Strange suicide of Olga Kotovskaya

Which country has the highest death toll for journalists? It’s not in a war zone, nor is it a military dictatorship.

The country is Russia, and when three weeks ago Olga Kotovskaya, a former director of an independent TV and radio company, plunged to her death from the 14th floor of a block of flats, she became the 321st journalist to die since 1993.

That was the year when it all started to go horribly wrong for our Russian colleagues, after the five years or so of the ”golden age” of Gorbachov’s “glasnost” reforms. From a position of considerable liberty, media began to fall prey to the oligarchs, gangsters and state security agents who effectively took over the country.

The war in Chechnya has accounted for dozens, though more have been murdered for their reporting, among them the world-renowned Anna Politkovskaya, than have been killed in the battle zone.

The ascendancy of Vladimir Putin, though it has imposed a sterner regime of order on the country after the anarchy of the Yeltsin years, has hardly helped the journalists, since the media have fallen under the grip of the Kremlin, and a culture of impunity has protected the agents of the state and the murkier elements of the security world suspected of involvement in many of the killings.

There are certainly suspicions around the death of Olga Kotovskaya, who had just won a vital legal case against a former Vice-Governor of the Kaliningrad region over his illegal takeover of the TV station Kaskad that she and her husband launched in 1991.

The state prosecutor’s office says she jumped from of a 14th-floor window, but local journalists and independent politicians maintain she was murdered.

Her husband and former co-owner of Kaskad, Igor Rostov, said after his wife’s death: “It was murder. If my dead body is found somewhere on a railroad track, don’t believe I committed suicide.”

Opposition activists in Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave on the Baltic Sea between Poland and Lithuania that is notorious as a centre of crime, insist it was murder. “I cannot imagine a person who has just won the case of her life in court jumping out of a 14th-floor window,” said regional duma deputy Mikhail Chesalin.

Another deputy, Solomon Ginsburg, said Olga Kotovskaya had told him she had been told by high-ranking officials to drop the legal case, in which the takeover of Kaskad was overturned because a document purporting to be the minutes of the crucial board meeting in 2006 was judged a forgery.

Indeed, Olga Kotovskaya, whose forged signature was on the document, was abroad at the time of the supposed meeting.

The Kaliningrad branch of the Russian Union of Journalists has demanded a thorough investigation.

I’m indebted for this information and for the figures on the deaths of Russian journalists to a network of researchers associated with the International Federation of Journalists and the Russian journalists’ union, notably the British writer John Crowfoot, who have compiled a database covering every case.