THE LOW POST: Scum Season

I've been avoiding the whole Politkovskaya issue, mainly because I'm no longer a part of that world. But on the day she was killed, there were a lot of phone calls back and forth among those of us who used to work in Moscow or who happened to know her (I met her a few times only), with everyone offering the usual expressions of astonishment and the usual speculation about who was responsible and why. If you live in Russia long enough, unfortunately, you have these conversations quite a lot. By my count Politkovskaya was the fourth reporter from that newspaper alone who's been assassinated in recent years, with the paper also losing a freelancer named Viktor Popkov, a section editor named Igor Domikov (brained with a hammer in his podyezd) and another famed dissident voice, Yuri Shekochikhin, who was poisoned a few years back.

And that's only one newspaper, and that's occurring in a relatively safe area of operations for Russian journalists. The number of reporters who have been attacked nationwide in Russia has long ago surged past a point of being worth counting. If you want to get a sense of the geography of repression in Russia, check out this map prepared by the Glasnost Defense Foundation. The map is arranged with a tinge of gallows humor. The yellow parts, which include Moscow and St. Petersburg (where assassinations are still not uncommon), are considered "relatively free." The red parts, which are most of the country and especially most of Siberia, are "relatively unfree." The brown parts -- in particular the far east and the Caucasus -- are basically "unfree."

But let's forget "unfree" and "relatively unfree" for the moment and concentrate on "relatively free," since that appears to be the acceptable minimum -- the level of respect for free discourse we expect from our "close friends," the vigilant safeguarding of journalistic freedom we apparently need to see before we open the gates of the WTO to strangers. What people have to remember about repression of the press is that it isn't just a matter of murdering the odd incorrigible investigative journalist. In places like Russia the fight has two fronts: You put a boot in the ass of the troublesome minority when it demands it, but you spend most of your time with the other half, the mainstream media, peopling it with cowards and lackeys and half-bright clerks who'll sell out their mothers for a new Skoda and a trip once a year to some shitty third-class beach in Ibiza. As the experience of both post-communist Russia and America has proven beyond any doubt, the vast majority of journalists in this world will roll over for anyone who pays the bills even without the threat of violence. But you get a much more enthusiastic crowd of reportorial ball-washers and ass-kissers when you dash the brains out of the rare malcontent who steps out of line, and this is what Putin has achieved in Russia.

That's why the best way to get a sense of what life is like for journalists in Russia these days isn't to ponder the crime scene of Anna Politkovskaya. The best way is to read the reaction to Politkovskaya's death in the "relatively free" Moscow media. Although there were many moving tributes, there was a definite editorial strategy that the bulk of the major papers pursued, a strategy as clearly coordinated from above as one of Karl Rove's election-season media campaigns. It was obvious that the relevant Russian editors got the memo: Politkovskaya was killed by Chechen terrorists or other criminals, no other versions of the murder are to be taken seriously and in fact her murder was clearly conceived as a means to defame Vladimir Putin, who should also be considered a primary victim in this business.

Natalia Kozlova of Rossiiskaya Gazeta posited that "businessman" Boris Berezovsky was to blame and added: "If the London resident is connected to the death of the journalist it would be very advantageous for him. It would certainly create a stir in Russia and inspire a negative reaction around the world. And it would provide a reason to criticize the Russian authorities for the death of an opposition journalist." Then there was Vitaly Tretyakov of Moskovskaya Gazeta, who theorized that Politkovskaya's American citizenship made her a humanitarian target for the Chechens and added, "A bigger gift to the enemies and opponents of Vladimir Putin and a bigger blow to his image could not possibly be imagined."