Death of Russia Official Hits Nerve
Sunday, 22 November 1998
M O S C O W (AP)
IN MODERN Russia, the crime was so common as to be mundane. Two
thugs, armed with machine pistols and silencers, stalked and killed a
powerful figure, then slipped away into the night. Police vowed to catch
them and politicians expressed outrage.
Usually, that would be the end of the story.
This time, though, the person shot was one of the most prominent and
popular women in Russian politics, a prospective presidential candidate
with friends in the highest reaches of the Kremlin.
As outrage mounted Sunday, it seemed clear that the killing of Galina
Starovoitova was not going to be treated as a routine crime, and some said
it might turn out to be a watershed in Russian politics.
"This is impossible to tolerate any longer," said Grigory Yavlinsky, the
leader of Yabloko, a reform-oriented party. "We must stop feeling
powerless before the increasingly brazen scum. We cannot go on living as
though everything is running as usual."
Starovoitova, a member of parliament and a leader of the liberal Russia's
Democratic Choice party, was walking up the stairs of her apartment
building in St. Petersburg with a young aide Friday evening. A pair of
assailants - police believe it was a man and a woman - appeared behind
them and opened fire.
Starovoitova, shot three times in the head, collapsed and died instantly,
authorities said. The aide, 27-year-old Ruslan Linkov, was critically
wounded but managed to telephone a news agency reporter before losing
consciousness.
Police have recovered two guns, and are hoping that Linkov can provide a
description of the killers. He had regained consciousness but still could not
speak Sunday.
Although it was still not clear who killed Starovoitova or why, the slaying
had all the earmarks of a contract hit - a remarkably common crime in
post-Soviet Russia. Most of the killings involve business deals and the
corruption that has swamped the government and the economy.
Until now, the most notorious of the slayings was that of popular television
host Vladislav Litsyev, who was shot outside his Moscow home in 1995.
But there have been hundreds of others.
St. Petersburg has been especially plagued. Last year, the city's deputy
governor was gunned down on the street. In the past two months alone,
hitmen have claimed the lives of a legislative aide, a high-ranking city
official and a prominent banker.
So deeply has the toxin infected Russian society that President Boris
Yeltsin ordered an investigation last week into reports that his Federal
Security Service - the domestic successor to the KGB - had ordered the
death of Boris Berezovsky, the nation's most prominent businessman and
the head of the Commonwealth of Independent States.
There is no indication that anyone attempted to carry out an assassination
of Berezovsky. But Yeltsin's order was the equivalent of President Clinton
ordering an investigation into whether the FBI was plotting to kill Microsoft
chairman Bill Gates.
Yet as remarkable as that move was, it has been vastly overshadowed by
Starovoitova's death. Television news since Friday has carried reports of
little else. Reaction has poured in from virtually every important figure in the
country and from surrounding nations.
Yeltsin, calling her "my comrade," declared that he would personally
oversee the investigation into her death.
There was, in much of the reaction, the sense that a line had been crossed.
Perhaps it was because Starovoitova was a woman, perhaps because she
elicited impassioned support, or perhaps because people are simply fed
up.
But in more characteristic fashion, her death also led to a round of political
finger-pointing.
Starovoitova's colleagues declared - without any apparent evidence - that
her Communist foes in the Duma, the lower house of parliament, were the
most likely culprits in her death.
Historian Dmitry Likachyov, one of the nation's most revered and trusted
figures, said her killing seemed to signal the "outburst of a new Red
Terror."
By late Saturday, the name-calling had gone so far that Interior Minister
Sergei Stepashin called a news conference to say there was no evidence
that the Communist speaker of the Duma, Gennady Seleznyov, was
involved in the slaying.
Seleznyov went on television to say he was saddened by her death. "But,"
he added, "I would not like the deputies who sat on the same bench with
Galina Starovoitova in the State Duma ... to turn this into a political show."
It is too early to know where the recriminations and political maneuvering
will lead. For now, the only thing certain is the Starovoitova has become
the latest in a long line of Russian martyrs. |
