Kholodov Gag Damns The Military

One year after investigative journalist Dmitry Kholodov was blown up in his office by a booby-trapped briefcase, hopes of identifying his killers and bringing them to justice are as remote as ever. The file is still open at the Prosecutor General's Office and the investigation formally continues, but most people are now resigned to the inevitability of the true facts never emerging.


There is nothing unusual about that. The same goes for the murder of the television journalist Vladislav Listyev, gunned down outside his apartment in March of this year, or of the businessman Ivan Kivelidi, poisoned two months ago -- or of countless other victims of contract killings. While prisons are overflowing with drunks, brawlers and petty thieves, the perpetrators of serious crimes apparently have little to fear from the organs of law and order.


But in Kholodov's case there is a much more sinister aspect. It is not as though the police were left short of leads. Before his death, Kholodov had been working on a series of articles about corruption in the Western Group of Forces in the period leading up to their withdrawal from Berlin and eastern Germany. The briefcase that killed him he had picked up from the baggage hall of Moscow's Kazan Station in the belief that it contained crucial documents on this subject. When he opened it, he detonated a bomb that killed him and destroyed his office.


With this much established, it was scarcely surprising that the finger of blame in most people's minds was pointed directly at the Defense Ministry. And when the former commander of the Western Group, General Matvei Burlakov, was fired from his post as deputy defense minister "to protect the honor of the armed forces" some two weeks after the murder, it seemed such suspicions were justified. Kholodov's editor in chief, Pavel Gusev, went even further and suggested that Defense Minister Pavel Grachev may himself have been implicated.


Gusev has, however, failed to produce any strong evidence for such a charge, and Grachev has since taken him and Moskovsky Komsomolets to court. Nobody knows whether or not the military was responsible for Kolodov's death -- that is something for a court to decide and for the public prosecutor to establish.


But what is certain is that if Grachev is innocent, then he is being done a terrible disservice by the silent failure of the prosecutor's office. For until there is some indication that a true investigation is being pursued in connection with Kholodov's murder, the bitter popular assumption can only be that the military was responsible and that the Defense Ministry has made sure that no one is allowed to unearth the truth.