Anna Politkovskaya was the most prominent among the few Russian journalists who dared write the truth about the second Chechen war. She travelled to the region for so many years, wrote about such burning issues, took such tremendous risks, that after a while many of us thought that she had managed to transcend danger. It seemed inconceivable that she could be simply, cynically, killed. After all, Russia could not possibly afford such an outrageous scandal.

Apparently, it could. Anna was shot dead at the entrance of her own apartment building. Her death left a gaping hole that cannot be filled.

The murder of Politkovskaya on 7 October 2006 made headlines in Russia and around the world. Russia’s Prosecutor General took control over the investigation. Politkovskaya’s family, friends and colleagues, and the public at large, were reassured time and again that justice would be done. Today, however, those responsible for the killing are still at large, and the authorities have sent a very clear signal to Russian civil society: those who dare criticise the government can be killed, with their killers practically guaranteed impunity.

It is symbolic that the end of the trial on Politkovskaya’s murder fell on 19 February 2009 — precisely one month after the brazen killing of a prominent human rights lawyer, Stanislav Markelov, and another Novaya Gazeta journalist, Anastasiya Baburova. The message to their murderers — and potential perpetrators of other such killings — is no less clear: you can do it and get away with it.

As a tribute to those who have been killed we must not stop trying to ensure that the message is wrong.

Tanya Lokshina works for Human Rights Watch in Moscow

Grachev, a 72-year-old retired colonel and local deputy, was publisher, editor and most likely the main if not the only journalist for the newspaper Solnechnogorskiy Forum. The paper has no website and is not even listed among local newspapers on the town’s main web resources, so in other circumstances this attack could have gone unnoticed.

But if the assailants were hoping not to cause a sensation, they’ve chosen the wrong time. The story of Mikhail Beketov, publisher and editor-in-chief of opposition newspaper Khimkinskaya Prabvda, who was beaten nearly to death in November, continues to make national and international headlines. Not to mention the murders of Beketov’s lawyer Stanislav Markelov and young journalist Anastasiya Baburova from Novaya Gazeta in the centre of Moscow last month.

Moreover, the Solnechnogorsk attack happened just as Interior Ministry officials were declaring that the majority of murders of journalists are not related to their professional activity. ‘Most often these are domestic crimes. The percentage of journalists killed for their publications and investigations is relatively low,’ Valery Gribakin from the Russian Interior Ministry public relations department recently said.

Colleagues say Grachev’s paper was critical of the authorities, and exposed corruption. The next issue is due on 10 February, and is believed to carry more revelations ahead of March’s elections.

‘If we look at Grachev’s newspaper from the point of view of international journalism standards, we may find his stories not very objective,’ one local reporter told Index on Censorship. ‘But today opposition is itself a rare phenomenon, especially in towns like ours, and this is his main value. His newspaper is the only oppositional media in our region.’

Various observers agree that the attack was aimed at putting Grachev out of action at least until 1 March — election day for many Russian regions. It is hard to predict how those attacks against journalists will affect the electoral choices of local communities.

It will be recalled that Anna Politkovskaya, murdered in the lift of her apartment block on 7 October 2006, was the best-known journalist on Novaya Gazeta, exposing human rights violations in Chechnya. And her murder followed those of her colleagues on the paper, Igor Domnikov in 2000, and Yury Shchekochikhin in 2003.

Domnikov’s murderers were only convicted in 2007. Indeed, journalism is a high-risk profession in Russia. Between April 1993 and December 2008 up to 70 journalists were killed for their work or went missing; many more were the victims of work-related assaults. Many of the perpetrators have escaped justice, in a context of complete, or increasingly, partial impunity.

The profession of lawyer has not been so dangerous, but Markelov had a very high profile. He worked closely with Anna Politkovskaya, for example on the ‘Cadet case’ in which the Chechen Zelimkhan Murdalov was tortured to death by special forces police. There is speculation that Markelov knew the name of Politkovskaya’s murderer.

Most strikingly, Markelov represented the family of the Chechen girl Elza (Kheda) Kungaeva, who in 2000 at the age of 18 was raped and murdered by Colonel Yury Budanov. At his first trial Budanov was acquitted on the basis of psychiatric evidence that he was temporarily insane at the time. But Markelov secured a forensic review from the London clinical psychologist Stuart Turner, who in a report which Anna Politkovskaya published in Novaya Gazeta on 23 January 2003, advised that Budanov was ‘healthy, and dangerous’. This helped to secure Budanov’s conviction and sentence to ten years in prison at a re-trial. But, on 14 January, 2009 Budanov was released on parole. Shortly before his murder, Markelov had conducted a news conference protesting at this decision, and demanding that the authorities resume the prosecution.

Despite taking cases for Chechens who suffered at the hands of the authorities, Markelov was a hero in Chechnya. On 20 January 2009, Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov awarded Markelov a posthumous medal ‘for services to the Chechen Republic’, and tens of thousands demonstrated in the Chechen capital, Grozny.

Yet there have been a number of recent murders connected with Chechnya. On 15 January 2009, Umar Ismailov, a 27-year-old Chechen exile and fierce critic of Ramzan Kadyrov was shot dead in Vienna, using very similar methods.

Furthermore, Markelov and Baburova were both left-wing and anti-fascist activists. He had defended the anti-fascist group Anti-Fa, and she had been hired by the paper to write about neo-Nazis, and quoted Markelov in her articles. In April 2004, he was attacked in the Moscow Metro by five skinheads, who beat him up, shouting nationalist slogans, and denouncing his work against Budanov. Anti-fascist activity too has become very dangerous. In October 2008, neo-fascist skinheads kicked 16-year-old Olga Rukosyla to death in Irkutsk and stabbed 27-year-old Fyodor Filatov to death in Moscow. In January 2009, the young leftist Anton Stradimov was beaten to death in Moscow. Racist violence is monitored by the excellent Sova Centre, which publishes regular updates on its website in Russian and English.

Speculation as to the identity of the murderer is rife. Police have already described the murders as a ‘contract killing’. Yet, as several commentators insist, it seems highly unlikely that Budanov or those close to him are involved. Moreover, this was probably not a neo-fascist or skinhead killing, since their victims are usually beaten or stabbed to death.

The daily Izvestia offers another possible explanation. The killer carried out his assassination on a busy street in broad daylight. He did not drop his gun, but calmly walked into a nearby Metro station. And the ‘Makarov’ pistol is standard police issue. Was he a police officer? The police could have had a grudge against Markelov. In April 2008 there was a brawl in Sokolniki police station in Moscow. Five youths were beaten up, but were charged with assaulting police officers. One of the youths was represented by Markelov, who succeeded in having charges pressed against police. On the day of the murder, the case was at its peak.

The General Prosecutor of the Russian Federation, Yury Chaika, and the Head of the Investigative Committee, Aleksandr Bastrykin, have promised that the murder investigation will be lead by them personally.

While a final judgment would be premature, we are entitled to ask whether this will be yet another example of impunity for those responsible. In any event, ultimate responsibility for the state of affairs in which murder and intimidation are so horrifyingly commonplace must be laid on those in political power in Russia.