The case appeared to get high-priority treatment as then-Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov ordered a special crimes unit to investigate. Investigators did not disclose the basis for that conclusion, and Nukhayev’s whereabouts were never made clear. Russian authorities later declared that Nukhayev, angered by the book’s anti-separatist approach, had ordered Klebnikov’s killing. His 2003 Russian-language book, Conversation With a Barbarian, drew on interviews with the Chechen separatist leader Khozh-Akhmed Nukhayev. While his investigations often focused on the connections between Russian business, politics, law enforcement, and organized crime, he also probed armed conflict and political strife in Chechnya. Among the sensitive subjects he explored were the 1995 murder of television journalist Vladislav Listyev and the “gangster capitalism” of the 1990s. Klebnikov was no stranger to risky topics. A veteran investigative journalist, Klebnikov immediately put Russia’s business elite in the limelight by publishing a list of the country’s wealthiest people, “The Golden Hundred.” The list caused a stir among the country’s entrenched oligarchs, most of whom preferred to keep descriptions of their assets off the pages of a high-profile magazine. In his first commentary for the magazine, he wrote that Russian business had arrived at a “new, more civilized stage of development,” and he cited the launch of his magazine as evidence. Klebnikov, an American of Russian descent, had launched the magazine’s Russian edition just months before, in April 2004, believing that reforms were propelling the country toward greater transparency in business and politics. The wounded Klebnikov described an assailant with “black hair, black clothes” but did not know the person’s identity or who might have been behind the shooting, said Russian Newsweek journalist Aleksandr Gordeyev, who talked with the journalist while an ambulance was on its way. As he left his Moscow office around 10 p.m., at least one gunman fired nine times from a passing car. Paul Klebnikov, 41, the founding editor of Forbes Russia, was working late on July 9, 2004. According to Novaya Gazeta, the independent Moscow newspaper, powerful interests prevented the investigation from digging deep enough or reaching high enough to learn the truth about Politkovskaya’s murder. The man identified by the government as the gunman disappeared before he could be charged. Three defendants-the alleged middleman, getaway driver, and lookout-were acquitted in the 2006 murder, although the Supreme Court later ordered a retrial. In this case, the openness of the proceedings revealed major weaknesses in the state’s case.
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Much of the Politkovskaya trial was open to the public, despite the presiding judge’s attempts to close the proceedings. The purported mastermind was never apprehended. But though the government appealed and won the right to retry the case, one defendant disappeared and the case was not brought back to court. After two defendants were acquitted in the 2004 killing, a prosecutor publicly decried “serious violations” in court procedures.
Most notably, the presiding judge left jurors vulnerable to intimidation and appeared to intervene in the verdicts.
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In the Klebnikov case, which was tried behind closed doors, a series of questionable judicial decisions tainted the conduct of the proceedings. Yet neither case ended in convictions, an outcome that laid bare systemic weaknesses in the judicial system: a lack of transparency, an absence of accountability, a susceptibility to external influences, and an inability to pursue cases to their conclusion. Prosecutors charged suspects and brought cases to trial before juries.įew other investigations into journalist murders have reached this level of progress in Russia. Investigators recognized the journalists had been killed in retaliation for their work. Much seemed to go right in the investigations into the murders of Forbes Russia Editor Paul Klebnikov and Novaya Gazeta reporter Anna Politkovskaya.
Anatomy of Injustice: The Unsolved Killings of Journalists in Russia
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