Over the weekend, the anti-democratic crisis brewing in Russia took a horrifying turn for the worse.

On Friday, the Associated Press reported that the Moscow police were circulating requests to primary schools requesting that they be provided with lists of all students with Georgian-sounding last names; the orders came in the wake of the forcible deporation of more than 100 Georgians from Russia as the start of a massive campaign. The AP gave an example: ???????Nina Zubareva, an official from school No. 1289 in northern Moscow, told the AP that on Thursday, the local police station telephoned and demanded a list of pupils with Georgian surnames. ???????There are very few pupils with Georgian surnames in our school and we have honored the police request. I must say that our pupils are Russian citizens and have Moscow registration. Their families have been living in Moscow for years,???????? she said.??????? Earlier in the week, the government began raiding Georgian-owned businesses in the captital, and by week????????s end the proceedings had all the ghastly earmarks of a pogrom, and there was open talk of ethnic cleansing. When one considered the fact that there were not yet even any open hostilities between Georgia and Russia, and that the dispute arose in the first place because Georgia foiled a Russia-sponsored coup d????????etat against Georgia????????s pro-West administration, the prospect of what Russia might be prepared to do in the event of such hostilities made it seem that the Georgian problem was the worst thing imaginable for Russia.

And then, suddenly, something so jolting happened that it made the Georgia issue seem like a minor distraction.

On Saturday, dozens of papers were reporting the contract killing of famed Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya (pictured above) at her apartment building in Moscow. Politkovskaya becomes the latest victim, and by far the most sensational and outrageous, in a string of contract hits on Russian journalists, none of which has been solved by the law enforcement authorities. Coming on the heels of the takeover of Russia????????s most important opposition newspaper, Kommersant, whose editor resigned last week in protest of the event, the killing created the undeniable sensation of an anti-democratic tsunami sweeping across the Russian political landscape.

Politkovskaya was a tenacious foe of rising dicatorship in Russia, and received a Time magazine hero designation in 2003. Here????????s what Time wrote about her then:

Anna Politkovskaya, a correspondent for the Moscow biweekly Novaya Gazeta, was in Los Angeles last October, picking out her dress for a media awards ceremony, when some staggering news came from Moscow: Chechen terrorists were holding 850 hostages in a theater. The Russian authorities tried to send in negotiators, but the Chechens refused to see most of them. They asked for Politkovskaya. And so Politkovskaya rushed back to cover yet another episode of one of the world’s nastiest and longest wars, which this time had shifted to Moscow. The terrorists, she says, “wanted someone who would accurately report things as they were. My work in Chechnya makes people there feel that I don’t lie. But there wasn’t much I could do for the hostages anyway.” She carried water and fruit juice to them, and reported their dejection and feelings of doom to the world. Two days later, Russian special forces stormed and gassed the theater, killing 41 terrorists and 129 hostages.Politkovskaya, 44, made her name by writing detailed, accurate and vivid reports on the plight of the civilian population in Chechnya, caught in the horrors of war since 1994. She tells stories of people who are taken from their homes at night and never come back; about extrajudicial executions; about the hungry refugees in cold and damp camps. “It was the refugee problem that started it,” she now recalls. When the second Chechen war began in 1999, tens of thousands of refugees began flooding the makeshift relief camps. “It was horrible to stand among the refugees in the field in October 1999, and see cruise missiles flying over your head,” she recalls. When those missiles hit a market in Grozny, it was only prompt coverage by journalists like Politkovskaya that forced the Russian commanders to let ambulances in and refugees out. “Our work is a lever to help people as much as we can,” she believes. But it also causes trouble. In February 2000, the FSB (the former KGB) arrested Politkovskaya in the Vedeno district of Chechnya. They kept her in a pit for three days without food or water. “It was important not to let them kill me on the first day,” she says. A year later, a Russian officer whose war crimes Politkovskaya had exposed threatened to kill her. Novaya Gazeta had to hide her in Austria for a while. The officer is now awaiting trial on charges of war crimes committed in Chechnya that Politkovskaya was the first to report. “But I don’t feel victorious,” she says. “I only feel that we’re all involved in a great tragedy.”Her editors have had to stand up to pressure from the Kremlin, which is often infuriated by her reporting. Novaya Gazeta balances on the brink of forcible closure. “Well, it goes with the job,” she shrugs. Politkovskaya has long since learned to keep her anxieties in check. As she arranges yet another trip to Chechnya, she may now be too famous to be targeted by the FSB. But she really doesn’t think about such things. “If you don’t have the strength to control your emotions, you’re of no help to the people who are in such shock and pain. You only add to their burden,” she says.

In other words, a journalist the Kremlin hates just happened to get shot as the Kremlin was opening an attack on a new Chechnya, Georgia, as that country sought entrance to the NATO community and freedom from Russian oppression, something the Kremlin vehemently opposes. Similarly, some apartment buildings in Moscow just happened to get blown up right before the Kremlin announced its intention to launch a major new military offensive in Chechnya. Coincidence? The alternative is a maligant presence of evil in Russia at the highest levels of government that is almost too horrible to contemplate. As Robert Menard, president of Reporters Without Borders, put it: ???????Politkovskaya single-handedly incarnated the resistance to the order that Mr. Putin wants to impose on the media. Nobody can imagine this was just a crime committed by common criminals.???????

What they can imagine is that she was silenced by the Neo-Soviet Union before she could get involved in the Georgia issue. And perhaps it????????s not the actual ordering of such a killing that is most horrible to contemplate; perhaps what is even worse is that nobody, not even the most ardent Russophile, can deny the fact that already, only a few years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, the possiblity is compellingly credible. In such a short space of time the Kremlin has abandoned any pretext of democracy and has launched itself headlong into a suicidal effort to reconstruct the USSR. Perhaps we should not even be surprised. After all, if the USSR had defeated the USA in the Cold War, would Americans simply have abandoned their love of liberty and democracy?

Kim Zigfeld publishes the Russia blog La Russophobe.