Volume 46, Number 1 · January 14, 1999
A Death in St. Petersburg
By Adam Michnik
Speaking at the grave of Galina Starovoitova after she was murdered in St. Petersburg on November 20, one of the Russian mourners recalled that terrorism in Russia is nothing new. But the nineteenth-century terrorists, so perspicaciously depicted by Dostoevsky in The Possessed, terrible as they were, had a certain ethics: they paid with their own lives for taking the lives of their enemies. The terrorism of today's Russia is a work of cowardly bandits who are interested in nothing but money, whether they are doing the bidding of politicians or not. Authorities don't know how to deal with this criminal Mafia. 'No one among us expected,' concluded the speaker, 'that the road to freedom would be so difficult.'
Feature, 2537 words
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