Running Out of Arguments for Putin's Russia

PARIS -- On Friday night, I got a call from Moscow: my friend Paul Klebnikov, the editor in chief of Forbes Russia, had been fatally shot as he left work. Paul's wife, Musa, was in Italy with their three children and had just spoken to him on the phone before he was shot. She was heartbreakingly brave the next day. Please gather articles about her husband, she asked, for his boys.

Then the anger rose. I am among those former Moscow correspondents, and those people of Russian descent, who have tried to stay optimistic about today's Russia and President Vladimir Putin, even in the face of all the distressing reports about Chechnya, Yukos, the media clampdown and the swelling powers of the Kremlin.

You have to remember where they were a scant 15 years ago, I would argue: Putin has to restore control over the government and economy, and the oligarchs have to be reined in.

It will be far harder to argue this, now that someone has pumped four bullets into a journalist who earnestly thought that he could help Russia make it by writing the truth about its dark underside. It's tough to continue pretending that Russia is just in transition, struggling to emerge from Communism's rubble.

Twenty journalists have now been assassinated in Russia for their work; 14 since Putin became president. Not one of the murders has been solved.

Three hours before Paul, who was 41, was gunned down, the last decent political program in Russia had its final broadcast. Savik Shuster's weekly program, "Svoboda Slova" was yanked off NTV, the station that Putin has been forcibly bringing under state control, by the newly installed general director. The "we're reviewing the programming" stuff rings hollow. Shuster had consistently high ratings, and they went off the charts when he held political debates during the election campaign for Parliament. The last show was about Russia's banking crisis. The week before that, a program about corporate responsibility was NTV's top-rated show.

I understand that in his last minutes, Paul said he had no idea who would have taken out a contract on his life. He had written books and articles about sleazy figures, and under his supervision, Forbes Russia had published a list of the 100 richest people in the country -- most of whom would have serious problems explaining how they got their billions.

Friends worried about him, especially when his book on the exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky came out. But he was not afraid. He was convinced that a Western journalist saying the truth in Russia would be respected.

I avidly hope that those who ordered his killing are caught. I hope the trial will be public.

But in the end, the perpetrators are not the issue: It is the cruel confirmation that the law and an appreciation of freedom have not taken hold in Russia. It is the evidence that murder is still perceived as a normal and safe way of settling scores and amassing wealth, and that the Kremlin is not really interested in doing anything about it.

A free press is not the enemy, nor is the West. Paul Klebnikov wrote about oligarchs and crime because he believed, almost naively, that Russia really wanted to become normal, that its president really wanted to know what was wrong. Many others, like Paul, have wanted to help. But when power tramples on institutions that are at the heart of a free society, we begin to wonder whether we can, or whether we should.

Serge Schmemann is editorial page editor of the International Herald Tribute and a senior writer at The New York Times, where this comment first appeared.