Editor's murder shocks Russia

Phil Reeves
Thursday 11 June 1998 23:02 BST
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MORE THAN 1,000 people turned up for her burial. Crowds protested on the streets of her home town, angrily brandishing copies of her newspaper. Boris Yeltsin publicly expressed his condolences; parliament observed a moment's silence.

With its ceaseless killings and endemic corruption, Russia is not easily outraged, but the murder of Larisa Yudina, a provincial newspaper editor, is proving an exception.

There is disgust at the crime itself and alarm about what it reveals about fragility of press freedom in the provinces of the new, criminalised Russia. Last year, 19 journalists were killed here, although there was no war, no plague, no natural disaster.

This year, six more lives were taken, while 33 journalists have been beaten up. Seven years after the end of the Soviet Union, asking questions in the wrong places can be lethal. Especially if you start probing dark crevices in which crime, business and politics unite.

In this case, the "wrong place" appears to have been the local government in the republic in which 55-year-old Mrs Yudina worked.

According to Russia's interior minister, Sergei Stepashin, she was the victim of a contract killing which was "undoubtedly" politically motivated, a remark which leaves little doubt that the federal government suspects the republic's authorities. Several Moscow papers share that view. "A totalitarian regime deprives people of their rights, and renders law useless," said Izvestia, in a front-page editorial.

Whoever smashed Larisa Yudina's skull and knifed her 14 times, dumping her body in a pond, can scarcely have expected the scale of the reaction. She worked in Kalmykia, on the Caspian Sea, hundreds of miles from those in Moscow now lamenting her fate.

The newspaper she edited, Sovetskaya Kalmykia Segodnya was the only local paper which dared to oppose the republic's president, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, 35, an autocrat whose aptitude for business made him a millionaire while he was in his twenties. So effective were the paper's attacks that the authorities several times closed down its offices in the republic's capital, Elista.

In much of provincial Russia, old Soviet habits of snooping and censorship continue. So, at times, does the use of brute force. On one occasion, members of Mrs Yudina's staff were beaten up by guards working for a bank linked to the presidential administration.

Though he is subordinate to Moscow, Mr Ilyumzhinov enjoys great autonomy, and has a reputation for flamboyance and ruthlessness among the 320,000 people who live in his (largely Buddhist) republic.

Interviewed earlier this year by The Independent, he boasted of his visits to Baghdad to see Saddam Hussein. He made international headlines by trying to recruit Diego Maradona to the local football team, and by starting work on a "Chess City" in Elista.

But he also has a record of riding rough-shod over the principles of democracy. He was elected in 1993 after distributing $100 bills to voters; once in power, he paid the legislature to dissolve itself, and closed opposition newspapers.

At the time of her murder, Mrs Yudina was reportedly investigating allegations of impropriety by a company, said to be linked to the president's administration, which registered off-shore ventures exploiting the tax-free regime that Mr Ilyumzhinov has established. The administration has indignantly denied that her killing has anything to do with politics or politicians.

Mrs Yudina was also active in Russia's only genuinely liberal party, Yabloko, which has taken up her cause. "In democratic Russia, politics are conducted with methods more murderous than in the totalitarian Soviet Union," said Vyatcheslav Igrunov, deputy chairman of the party's central council.

The investigation has been taken over by federal prosecutors in Moscow. Investigators say they have arrested two suspects, but it is hard to be optimistic that they will get to the bottom of the crime.

Just over three years ago, Vladislav Listyev, a popular television journalist, was gunned down. Prosecutors have made little progress in finding his killers. Nor have they moved with any alacrity over the case of Dmitri Kholodov, a newspaper reporter whose investigations into corruption within the upper echelons of the military came to an abrupt halt when he was blown up by a briefcase bomb.

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