Nature Weeps As A Heroine Is Buried

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Fifteen years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, authoritarianism is essentially back. Putin's rigid bureaucratic regime has asserted control of the judiciary, enacted legislation that effectively prohibits the emergence of independent political parties, and gone to great lengths to stifle critical media coverage. On the day of the funeral, Putin denounced Politkovskaya's murder as a "disgustingly cruel crime which must not go unpunished," though he also downplayed her importance, saying, "her influence on political life in Russia was very minor."

Working their way through the decidedly not minor crowds were Politkovskaya's journalist colleagues. Many of them have been unemployed since their once independent TV stations and publications were closed or taken over by Kremlin loyalists over the last six years. "Things feel as oppressive as back in the late 1970s," muttered one of them to Kondaurov. "Worse," Kondaurov responded. "People got jailed then, but didn't get killed."

Walking with me to Politkovskaya's service, Dmitry Furman of the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute of Europe said how similar this experience felt to the funerals of poets Boris Pasternak in 1960 and Vladimir Vysotsky in 1980: "In Soviet times, funerals of individuals frowned upon by the state but beloved by the people emerged as the only form of spontaneous public protest."

Pasternak's funeral sparked the first public act of defiance by the Soviet intelligentsia in decades, and Vysotsky's grew into the first spontaneous mass demonstration in Moscow since the late 1920s. That outpouring of feeling so scared the authorities that his supporters were forbidden from staging a memorial play in his honor, which only added to smoldering discontent.

Moscow had not, until last week, seen a mass dissident demonstration for years. Nor had cities like St. Petersburg, or Yekaterinburg in the Urals, where rallies all paid homage to Politkovskaya. Not unlike 26 years ago, it took the death of an individual of rare honesty, courage and popularity to jolt people into appreciating that that there are too few like Politkovskaya left in their midst.

Not many of the thousands of people gathered in the chilly rain to pay their last respects to a heroic journalist would have expected that, 15 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, they would have occasion to once again feel like dissidents in the face of a too-powerful state.