Russia Profile
November 5, 2009
Found: Two Double Murderers?
Investigators Appear to Have Eliminated the Caucasus Connection in the Murders of Markelov and Baburova
By Roland Oliphant
Two former members of an obscure neo-Nazi organization have been arrested for the murder of Stanislav Markelov and Natalia Baburova, Russian media have reported. But is it not just the slightest bit suspicious that somebody chose to leak this information on Russia’s Day of National Unity, which has been adopted by Russia’s far right?
The arrests reportedly took place late Wednesday during what the press is describing as a “special operation.” According to unconfirmed reports in several Russian media, all of which quote “sources in the law enforcement agencies,” two people have been detained on suspicion of direct involvement in the murder.
The first leaks, details of which were printed in the Kommersant daily on Thursday morning, suggested that a man and a woman had been detained. While noting that the investigative bodies were officially refusing to comment, the daily reported “talk” that the woman was believed to have trailed Markelov before the murder and communicated his movements to her male accomplice, who carried out the killing.
By Thursday afternoon the two suspects had been named in public – Yevgenia Khasis, a 24-year-old manager in a trade company, and Nikita Tikhonov, 29, unemployed. Both were once members of Russian National Unity, a far-right group that broke up in 2000.
Both the law enforcement agencies and those close to the Baburova and Markelov have been tight-lipped about the latest developments. Novaya Gazeta, the paper where Baburova worked, declined to comment, saying that it would release a statement on Friday. Meanwhile, Markelov’s brother Mikhail, a former State Duma deputy for the Just Russia party, told Kommersant that he had known about the arrests in advance but refused to go into details, saying he did not want to jeopardize investigative secrets.
When Markelov was killed no one – including, to their credit, the authorities – wasted any time pretending that his murder was not connected to his professional activities. Being in the words of his friend and colleague Tanya Lokshina “the kind of person who receives threats on a daily basis,” the only problem was working out which of his various fields of legal practice had prompted the murder.
A back-of-an-envelope rogues gallery drawn up in the hours after the killing would have turned up three chief suspects. Firstly and most obviously, he had been representing the family of a young Chechen woman murdered by a Russian colonel, Yuri Budanov, in 2000. Budanov was released just days before the murder, and Markelov was shot after leaving a press conference in which he announced his attention to challenge Budanov’s early release. Whether or not Budanov was involved (he denied it immediately), his sympathizers could have acted alone.
Then there was the other side of his work in Chechnya. Although Markelov was praised by the Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov for bringing Budanov to justice, he had also championed the cause of the “disappeared” in the republic. One such case he became involved in was that of Mokhmadsalakh Masaev, who was abducted after accusing Kadyrov of running illegal prisons in Chechnya. Furthermore, Markelov’s murder had been preceded by a series of assassinations of Kadyrov critics.
Mikhail Markelov, however, has dismissed both of these versions. In an interview with the BBC’s Russian service last month, he said that his brother’s murder was “related neither to the Budanov case, nor to the Caucasus.” He also said that he had conducted his own investigation and come to exactly the same conclusions as the official enquiry, and that he knew the “names and whereabouts” of the killers.
Russian National Unity was one of the scarier and more formidable neo-Nazi groups to emerge out the chaos of the early 1990s. It was involved in the defense of the White House during the constitutional crisis of 1993, and its members underwent paramilitary training, including instruction in small arms and explosives. By 1999 the organization was outlawed in certain regions in Russia, including Moscow, but continued to organize until internal disputes led to the expulsion of leader and founder Alexander Barshakov in 2000. “It was without questions a dangerous organization,” said Alexander Brod, the director of the Moscow Human Rights Bureau and an expert on Russia’s far right.
Since then, two organizations – one under Barshakov’s leadership, and another, calling itself the “All Russian Civil Patriotic Movement” (RNU), have claimed the movement’s name and the slavicized Swatika emblem. It is not clear which of these splinter groups Khasis and Tikhonov were involved with, though Barshakov’s lawyer told Interfax Thursday that members of the RNE were not involved in the killing.
But posts on nationalist Internet forums talking about opening champagne after hearing the news of Markelov’s murder are evidence enough of how much he was hated on the far-right. Not long after the murder, Alexander Batrykin, the head of the Investigative Committee of the Chief Prosecutor’s Office, announced that he was focusing on the nationalist connection. “It is quite possible that nationalists were involved in the murder,” said Brod. “They have an aggressive mood, a lot of lists of enemies, including human rights activists and journalists. And they have attacked their enemies before.”
Possibility, however, is not likelihood, and other than clear antipathy toward Markelov and a well-known violent temperament, there is no hard evidence available in the public sphere that nationalists were indeed involved. Presumably, the law-enforcement community will present its evidence in court in the near future, but Markelov’s and Baburova’s families can only hope that prosecutors do not make the same mess of their case as they did with the trial for Anna Politkovskaya’s murder.
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