Late on the evening of April 16, 2004 ^[1], a 30-year-old Russian attorney named Stanislav Markelov was attacked in the Moscow subway by a gang of five men who screamed “you asked for this!” as they brutally beat him unconscious. They stole his cell phone and various legal papers relating to his clients (including Anna Politkovskaya, the firebrand star reporter for the maverick Novaya Gazeta newspaper) from his briefcase, but left his wallet untouched. The police refused to accept his criminal complaint against the attackers, accusing him of faking his injuries ^[2]. Markelov had graduated from law school just eight years before.

Some of the stolen papers related to Markelov’s lobbying efforts seeking the prosecution of OMON officer Sergei Lapin. OMON is like a combination of the FBI and SWAT, assuming their officers were paid $3/hour and their primary function was to eliminate political opposition to the president. Three years earlier, Lapin had been the subject of an article in Novaya Gazeta entitled “The Disappearances” and penned by Politkovskaya, an article which accused him of, among many other things, kidnapping and torturing 26-year-old Chechen Zelimkhan Murdalov ^[3] in a Grozny prison in January 2001. Murdalov then disappeared while in police custody and his body has never been found.

He was not the first victim ^[4] of torture by Russian police officers imported to Chechnya to “keep order.” In fact, as Politkovskaya began pressing Murdalov’s case it was revealed that dozens of young Chechens had been put to death in what some have called Lapin’s “death factory.”

The following year, as the authorities were forced by her coverage to institute criminal proceedings against Lapin, Politkovskaya began receiving death threats. Amazingly, though Lapin was dismissed from the ranks of OMON when the criminal charges were filed, he was released on his own recognizance pending trial after a finding that he was “not threatening” to public safety, and it was reported that he had been “reinstated as a police officer in the city of Nizhnevartovsk” and “awarded a medal ‘For Protecting Public Order,’ accompanied by a letter, signed by the Russian President.” The prosecution then became mired in red tape and essentially ground to halt. Outraged, Markelov began agitating to move the prosecution forward.

Then came the April assault. Undeterred, Markelov pressed the matter forward and, four years after the disappearance, in March 2005, Lapin was finally tried, convicted, and sentenced to 11 years in prison. But that did not end the matter. On October 7, 2006, Politkovskaya was gunned down outside her apartment building in Moscow. Two weeks later, Lapin’s conviction was then suddenly set aside and he was retried, but convicted again ^[5] and handed a slightly shorter sentence.

Markelov then moved to take up Politkovskaya’s mantle. In April 2007, he published an essay ^[6] on the blog of Robert Amsterdam, the lawyer for jailed billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky (who was sent to prison just as he began to appear as a possible challenger to Vladimir Putin for the Russian presidency in 2004). In the essay, Markelov described “secret Ministry of Internal Affairs Order No. 870” which adopted a practice known as “filtration.” This system “involved rounding up men and women and subjecting them to brutal assaults, inclusive of rape and severe bodily injury, in an attempt to weed out so-called threats to society.” The attack on Murdalov fit that pattern, and Markelov claimed he had been contacted by others being victimized by such practices throughout Russia after he became prominent in connection with the Murdalov prosecution. Markelov also began blogging in both Russian and English at a website he created called RuleofLaw.ru ^[7]. All this gave the impression that he intended to expand his activities well beyond the scope of the Murdalov case.

And so he did.

On Monday morning January 19, 2009, for instance, Markelov gave a press conference in downtown Moscow, less than a mile from Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin.

Markelov was speaking as the attorney for the family of 18-year-old Heda Kungayeva, a young Chechen girl who was kidnapped in March 2000 by Russian forces occupying the region, raped, and strangled. The ringleader in the attack, Russian Army Colonel Yuri Budanov, was tried and convicted five years ago and sent to prison on a ten-year stretch (but only after a trial the previous year had been set aside when Budanov beat the rap using a “temporary insanity” defense). To Markelov’s chagrin, on Thursday of the preceding week Budanov had been released on parole, having served only half his sentence. Markelov was far from alone: Even the Kremlin’s puppet ruler in Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, was outraged by Budanov’s release.

Markelov, who had been shadowing the prosecution from the time Budanov first beat the rap, announced that the family intended to file legal proceedings to challenge the early release. He poured scorn on the decision, pointing out that oil oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky had been denied parole just a few months earlier even though his alleged financial crimes were far less serious.

Markelov then left the press conference and walked outside to his waiting vehicle. With him went a young journalism student named Anastasia Barburova, a stringer for Novaya Gazeta. Barburova had been covering the Budanov trial for the paper for some time.

Markelov never made it to his car. At around 2 pm Moscow time an assailant approached him from behind, pointed a silenced pistol at the back of his head, and pulled the trigger. Markelov died instantly, and the assailant attempted to flee. Barburova, heedless of her own safety, charged after the killer and was shot in the head for her trouble. She died in the emergency room several hours later.

These two killings are only the latest in a long string of political murders that began as soon as Vladimir Putin was placed in charge of the KGB with the killing of parliamentarian Galina Starovoitova ^[8]. They will not the be the last — particularly not as Putin becomes more and more desperate to avoid criticism as the Russian economy heads south — unless the leaders of the Western world, starting with Barack Obama, demand otherwise.