Murder in Moscow

The Putin era of brutality claims a victim of rare courage.

ANNA POLITKOVSKAYA, who was murdered in her apartment building yesterday, knew it was dangerous to be an honest reporter in President Vladimir Putin's Russia. Yet, as he wielded a combination of blandishments and bullying to gradually reimpose authoritarianism on his country, Ms. Politkovskaya, 48 and the mother of two, never yielded. Whether reporting on Mr. Putin's dirty war in the separatist region of Chechnya or on the diminution of freedom at home in Moscow, she remained, if not unafraid, unbowed.

Chances are Ms. Politkovskaya's murderer will never be officially identified. At least a dozen other journalists have been murdered in contract-style killings in the past six years, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, and not one of those murders has been solved. Human rights advocates and pro-democracy politicians have been struck down in the same way.

Yet it is quite possible, without performing any detective work, to say what is ultimately responsible for these deaths: It is the climate of brutality that has flourished under Mr. Putin. A former KGB agent himself, he inherited an imperfect democracy and systematically undermined its institutions. The media, political parties, local government, private business -- each in turn was neutered. Loyalty to Mr. Putin has become the quality that matters most, and any opponent is labeled an enemy, to be bankrupted, imprisoned or worse. Meanwhile, ugly nationalism was permitted to flourish.

Now you can see these same values being applied to foreign policy. The independent nation of Georgia, to Russia's south, has not displayed adequate fealty in Mr. Putin's view; it wants to be a democracy, with normal ties to the West. So the czar has launched an ugly campaign of threats against the country and the hundreds of thousands of ethnic Georgians who live in Russia. It is a dangerous moment.

Through all this, the Bush administration has responded with timid complaints bracketed, until recently, by absurd protestations that Russia was moving, overall, in the right direction. France and Germany, dependent on Russian natural gas, have bowed even more cravenly. Against these studies in amoral pragmatism, the courage of small nations, such as Georgia, and lone heroes, such as Anna Politkovskaya, shines all the more luminously.

"Taking a risk comes with the job," she said in 2002, as she accepted an award for courage from the International Women's Media Foundation. "And if you cannot take it any more, if you are unwilling to risk, you have to leave.

"As for myself," she concluded four years ago, "I am not tired yet."