four years ago, a woman stood in the biting wind of a dank October day in Moscow, in front of the Palace of Youth, listening to a journalist speak to a crowd of mourners grieving over the death of one of his colleagues, 27-year-old reporter Dmitri Kholodov, whose legs had been blown off by a suitcase bomb in his office.

"The real dividing line in Russia today is not between communists and democrats, but between honest and dishonest people," said the speaker, Alexander Minkin.

The woman was Galina Starovoitova, one of Russia's most uncompromising democratic idealists. On Friday night, she became the latest victim of the assassin's bullet. Her political allies believe that she fell as a combatant in the struggle between 'democrats' and 'red-browns' - the communist-nationalist forces hoping one day to rule Russia. Whether this was the case, or whether she died in a more tortured Russian struggle between honest and dishonesty, good and evil, crime and punishment, only the detectives can say for certain. And their record on high-profile hits is not good.

Like the Kholodov killing, the Starovoitova murder enters history posing as a turning-point in Russia's post-Soviet struggle for law and order. But, the cynics would argue, what has changed? Then, as now, it seemed clear that the slaying had been political. Then, as now, president Boris Yeltsin promised personally to ensure that the case was solved. Then, as today at the Alexander Nevsky monastery in St Petersburg, a vast crowd of ordinary people vented their genuine grief at the death of someone who still dared to fight the fight against cynicism they had given themselves up to. Politicians wrung their hands, detectives and federal agents and forensic scientists swarmed over the crime scene - and no one has been charged. No one has been tried. No one is guilty.

Starovoitova, an MP representing the party Democratic Russia, died from three bullets to the head after entering the stairwell in the canalside tenement in central St Petersburg where she had her flat.

She and her spokesman, Ruslan Linkov, entered the tenement together shortly after 10.45pm. They began climbing the steps to the first floor. As they approached the landing, silhouetted against the light, they saw two dim figures coming down the stairs towards them: the assassins.

When the killers shot Starovoitova she died immediately. Linkov was hit in the back of the head and in the neck but survived. The killers abandoned their weapons on the scene, as is usual in Russian hits, and escaped along the embankment of the Griboyedov Canal.

The weapons were unusual - not the Russian-made TT pistol and Kalashnikov of rank and file criminals. One was a Beretta pistol, which, according to unspecified forensic traces left on the trigger, was fired by a woman; the other was an Argan-2000 machine pistol, once favoured by US special forces but now manufactured under licence in the former Yugoslavia.

The Balkan connection - according to some sources, the weapon was manufactured in Serbia - has led Petersburg democrats to make a link with the 'red-browns'. Russian nationalists and self-styled Cossacks did fight on the Serbian side in the Yugoslav wars, and there are indisputable ties linking Serbian extremism, post-Soviet conflicts such as the war in Moldova, and radical Russian politicians such as the outspoken anti-semite MP Albert Makashov, whom Starovoitova clashed with a few days before her death.

"The most likely version is that the hand of the red-brown bigots is behind this," said Sergei Alexeyev, deputy chairman of the executive committee of Democratic Russia's St Petersburg branch. "Galina spoke in favour of passing a law on the forbidding of communist and fascist activity in Russia. She considered both equally dangerous for democracy. The communists stated that this was a witchhunt. And now we see that the red-browns went a-hunting themselves." The evidence is circumstantial. Yet there is a well of hatred sunk deep into Russia of which General Makashov is only the mouth. There are numerous fascist and extreme neo-communist groups who share a vicious anti-semitism with a broader hostility towards all foreigners and a cult of militarism. And in Russia, weapons are all too easy to come by.

It is hard from the outside to understand the steady accretion of hate which a woman like Starovoitova could provoke among people she barely knew, who watched her from a distance. She was one of the few remaining active liberals from the early days of Yeltsin's anti-communist struggle who combined all the facets which the extremists actively despise and many ordinary Russians passively dislike - multi-culturalism, political pluralism and the idea of a law-based society. But she went further: she was radical on every front, as economically liberal as the reviled privatisation guru Anatoly Chubais, as pro-western as anyone - she even suggested Russia should apply for membership of Nato - and as vocal in her demand for human rights as the late Andrei Sakharov.

Starovoitova is the sixth Russian MP to be killed since the break-up of the USSR. Yet her murder is more sinister than that of many of the other political and journalistic killings of the post-Soviet years, because so far the most likely motive does appear to be that it was an act of people who believe in the value of broad-based political terror.

Kholodov's killing, it seems, was a one-off act by a group within the Russian military who became angered by his accusations of corruption against leading generals. The killing of Vlad Listyev, the enormously popular head of the ORT television channel, was probably - in a phrase which has become a terrible, weary cliche of Russian crime reporting - 'connected with his business activities'. Knowing this makes neither murder less horrible - but it is still less terrifying than the thought of Latin American-style death squads emerging in Russia.

Political or not, Starovoitova's murder is only the latest in a string of recent assassinations which prompted one journalist yesterday to call St Petersburg "the centre of political terror in Russia."

The head of privatisation in the city, Mikhail Manevich, was shot dead by an extraordinarily accurate rifle shot. The sniper, on the rooftops, shot him through the back window of his car while the car was moving.

An aide to the speaker of the Russian parliament, Mikhail Osherov, and Dmitri Filippov, a prominent businessmen, were killed recently. What is striking is that these three victims come from opposite sides of the political barricades. The latter two were moderate communist supporters, Manevich an economic liberal.

The notion that the struggle between honesty and dishonesty, rather than between left and right, may be at the root of the St Petersburg evil is strengthened by the high number of candidates with criminal convictions running in elections for the local council in St Petersburg, scheduled for December 6. Starovoitova was leader of a group of democrats called Northern Capital running in many wards across the city.

An idea of the level of the struggle was given by Moskovsky Komosomolets, which quoted one candidate as saying on local television in Petersburg: 'Yes, I'm a bandit. But I want to become a local councillor and help people.' One thing is sure: none of Starovoitova's allies trusts the investigators, the police, the prosecution service, and the FSB - the federal security agency, on the cusp between what it was, the KGB, and what it might become, something like the FBI. There is a firm belief that an unbroken chain of acquaintances and friends stretches from the depths of the underworld through the law enforcement agencies to the very heights of power. The onus is on the enforcers, who have yet to solve a single high profile killing, to prove that the cat, as one man close to the Listyev case put it, is not chasing its own tail.

Alexeyev said that the FSB officer in charge of the case was Victor Cherkessov, a man who had "spent his Soviet career persecuting dissidents."

"If Cherkessov's been brought into the case," said Alexeyev, "You can consider it buried."

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