Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [9]
It is not yet late on November 4, the day after the assassination attempt, but as usual you can’t see a thing in the Ryazan suburb of Dashkovo-Pesochnoye. The district itself does not really seem to exist. Zubkova Street, “Broadway,” can only be sensed, immersed in the darkness of non-being. You can only feel that somewhere nearby is habitation. All the conditions for a successful hit are there. We grope our way along, guided by Valentina Komarova, Mikhail’s mother, who is shocked by what has happened. She has two sons. The younger, Dima, is 20 years old and a promising footballer. Her elder, Mikhail, “has turned out like his grandmother,” Valentina explains, with a mixture of pride and fear. “She was a truth-teller too. She survived the war and is still fighting to this day, although she is 80. She doesn’t give in, and she’s penniless. Misha is the same. How many times have I begged him, ‘Don’t, son. Let them live their lives, and we will live ours.’ At work people kept telling me, ‘This is going to end badly.’ There, we’ve arrived. This is our entrance, No. 14.”
It was on these steps that two people in black woollen hats and leather jackets, the uniform of Russian hitmen, were waiting for Mikhail. The neighbours spotted them but, as is the way, thought nothing of it. “As long as I’m all right, as long as it’s not me they’re beating up, everything is fine.” Here is the staircase the journalist crawled up, leaving a trail of blood, in order to escape his would-be killers. Today, just like yesterday, all the doors are firmly shut. The entrance is well adapted for murder, with dark corners in which you are your own rescue service, your own pyramid of power, prosecutor and militia.
Incidentally, the October District militia station is just round the corner. Actually, it is world famous because it was near here that, also in the darkness which is a friend not only of hitmen but also of the FSB, in the autumn of 1999 the Ryazan Directorate of the Federal Security Bureau was caught red-handed planting explosives in an apartment block just before the resumption of the Chechen War, the so-called hexogen “sugar” training exercise.*
“Have you heard that somebody made an attempt on the life of the journalist Mikhail Komarov in your district yesterday?” I ask some young militiamen anxiously peeping out of the door.
“Yes. We’ve just seen it on television.”
“This kind of thing must often happen here, since you’re taking it so calmly?”
“No, this is the first time,” Vitaliy Vyazkov, duty officer at the station, says, not turning a hair.
Early morning on November 5. On Wednesdays the October District Militia have an inspection parade. Some of the militiamen have not bothered to go to it and are smoking by the door, discussing the attempt to kill Komarov. “He should have kept his head down,” a woman smoking a cigarette mutters. The others agree.
Their superiors arrive, the Acting Head of the District Militia, Alexander Naidyonov, and his deputy Yevgeny Popkov. “We have nothing to say,” is their curt joint communiqué.
“Can you at least tell me whether you are instigating a criminal investigation? It is already November 5.”
Colonel Naidyonov almost runs away from me, his eyes darting all over the place.
What’s the problem? Isn’t it straightforward: if there has been an attack on someone it should be investigated? Or might the militia’s skittishness relate to the fact that in his statement Komarov named as his own prime suspect the Ryazan oligarch, Sergey Kuznetsov, one of the ten wealthiest locals, the owner of a large shopping center and much else besides, about whose business methods Komarov frequently wrote?
This explanation seems to be confirmed when Investigator Mikhail Zotov, accompanied by Colonel Naidyonov, arrives to question the victim for the first time in the provincial neurological clinic.