A raw grey morning in October 1994: thousands of mourners converge on Moscow’s Palace of Youth to pay their respects to Dmitry Kholodov, a leading investigative journalist who had been fatally wounded when a booby-trapped briefcase blew up in his hands. Although few among the crowd would have heard of the 27-year-old reporter prior to his death, they waited patiently in the drifting snow to file past the bier, a cloth covering his terrible facial injuries.
Kholodov had made his name exposing corruption in the military, infuriating top brass at the Ministry of Defence. The day after he was killed, the front-page headline of the newspaper for which he worked, Moscovsky Komsomolets, declared: “This was a political murder.” At the graveside, his parents, Yuri and Zoya, echoed the accusation before the television cameras. “No matter how strong the authorities are, there’s always someone who can fight them,” Zoya said, “and one of these people was my son.”
For many ordinary Russians, the killing stirred memories of life under communism, when journalists who strayed too far from the party line were dealt with ruthlessly. Kholodov was the first member of the media to be targeted since the collapse of the USSR and the adoption of a new constitution guaranteeing freedom of the press.
To this day, nobody has been convicted of Kholodov’s murder, and without the tenacity of his parents, the case might easily have become another police statistic. Despite lacking what the Russians call blat – the inside influence, based on wealth or power, that makes things happen – and after exhausting every legal option in their own country, the Kholodovs appealed to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. Last October, they learnt that it would conduct a full inquiry into their son’s death.
In the wood-panelled room where Moskovsky Komsomolets holds its editorial conferences, Zoya Kholodov slaps down the dossier that will be presented in Strasbourg later this year. “Justice failed us in Russia, so we were obliged to seek it elsewhere,” she says. Nothing will convince her and Yuri that those behind their son’s murder are not being protected by the military authorities. “A climate exists in our country in which journalists can be killed with impunity.”
The Kholodovs are both 68 and after more than 40 years of marriage they have acquired the habit of finishing each other’s sentences. This is particularly noticeable when they talk fondly of “Dima” and his formative years in their home town of Klimovsk, some 30 miles south of Moscow, where Yuri, a highly qualified physicist, worked at a research institute, and Zoya taught maths before becoming a computer programmer.
“Dima did very well at school and followed his brother into the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, but always dreamt of becoming a journalist or writer,” Zoya recalls. “When he was quite small, he produced his own newspaper with proper editorials, crosswords, weather forecasts, even short stories. He only carried on with the physics to have something to fall back on.”
After two years’ military service, Dmitry worked for a local radio station before answering an advertisement for reporters at Moscovsky Komsomolets, the stodgy organ of the communist youth movement that had been transformed, post-glasnost, into an irreverent, muck-raking tabloid. “Dima was one of the few people taken on, and he never looked back,” Zoya chips in. One of his first assignments was covering the civil war in Georgia. Promoted to military correspondent, he began to report on the problems confronting Russia’s armed forces after the disintegration of the former Soviet empire. Military spending had been slashed drastically, troops were being paid months late, while training and equipment budgets were cut to the bone.
A favourite target of Kholodov’s was the then minister of defence, General Pavel Grachev, a rugged paratrooper who had commanded Russian airborne units during the war in Afghanistan. Grachev subsequently became head of the Western Army Group stationed in the former East Germany, until the break-up of the Soviet Union led to its withdrawal. Using information from his extensive military sources, Kholodov accused Grachev of belonging to a clandestine “mafia in uniform” that was selling off warplanes, helicopters, tanks and heavy weapons to the highest bidders in the newly independent states that formed the Russian Federation. He also pursued persistent rumours that Grachev had diverted army funds for his personal use, focusing on the £125,000 spent on a pair of new Mercedes limousines (the media took to calling him “Pasha Mercedes”).
Although he never told his parents, Kholodov was now receiving threats from anonymous callers warning him to “lay off our guys” or else. Through his contacts he learnt that Grachev had banned all senior personnel from talking to him and issued orders to keep him off military bases.
On the day of his death, Kholodov was sent a ticket for the left-luggage office at Moscow’s Kazan railway station. It came from a trusted contact, an officer in the Russian counter-intelligence service, who told him he would find a briefcase containing documents exposing financial scandals within the defence ministry. Kholodov was delighted: he was shortly due to testify before a committee of the Russian Duma (parliament) looking into official corruption.
Kholodov had hurried back to his office with the briefcase. The moment he opened it, a detonator triggered off half a pound of TNT, creating a devastating explosion in the enclosed space. Astonishingly, another journalist working in same room, Katya Deyeva, escaped with minor cuts and bruises. As Kholodov was rushed to hospital, he regained consciousness briefly, mumbling: “It wasn’t supposed to happen like this.” Despite efforts to save him, he was dead on arrival. A murder investigation was immediately opened by the Moscow public prosecutor’s office and Moscovsky Komsomolets agreed to pay for lawyers to represent Yuri and Zoya. “They warned us we’d have to be patient,” Zoya recalls wearily. “But we never dreamt our nightmare would last for over 10 years.”
It was not until 1998 that six men were charged with murdering Kholodov; five were ex-paratroopers, including a former intelligence officer, Colonel Pavel Popovskikh. By then, Grachev had been sacked as defence minister, carrying the can for Russia’s disastrous war in Chechnya and undermined by fresh allegations of corruption. Another two years passed before the trial began. Because the accused had been in the army at the time of the bombing, it took place before a military tribunal, sitting in a former Moscow prison with the media excluded.
