Moscow – The one-year anniversary of the execution-style murder of crusading journalist Anna Politkovskaya was marked Sunday by a series of competing memorial events in Moscow that drew scant crowds and droves of police on a miserably wet day.
About 2,500 police, including some on horseback, were deployed in and around Pushkin Square in the center of the city where several hundred people listened to political speeches that eulogized the reporter and attacked the Kremlin.
A smaller and more relaxed police presence was visible in another part of the city where a pro-Kremlin youth group celebrated President Vladimir Putin’s 55th birthday.
“In death, she confirmed that what she wrote is real and true,” Lyudmila Alexeyeva, head of the Moscow Helsinki Group, a human-rights group, told the crowd in Pushkin Square. “Violence and lies rule in our country, and it’s a disgrace.”
There were brief chants of “Putin without Russia,” a common refrain at opposition rallies, which prompted the head of the Glasnost Defense Foundation, Alexei Simonov, to retort: “What is much sadder is Russia without Polit kovskaya.”
The Pushkin Square event was organized in part by presidential candidate and former prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov, whose supporters waved the flags of his party. Organizers asked that flags be lowered during a minute’s silence because Politkovskaya was not a member of any party – an instruction that some in the crowd had difficulty following as they were listening to their iPods during the speeches.
Other members of the opposition, notably chess star Garry Kasparov, objected to turning the memorial into a political rally and refused to attend. Earlier, Kasparov and others put up a plaque outside the apartment building where Politkovskaya was killed, while colleagues of the journalist attended a gathering at her graveside. Memorials were held in cities across Europe.
City officials also gave a permit to the Movement of the Older Generation for an anti-opposition rally in a park that was the site of a photo exhibit commemorating Politkovskaya, where they blared music as people walked past portraits of Politkovskaya and shots from the conflict in Chechnya that defined her reportage.
“It may have been a stupid mistake,” said Tanya Lokshina, chairwoman of the Demos Center, a human-rights group, of the juxtapositioned rallies. “I’m not sure it was deliberate.”
But in the Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod, officials clearly wanted to disrupt a planned roundtable to discuss Politkovskaya’s legacy, organizers said. Five foreign human-rights activists were detained in the city, allegedly for failing to register with the local authorities. But organizers said local hotels were pressured to renege on hotel reservations, forcing visitors to stay in private homes, which makes the process of registration much more time-consuming and difficult.
The murder of Politkovskaya remains unsolved. Police arrested 11 suspects, but some were later released for lack of evidence. Editors at Novaya Gazeta, Politkovskya’s newspaper, accused the authorities of attempting to sabotage the case. Prosecutors, without providing any evidence, also linked the killing to unnamed enemies of the Kremlin who reside outside Russia – code for the exiled tycoon and Putin critic Boris Berezovsky, who lives in London.
