"A campaigning Russian lawyer was shot dead in central Moscow today after giving a press conference to draw attention to the early release of an army colonel convicted of the murder of a young woman during the war in Chechnya.
Officials said that Stanislav Markelov, who also represented the slain journalist Anna Politkovskaya, was shot dead in the street by an unknown gunman moments after speaking out about the case of Yuri Budanov.
A young female journalist accompanying Mr Markelov later died in hospital after being seriously injured when she tried to intervene.
Anastasia Barburova was reported to be working freelance for Novaya Gazeta, the opposition newspaper which also employed Politkovskaya."
Something like a dozen journalists have died since Putin came to power in 2000 and no one has ever been convicted of these murders. Now, it seems, the dragnet has widened to include even their associates and human rights activists more generally. Stanislav's onetime client, Anna Politkovskaya , was not only one of the most famous—second after Paul Klebnikov, the editor of the Russian Forbes—but also the one whose death meant the most to me—and to a free press in Russia. (I once wrote a poem about the day of her death, ironically, but surely not coincidentally, Putin's birthday and I think it is probably one of my best.) Her book Putin's Russia is absolutely beautiful. I still look forward to reading the dispatches on the Second Chechen War that won her the enmity of the Kremlin and the accolades of the Western press collected in A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya and The Dirty War: A Russian Reporter in Chechnya.
I don't know how the original Russian of her reportage reads, but even in the translation, one can feel the pulse and throb and swing of each sentence as it unfolds with the moral urgency of a derailing locomotive. And the outrage. The outrage, above all else. I remember that Anne Applebaum, in a generally eulogistic obituary for Slate, had the gall to fault her for being overly pessimistic, but in a world where outrage has all but disappeared, especially the kind of outrage steeped in such fervid eloquence, she cannot be pessimistic enough.
I don't know how the original Russian of her reportage reads, but even in the translation, one can feel the pulse and throb and swing of each sentence as it unfolds with the moral urgency of a derailing locomotive. And the outrage. The outrage, above all else. I remember that Anne Applebaum, in a generally eulogistic obituary for Slate, had the gall to fault her for being overly pessimistic, but in a world where outrage has all but disappeared, especially the kind of outrage steeped in such fervid eloquence, she cannot be pessimistic enough.
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