RussiaMystery death of Kremlin critic
Journalist who was outspoken opponent of Putin-led war against Chechnya killed in Moscow air crashA prominent Russian journalist and media magnate who specialised in investigative exposés of the Kremlin was killed in a mystery air crash at Moscow airport yesterday. Artyom Borovik was one of the loudest critics in Moscow of the acting president, Vladimir Putin, and of Mr Putin's war against Chechnya.
The small Yak-40 aircraft crashed immediately on take-off at Sheremetevo airport, killing all nine people, four passengers and five crew, on board. The cause of the crash was unknown. Police recovered the flight recorder and launched an inquiry, saying that they did not exclude the possibility of a terrorist act.
Borovik, 39, the son of a prominent Soviet journalist, had just taken off for Kiev, accompanying the oil industry executive Ziya Bazayev, a Chechen businessman who heads the Alliance Group oil company.
In more peaceful times, Bazayev worked in the oil industry in Grozny, the Chechen capital which has been destroyed by Russian bombardment and is occupied by Russian troops.
"It's very difficult these days for a Chechen to be in the oil industry in Russia," said the former Russian prime minister Sergei Kiriyenko, fuelling speculation about foul play.
The three-engined passenger jet is generally regarded as a reliable aircraft. The plane that crashed yesterday had been in use for 24 years.
Pilots at Sheremetevo told Russian television that even if all three engines had failed on takeoff, the plane would still have been able to land relatively safely.
"I don't think oil magnates use unreliable aircraft," said Vsevolod Bogdanov, head of the Russian journalists' union.
Such remarks encouraged speculation that the crash was caused by a criminal plot, though there was no fire or explosion. Commentators surmised that enemies of the oil executive in Russia's notoriously ruthless business mafias were responsible for the deaths, or enemies of Borovik whose newspapers and television shows crusaded against corruption in Russia's political and economic elites.
"Power in Russia is not in the hands of the democrats or the communists, it's in the hands of organised crime and the mafia," Borovik once famously declared. He was well connected politically and a respected, outspoken opponent of Mr Putin.
Russian state television, servile to the Kremlin, took his Top Secret programme off the air last year, a decision that Borovik ascribed to the looming election campaigns for the Russian parliament and presidency. He often appeared in his own TV production, reporting on and denouncing the graft-filled netherworlds of Russian politics.
"We often talk of the media wars here, forgetting the real danger," said Mr Bogdanov. "Artyom [Borovik] brings to more than 20 the journalists who have gone."
"His reporting was acute, honest and principled. He took risks. But I don't want to speculate," said the dead journalist's father, Genrik Borovik, a veteran Soviet-era journalist who worked for years as a correspondent in the US.
Mr Borovik's newspapers, Top Secret and Versiya, concentrated on juicy revelations of the venality and the corruption among Russia's rich and powerful. In recent months, the Borovik publications have been bitterly critical of Mr Putin, his erstwhile KGB connections, and his closeness to the entourage of the former president Boris Yeltsin.
The front page of this week's edition of Versiya is headlined "The Routine Genocide" in reference to alleged atrocities perpetrated in Chechnya by Russian troops. Highly unusually for the generally compliant Russian media, the news paper features a two-page report on alleged atrocities.
The main article in the most recent issue of the monthly Top Secret warns that Mr Putin could be a dictator bent on "liquidating liberalism" who is exploiting the Chechen war to mask his dearth of policy ideas.
In January, police sought to detain another prominent investigative journalist, Alexander Khinshteyn, and revive an old KGB practice by sending him to a psychiatric clinic run by the interior ministry outside Moscow.
At the weekend the Kremlin warned the Russian media that it would take action against "fabrications and provocations" in the election campaign.
"The press service will detect all facts of lies with respect to acting President Putin and reserves the right to use all means necessary for an asymmetrical response to provocations," said a statement from the Putin campaign's media office.
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