By Renfrey Clarke
MOSCOW — The scene might have appeared mundane, scarcely news at all: lying inert in a St Petersburg stairwell on November 20, killed by a shot to the base of her skull, was a 52-year-old woman.
The fact that the victim was female was not especially remarkable; plenty of women in Russia die in contract killings. Not even the fact that the victim was a deputy to the State Duma, the lower house of Russia's parliament, would automatically have put the news on the front pages. A number of deputies have met similar deaths in the past half-decade.
But the news of the victim's name — Galina Starovoitova — sent a wave of revulsion and despair through liberal Russia.
When elected officials in Russia are murdered, the presumption is usually that they were involved in some shady business or other. But Starovoitova, who represented a St Petersburg territorial electorate for the small Democratic Russia party, had no known business dealings.
Unusually for a Russian politician, she had a reputation for being motivated by ideas rather than interests. Her attitude to official corruption was relentlessly hostile.
True, for her faith in the self-curative powers of the "free market", she was likened to Margaret Thatcher. But unlike Thatcher, now campaigning to keep mass murderer Augusto Pinochet out of jail, Starovoitova was serious about defending human rights.
So who had her killed? Former privatisation chief Anatoly Chubais immediately pointed to the left. Starovoitova, Chubais argued, had "stood in the way of Communists and bandits". The Communists, Chubais argued, had reason to want her dead because "everything she did, she did to make sure this ideology would never triumph again".
Former prime minister Yegor Gaidar also took aim at the Communists. The murder, he maintained, "had one goal — to intimidate those who disagree with Nazis and fascists". It was necessary, he continued, "to answer this murder with a determined struggle against the repellent brown horde that in recent times has so obviously been crawling out from beneath the red banners of the Communist Party".
Starovoitova, in the weeks before her death, had strongly criticised the Communists over anti-Semitic statements by CP deputy Albert Makashov. The idea that the CP had put out a contract on Starovoitova, however, was so far-fetched that not even the main Moscow dailies, which rarely pass up a chance to attack the left, took it seriously.
For one thing, how would the Communists have paid for the assassination, estimated by sources quoted in the newspaper Segodnya at US$150,000? In the St Petersburg local elections due for December 6, the bloc "Communists of Leningrad" has lacked the money for even a token publicity campaign.
The general conclusion among journalists was that Starovoitova had been killed because she stood in the most dangerous position possible in Russia today — between ambitious commercial-criminal operators and large sums of money.
St Petersburg has a reputation as one of the most crime-infested cities in Russia. The influence of the gangs extends deep into the city administration. For officials who cooperate with the gang bosses, there are handsome bribes, and for those who resist, there are often bullets or bombs.
To win and hold office, St Petersburg politicians must demand stern action against organised crime. Starovoitova, however, stood out because she had a reputation for being serious about it. Over the years she made numerous enemies, especially in the camp of city Governor Vladimir Yakovlev.
Within the city, various mob clans compete for money and turf, and local officials are at times in a position to decide which will get the sweetest plums. This makes elected office a prize to be fought for.
As described by Segodnya, the current race for the St Petersburg municipal legislature has become "the dirtiest electoral campaign in the history of Russia ... in each of the districts there is at least one representative of the criminal world on the ballot".
Starovoitova threatened to spoil the whole game for the bandits by putting together a bloc of candidates who, she hoped, could not be bought or intimidated. For months, she tried to persuade fractious and demoralised liberal grouplets to bury their differences and present united slates.
Ironically, one effect of Starovoitova's murder may be to shame the St Petersburg liberals into doing just that. The huge turn-out for her funeral — reported to be more than 10,000 — suggests that candidates identified with her will poll well on December 6.
But even if the new deputies are brave to the point of being suicidal, the obstacles they face seem overwhelming. Most importantly, their basic approach is untenable.
Starovoitova's main presumption in her fight against organised crime was that Russia's new elite wanted to reform itself — that key elements within it were ready to make sacrifices and take risks in order to assert the rule of law. This has never been a realistic position.
At the beginning of the decade, the groups at the front of the queue to become the country's new capitalists were industrial managers addicted to stealing state property, thuggish party-state bureaucrats and the already burgeoning mafia. With very few exceptions, the people who have made really big fortunes in the years since have done so by breaking or bending the law (often paying bribes on a huge scale) in order to seize public property.
If the genuine rule of law was imposed, these people would be stripped of their assets and jailed. They are determined to stop that happening.
Logically, the democratic intelligentsia at the beginning of the 1990s should have foreseen what was coming, shunned the would-be capitalists and sought allies among layers that had a real stake in democracy and the rule of law — primarily, the workers and peasants — to try to block the theft of the "property of all the people".
But, blinded by a phobic anti-socialism, the democrats of the early "reform" period threw themselves into ensuring the triumph of the people who would eventually become their tormentors.
Starovoitova, like most of her associates, thus made a string of political errors that helped guarantee that her hopes of democracy and human rights would largely be dashed. It would be an insult to the memory of a brave and intellectually honest woman to suggest that she shared in responsibility for her murder. But anyone who shares her democratic vision has to reject her illusions in capitalism and capitalists.
No reforming current within the elite is going to nail the people who hire the killers, or root out the bribe-takers from the ministries. The job is too vast and mortally dangerous, the members of the elite who might take it on too compromised.
The only force capable of defeating organised crime, and of making democracy and human rights a reality, is the mass of the population, the workers and peasants, mobilised in struggle for their class interests.
At the end of the century, as at the beginning, the tasks before the Russian masses include making the democratic revolution. Once again, the tasks of the democratic revolution are intertwined inextricably with those of the socialist one.