| With the high attrition rate of members of the Russian
parliament, it is tempting to believe that the fatal allergy that has struck
down the campaigning journalist and politician Yuri
Shchekochikhin, at the age of 53, was not due to natural causes. His
reporting had made him many enemies, and, as deputy chairman of the parliamentary
security committee and deputy editor of the liberal newspaper Novaya Gazeta,
he had upset almost everyone of any importance.
Shchekochikhin had long campaigned against Boris Yeltsin's brutal war in
Chechnya - viciously continued by Vladimir Putin - and had reported frankly
on more than a dozen visits to the battle-scarred region. "In my worst
dream, I could not imagine sitting in an armoured personnel carrier, shots
raining down, bodies at the side of the road. Oh Lord!" he wrote in
his
recent collection of articles documenting the conflict. "I know I
am not the
main witness. But I was there, I saw."
Shchekochikhin had also reported on corruption in the Moscow municipal
administration, the defence ministry, the prosecutor-general's office,
and
the Russian military forces in Chechnya. Last year, as part of his attempts
to broker a peace deal in the region, he travelled to Liechtenstein to
meet
Akhmed Zakayev, an envoy to the Chechen rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov;
Zakayev is regarded as a criminal by the Kremlin and is currently fighting
extradition from Britain.
A veteran journalist who took full advantage of the greater freedoms
launched by Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s, Shchekochikhin never shied
away from such dangerous topics as organised crime and corruption at the
highest levels. He was elected from the Ukrainian town of Luhansk in 1989
to
the congress of people's deputies, the first and only semi-free parliament
the Soviet Union ever had. Its chaotic, freewheeling style gave him a taste
for trying to turn campaigning into action.
Just a month before the unsuccessful coup of August 1991 that nearly
unseated Gorbachev, Shchekochikhin wrote an open letter to the Soviet
president warning that the crackdown in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius
at
the beginning of year had been initiated by anti-reformists in his
government. As the coup began, sympathetic KGB officers tipped him off
that
he was among the leading opponents scheduled for arrest. Shchekochikhin
ignored the first three warnings, but after a fourth call he slipped out
of
his home and joined the barricades around the Moscow White House, then
the
home of the old Russian parliament and the site of Yeltsin's famous address
from the top of a tank.
Unlike many in the democratic movement, Shchekochikhin made the transition
to new-style politician, keen less on grandstanding and hand-wringing than
on the daily grind of persuasion and planning. Although he went back to
journalism as the Soviet Union fell apart at the end of 1991, he soon felt
impelled to return to the political stage, and, in December 1995, he was
elected to the state duma, the lower house of the Russian parliament, for
the liberal Yabloko party. He was reelected in December 1999.
Born into a military family in Kirovabad (now Gyanja), in Azerbaijan,
Shchekochikhin studied journalism at Moscow State University, writing
simultaneously for the daily Moskovsky Komsomolets. After graduating, he
joined Literaturnaya Gazeta, a weekly known for its liberal, often daring,
line. Under his guidance, in 1987 it became the first mass-circulation
paper
to publish a letter criticising the Soviet labour camp system.
Both in and out of parliament, Shchekochikhin kept up a steady stream of
journalism and broadcasting. In the early 1990s, his pioneering television
programme Special Brigade ran many investigations - until, in October 1995,
the management took it off air, alleging that Shchekochikhin "destabilises
the situation in the country".
Shchekochikhin was active in numerous human rights organisations, including
Memorial, which keeps alive the memory of the victims of the communist
era.
He was also a UN expert on organised crime. More recently, he had been
withering in his criticism of President Putin's leadership, and what he
regarded as the resurrection of Soviet methods. "We are returning
to where
we have escaped from," he complained. "We are being driven ever
more
insistently back to the radiant past."
He was similarly critical of western aid to Russia, especially of the wealth
that it brought to foreign consultants and well-connected Russians. He
told
American audiences: "Do not help, thank you. All of your aid resulted
in our
beautiful dachas and beautiful houses. You're only helping the communists
in
Russia to continue to promote communism. It's not good to develop a unipolar
world."
After his death, colleagues at Novaya Gazeta declared that Shchekochikhin
"was naive in his striving for justice, but it was this very naivety
that
turned out to be his best weapon against evil."
Twice married, he is survived by his two sons, Konstantin and Dmitriy.
· Yuri Petrovich Shchekochikhin, journalist and politician, born
June 9
1950; died July 3 2003
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