THE LOW POST: Scum Season

Shortly after these and numerous other similar editorials, Russia's General Prosecutor, Yuri Chaika, came out with the utterly preposterous contention that Politkovskaya's murder could be explained by a zarubezhnaya versiya, or "foreign version," in which foreigners of some kind were to blame for the hit. This claim was credulously reported in papers and Internet news sites all over Russia, and a kind of fairy tale about Politkovskaya's killing began to spread, a tale in which, aside from the "foreign version," there were three basic scenarios that might possibly explain the killing: Chechen terrorists, a plot against Vladimir Putin or revenge on the part of police officials put in jail by Politkovskaya's reports.

This is another way you use the press in Russia, if you happen to control it. If you or one of your ministers comes out and says in the media that the murder was committed by "foreigners," or plotters against the president, that is also a way of announcing to your own that no other investigative scenarios need to be entertained. That's the way things are done over there. Of course, the most obvious suspects in Politkovskaya's killing -- the FSB, forces close to Chechen Prime Minister Ramzan Kadyrov and Putin himself -- will never be investigated. When and if someone is arrested for Politkovskaya's killing, we can be fairly sure it will be a person or persons whose identity corresponds to one of the accepted "versions." And the most popular "version" being pimped by the lapdog media in Russia is the one which contends that Politkovskaya's death was of greatest benefit to the enemies of Vladimir Putin. It will be of no surprise to anyone when a political enemy of Putin is charged with ordering this murder.

In this way large chunks of the "relatively free" Moscow media have, revoltingly, turned the murder of one of Vladimir Putin's greatest enemies into a sympathy ploy for the same V.V. Putin. Some journalists even went so far as to shit on Politkovskaya as a person in their editorials. That is another thing that is done over there. Someone like this dies, and there will be whispers in various quarters: She was an elitist anyway, she was unpatriotic, she drove a fancy car maybe and she was, moreover, not particularly good-looking for a woman . . . not worth killing at all. This is part and parcel of a mentality that was developed over seventy-plus years of Soviet rule. When your neighbor disappears in the middle of the night, don't blame his captors, blame him; remember that he was a kulak who had a cow and windmill while you lay drunk in the gutter, or remember that he had been to Paris once, or was mourned a little too much when he died unexpectedly. Politkovskaya got plenty of that from her supposed colleagues in the Moscow media.

The worst of these was Maxim Sokolov of Izvestia, who appeared to take his editorial line straight from the Kremlin in a piece he wrote right after Politkovskaya's death. Sokolov's theory was that Kremlin would never kill Anna -- not because killing journalists is wrong, but because this particular journalist was too meager and unimportant a figure to be worth the trouble. "For two years already A.S. Politkovskaya has been at the far periphery of popular opinion," he wrote. "The level of recognition of her articles was practically nil," he added, sneeringly noting that such an unimportant person's death could hardly benefit the president.

Very soon after Sokolov's column, Putin said the following to a German newspaper: "I think, in connection with this, and one of our papers today put it correctly, that for the responsible powers in general and for the Chechen powers in particular her death had far more impact than her articles."