Slain journalist's tale familiar

MOSCOW — The mourners stood in the rain, which fell heavily at moments on Tuesday, fulfilling their part in a ritual of sadness and anger and, politically speaking, inconsequence, which has become strikingly common in Russia today.

They gathered, in this case, on the western edge of Moscow for the funeral of Anna Politkovskaya, a tenacious, sometimes reckless, but always passionate journalist and human rights advocate, who died three days ago at the hands of, from all appearances, a professional killer.

Her murder has made her a symbol of what Russia has become, but it was only the latest in a series of them. She was 48; the freedoms that she used to make her post-Soviet career, to write openly and critically about the deeds of a new Russian power, are much younger. And, it would seem, equally fragile.

"Anna was, in my opinion, a glimpse of hope," said Tatyana Ivanyenko, a doctor from Moscow who attended the funeral. "And now there is none."

Unnatural death occurs with alarming regularity here, despite the carefully cultivated impression that President Vladimir V. Putin has presided over an era of stability, economic progress and resurgent national pride. Some say it occurs because of it.

"This state killed Anna Politkovskaya," Grigory A. Yavlinsky, a once-prominent democratic leader, declared bluntly as the mourners filed out into a cold, gray afternoon.

Russia is unquestionably a dangerous place for journalists — less so than only Iraq and Algeria, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Thirteen of them have been killed since Putin came to power in 2000, a little more than two a year on average.

The killings — and the failure to solve them — have created an atmosphere of impunity and violence that extends beyond those whose writings or broadcasts anger those in government or business. That was also lamented here, inside an airy white-stone hall at Troyekurovskoye Cemetery.

Politkovskaya's killing was the third mob-style assassination of prominence in the last month alone. Andrei Kozlov, the first deputy chairman of the Central Bank, who led efforts to clean up the dirty money of the country's banking system, was killed as he left a soccer game on Sept. 13. Less than two weeks later, Enver Ziganshin, the chief engineer of Kovytka, a potentially lucrative gas field in Siberia at the center of a dispute with the government, was shot in the back and head at his bathhouse in the countryside.