Pavel Grachev 's response to the brutal killing of Moskovsky Komsomolets reporter Dmitry Kholodov should tar the defense minister's reputation as a public servant forever.


There are here some very clear distinctions to be made. For example, there was nothing amiss in Grachev's decision to sue Moskovsky Komsomolets. The daily has accused him of very serious crimes, including complicity in murder, based on what in the West would be considered the flimsiest of evidence. If he is innocent, then clearly he has no choice but to sue to clear his name.


But the defense minister has done nothing to ease suspicions since Kholodov, who had been reporting on military, coruption was blown up by a booby-trapped bomb.


To say, as Grachev has, that Kholodov could well have brought the explosives that killed him back from one of his reporting trips to the Caucasus and probably blew himself up is a groundless and tasteless allegation to make against the dead 27-year-old.


Under the same category of tastelessness would come Grachev's comment that if Kholodov was murdered and if the killer had been one of his men, the assassin would have been fired for the unprofessional job he did. Small wonder that Kholodov's family believe Grachev has "spat" on their son's grave.


Only a little less insensitive was Grachev's statement that he would not rule out that Kholodov's murder had been engineered in order to bring him, the defense minister of Russia, down -- a rather unlikely claim.


But just as disturbing is what Grachev has failed to say. Kholodov was only one of a number of journalists and officials who have brought forward evidence of widespread corruption at top levels of the military. The names of dozens of officers found by the prosecutor's office to have been involved in such corruption have already been published.Yet at no point has Grachev acknowledged that there could be a problem inside the former Soviet army, a problem of which Kholodov's murder -- and it was a murder -- could well be dramatic evidence.


Instead, Grachev's newly appointed deputy, Matvei Burlakov former commander of the Western Group of Forces, has said that no more than 62 pistols were lost from the garrisons of Eastern Europe since 1946. This, granted that dozens of reporters bought or were offered ex-Soviet weapons from Kalashnikovs to anti-aircraft systems at the train stations of East Germany after the wall cam down, is Alice in Wonderland stuff.


Instead of assailing the dead Kholodov, Grachev should be launching a full-scale investigation both into the charges of corruption inside the Western Group of Forces and into whether any military mafiosi were involved in the reporter's murder. Then he could clear his name.