Journalists’ Slayings Sap Russian Media’s Spirits

When two masked, pipe-wielding attackers crashed through a balcony window into his bedroom at 4 a.m., all that saved journalist Alexander V. Minkin was the drapery that entangled the hit men and a crate of apples stored in the doorway that caused them to trip.

The stumbling and bungling gave Minkin and his wife the few vital seconds necessary to comprehend the peril of lead truncheons whooshing through the darkness, one blow so forceful it shattered a wooden dresser only inches from the crusading anti-government columnist’s head.

The Minkins managed to escape to a neighbor’s apartment, from which they summoned the police--only to have their case relegated to a mountain of other unsolved attacks on prominent journalists that officials shrug off as random acts of violence by elusive thugs.

But as the toll of deaths and injuries soars among critics of the Kremlin’s botched and bloody campaign against separatist rebels in Chechnya, suspicion of government involvement has congealed to outright accusation that the iron hand of authority is trying to choke opponents into silence.

“I’m afraid I have to support the theory that the government is involved in many of these incidents,” said Oleg V. Panfilov, head of the Russian Committee to Protect Journalists. “Of 42 serious attacks against journalists last year, we suspect at least half of them were instigated by government officials. Of course, we have no proof, but it cannot be coincidence that the harshest critics are those being attacked.”

Four journalists have been slain in Russia already this year, on the heels of 18 fatal assaults against leading writers and interviewers last year and dozens of beatings, bombings, poisonings and arson attacks that have injured courageous colleagues from Moscow to Vladivostok.

Just five days after the failed attempt on Minkin’s life, freelance photographer Felix Solovyov was gunned down outside his central Moscow apartment. Two journalists covering crime and corruption were murdered last month in the Russian Far East.

*

The incidents have had a chilling effect on much of the Russian media, as fears of retaliation overpower fragile commitments to the defense of a free press.

The latest spate of journalist deaths and injuries has passed with little public notice, with many writers echoing the official line that the attacks are the work of hooligans.

“Everyone is afraid because it is obvious who is behind this,” insisted Minkin, still shaken more than two weeks after the latest of three attempts on his life in the past six months. “Who else besides the leadership could be interested in killing me?”

Minkin’s caustic, satirical accounts of Kremlin actions in Chechnya in the popular daily Moskovsky Komsomolets have chronicled the savage crackdown in humiliating detail and cast him in the role of adversary to President Boris N. Yeltsin and reviled Defense Minister Pavel S. Grachev.

Military connections are also strongly suspected in the October 1994 murder of Minkin’s colleague Dmitri Y. Kholodov, who was killed by a briefcase bomb just before he was to testify in parliament about illegal arms trading by the army.

Mafia gangs bred by official corruption are known to have carried out several other slayings of prominent journalists, including the shooting death a year ago of Russia’s best-known television talk-show host, Vladislav N. Listyev.

*

While Listyev’s slaying spurred an emotional outpouring and demands for protection and justice, the quickening pace of attacks on journalists since then has commanded little attention.

Independent television broadcasts made brief mention of the predawn terrorizing of the Minkins on Feb. 20, but only Vitaly Tretyakov of Nezavisimaya Gazeta dared suggest that the attack had official sanction.

“Until the perpetrators and instigators of the attack on Mr. Minkin are found, society is entirely justified in assuming the worst, namely, that this was by political order,” Tretyakov wrote in a front-page report.

Yuri Shchekochikhin, a respected writer for the weekly Literaturnaya Gazeta and a recently elected deputy to parliament, acknowledged increasing risks for journalists in the provinces but contended that no official campaign of retaliation could succeed in Moscow.

He described the three assaults on Minkin as “coincidences” unconnected with his work.

Alexander P. Podrabinek of the human rights journal Ekspress-Khronika said he feared the dangers for Russian journalists will heighten with the intensity of the presidential election campaign this spring and summer.

He pointed to the press critics of the Kremlin’s Chechnya policy as the most vulnerable to government-backed attacks.

“Security for journalists is worsening in general, but the causes depend on the circumstances,” he said. “Those writing about business corruption have more to fear from the mafia, but critics of the Chechnya campaign are obviously at risk from the government.”

Minkin, frightened into hiring a bodyguard but unrelenting in his criticism of the Kremlin, likens his attackers’ failure to kill him to the army’s inability to prevail in Chechnya.

“Everyone keeps telling me this isn’t serious, that if the government wanted to kill me, I would be dead--that these attacks are just warnings,” the columnist observed. “But I don’t believe that. These two men failed for the same reason our soldiers have failed in Chechnya, through sheer incompetence.”