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of the interrogation of witness Dalayev have also disappeared. Lapin, trying to force him to incriminate himself, ground Dalayev’s teeth down with a file. Dalayev’s testimony is also important in respect of the disappearance of Zelimkhan Murdalov because he was the last person to see him when Murdalov was dragged by Lapin personally, a Russian militiaman with his nickname “Cadet” shaved on the back of his head, into the cell of the holding facility in the October District Office after being tortured. We will not deny that we too are looking for those records, in order that the Russian Constitution should win in its battle with those who are supposedly there to protect it, and so that the court should be in possession of all the available information.

Finally, a few words about the way the Board of the Prosecutor-General’s Office of the Russian Federation in the North Caucasus works nowadays. It is the main center to which prosecutions for war crimes in Chechnya are sent. How can this sort of thing be possible? Why should the Prosecutor’s Office be so dogged in its whitewashing of war criminals? How has this institution been reduced to Essentuki plc, a state enterprise with extraordinarily limited liability?

From the very beginning of the Second Chechen War, the Prosecutor’s Office gained the reputation of being subservient to the will of the Kremlin, behaving like a baggage wagon trundling along in the distant rearguard of the Army in all matters relating to war crimes. We are now reaping the bitter fruits of its failures. In order even to have a criminal charge brought against a serviceman observed looting, robbing, abducting people, trading in corpses, torturing and murdering (to list only the most routine war crimes in Chechnya), it is essential to make the case “resonate,” as everybody from the District Prosecutor to the Prosecutor-General himself will explain. A case resonates when the prosecutors get a kick up the backside from the public, from the pages of newspapers, from television screens. The mere fact that murders, abductions, looting and the like have taken place is not sufficient to get the Prosecutors to act.

This has been the state of affairs for three years now, since the beginning of the war itself. During this time dozens of people working for the Prosecutor’s Office have received government awards, titles and ranks for profaning their profession, while the few honorable activists who try to fulfil their obligations are relentlessly purged from these serried ranks, and the very best have actually been killed in Chechnya in mysterious circumstances. Like, for example, the fearless Alexander Leushin, the first investigator who took up the Cadet affair and was trying to have an arrest warrant issued when he was shot dead by “unidentified assailants.”

Naturally, “keep your nose out” has become a Pavlovian conditioned reflex for Prosecutors working in Chechnya and Essentuki. They salivate when they hear the bell. Because of this, we once again have a region in our country where the laws of the Russian Federation do not operate. It is called Chechnya. Where soldiers can do whatever their appetites dictate, and criminal cases brought against them, even when they have been opened, are subject to “laundering” in Essentuki, with a kindly nod towards the murderers, and quite extraordinary heartlessness towards their victims.

THE CADET AFFAIR: A CRIMINAL CASE IS OPENED INTO DEATH THREATS TO Novaya gazeta’S COLUMNIST, ANNA POLITKOVSKAYA

September 5, 2002

“Forgive my troubling you, but you have just 10 days to publish a retraction of your article ‘The Disappeared,’ otherwise the militia officer you have hired will be unable to protect you. Yours sincerely, The Cadet.”

This was the second message bearing this signature to arrive in Novaya gazeta’s electronic mailbox. We were obliged to take additional security measures, and Anna Politkovskaya left Russia under the Program for the Protection of Journalists.

Almost a year has passed. Criminal cases were opened against The Cadet and a number of other officers,