“Everyone on the military side was in uniform with medals on their chests,” says Deyeva, the journalist who survived the bombing. The prosecutor’s office had done a fairly thorough job, she acknowledges: its 800-page indictment established beyond doubt that the explosives used to kill Kholodov could be traced back to the base where Popovskikh and his co-accused were then stationed. Another damning piece of evidence should have been testimony by a serving member of the military who contacted Moscovsky Komsomolets after it published an appeal for information about the killing. “He was ready to swear that he’d actually seen one of the accused guys assembling the bomb,” Deveya says. “But once the army discovered this, he came under huge pressure and retracted his claim.”
It was established in court that Popovskikh had been present at meetings where Grachev raged against the media for attacking him, singling out the reporting by Kholodov – “this little kid who allows himself to cover me with mud”. In his own court testimony, Grachev agreed that he had instructed subordinates to “sort things out” with the media, but insisted this meant simply that they should try harder to get hostile journalists onside.
As the trial dragged on, Zoya became increasingly concerned about her husband’s health: within two weeks of their son’s death, Yuri had a heart attack that ended his working life. Against his doctor’s advice, he was toiling to produce a report to the court that would challenge the defence’s shaky forensic evidence. “I knew enough about explosives to understand that they were deliberately distorting the facts,” Yuri explains. To prepare his case, he steeled himself to be present when unclaimed bodies from Moscow’s morgues were blown up in experiments to establish the precise power of the blast that killed Dmitry. “Believe me, that is not something anyone would want to experience,” he recalls. A lawyer present at the trial considered that Yuri had wiped the floor with the defence’s forensic experts, yet none of his arguments were accepted in the judge’s closing statement.
In summer 2002, after 19 months of hearings, all six defendants were acquitted. For the Kholodovs, this was hardly unexpected. “The way they behaved in court, it was obvious they knew the military was going to look after its own,” Zoya says bitterly. “They kept pointing at us and laughing or making insulting remarks.”
An appeal court subsequently quashed the acquittals, ordering a re-examination of defence evidence and procedural issues, but in March 2005 the Supreme Court ruled that the original verdicts must stand. Yuri and Zoya were informed that since the statute of limitations in cases of murder had now expired, they could not pursue any further legal action inside Russia.
Although the Kholodovs understand that the authority of the Strasbourg court is limited to issuing findings and recommendations which will not be binding on the Russian authorities, they never considered giving up the fight. “We were worn down, and friends were encouraging us to get back to a normal existence,” says Zoya, “but that would mean that the people who murdered Dima, and those who issued the order, had won. How could we live with that?”
In one of the first speeches that Vladimir Putin made after replacing Boris Yeltsin in the Kremlin six years ago, he went out of his way to praise the work of the country’s journalists. “Without a truly free media,” Putin proclaimed, “Russian democracy will not survive and we will not succeed in building a civil society.” Behind the scenes, his aides were assuring sceptical editors that the former KGB hard man had no problem with the abolition of official censorship under the country’s liberalised press laws.
A few days after Putin delivered this accolade, armed security troops in ski masks raided the offices of the country’s largest private media company, whose newspapers and TV networks had campaigned against his bid for presidency. Then a prominent Moscow commentator, Igor Domnikov, suffered brain damage in a frenzied attack with a hammer outside his apartment building. He worked for Novaya Gazeta, a twice-weekly newspaper with a track record of fearless reporting (a colleague of his had been brutally worked over by masked thugs some weeks earlier). Domnikov never came out of his coma.
Four more journalists were murdered in 2004. By the end of that year, the death toll had reached 10. Among the victims was Natalya Skryl, a business reporter on a newspaper in the southern city of Rostov-on-Don. She had been investigating a bitter takeover battle for a local metallurgical plant when she was ambushed on her way home and bludgeoned to death with an iron bar. Whoever killed her was not after money: her purse and gold jewellery were left behind.
According to the latest reports from the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), since Putin took office at least a dozen Russian journalists have died in what bear all the hallmarks of “contract” killings: two more are missing, presumed dead. In almost every case, the CPJ says, police have failed to come up with arrests, and there has never been a single conviction in the courts. The Russian authorities’ standard explanation for this record is that these killings were almost certainly random attacks, committed by hooligans or muggers. As a result, police spokesmen maintain, there has been “a shortage of suspects” who could be charged.
As the body count mounted – the number of media murders under Putin’s rule is around 35, though not all are regarded as mafia-style retribution – the Glasnost Defence Foundation (GDF), established by Russian activists in the early 1990s to preserve democratic freedom, delivered a sombre warning: “These killings are being organised and paid for by certain circles that have influence over local courts and the police [and] investigative journalism is becoming an extraordinarily dangerous profession.”
That applies particularly in the provinces, where local politics and organised crime often overlap and reporters sniffing around the connection put their lives on the line. After Irina Petrushova founded a weekly paper to challenge the endemically corrupt leadership in Kazakhstan, a decapitated dog was hung outside her office, bearing the message “There will be no next time” (the head was found nailed to the Petrushova’s front door). Fearing for the safety of her young children, she fled abroad but continues to edit the paper in exile.
