Paul Klebnikov

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Paul Klebnikov

Paul Klebnikov (June 3, 1963 – July 9, 2004) was an American journalist of Russian descent. His murder in Moscow is seen as a blow for investigative journalism in Russia.

1 Life
2 Murder
3 Legacy
4 Bibliography
5 See also
6 External links

[edit] Life

Klebnikov was born in New York to a family of Russian émigrés with a long military and political tradition; his great grandfather was an admiral in the White Russian fleet who was assassinated by Bolsheviks, and his great-great-great-grandfather Ivan Pouschine participated in the Decembrist revolt in 1825.

Klebnikov attended St. Bernard's School and the Phillips Exeter Academy, and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1984. He wrote a doctoral thesis at the London School of Economics on Pyotr Stolypin, the reformist Tsarist prime minister.

Klebnikov joined Forbes in 1989 and gained a reputation for investigating murky post-Soviet business dealings and corruption. He rose to the position of senior editor, specializing in Russian and Eastern European politics and economics, before becoming the first editor of Forbes' Russian edition when it was launched in April 2004.

Observers have suggested Klebnikov may have made powerful enemies because he investigated corruption and sought to shed light on Russian business. He wrote Godfather of the Kremlin (September 2000), a biography of a Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky. Berezovsky was openly critical of Klebnikov's writings, particularly an article published in Forbes in 1996 about his alleged criminal activities for which he filed a libel suit, and Forbes was forced to retract the allegations. After his murder, an opinion article in the Washington Post written by Klebnikov's colleague Michael R. Caputo openly accused Berezovsky of the assassination [1].

[edit] Murder

Klebnikov was shot dead on a Moscow street late at night on July 9, 2004 by unknown assailants. The publisher of Forbes' Russian edition has said that the murder is "definitely linked to his professional activity". The United States Senate has asked Russia to accept help in the investigation of Klebnikov's death, but Russia's Prosecutor General Yury Chaika has said that Russia can cope on its own.

On November 29, 2004 two main suspects (Kazbek Dukuzov and Valid Agayev) were arrested in Minsk, Belarus, to where they allegedly fled from Russia. Both men are ethnic Chechens and are Russian citizens. They were being held in Minsk KGB jail and were handed over to Russians almost three months later on February 22, 2005. The delay in extradition, the Belarus authorities said, was because they were waiting for paperwork and necessary evidence from the Russian side. On November 21, 2005, according to the press release from the Russian Prosecutor General, the indictment was sent by prosecutors to court [2].

According to the indictment, ethnic Chechens Kazbek Dukuzov, Magomed Dukuzov, Musa Vakhayev, Magomed Edilsultanov and others were a criminal gang, and they were involved in racketeering and contract killings. A paralegal from Moscow, Fail Sadretdinov, was co-indicted with them because he allegedly paid the same gang to murder a Moscow businessman Aleksei Pichugin. Kazbek Dukuzov, Vakhayev and Sadretdinov have been arrested, other people indicted were still wanted by the police.

The trial began on January 10, 2006 in closed session because Russian authorities claim case-related documents contain information about secret surveillance methods used by law enforcement. All of the accused have pleaded not guilty. Soon the original judge, Mariya Komarova, fell ill, and on February 13, according to the Russian law, she was replaced by a different judge, Vladimir Usov. The trial had to be restarted from the very beginning, including the new jury selection process. The trial ended on May 5, 2006 with a jury verdict of "not guilty" for all the accused and they were released from custody in the courtroom. On November 9, 2006 the Supreme Court overturned the acquittal of three suspects in the killing Klebnikov and ordered a new trial. The new hearings are scheduled to start on February 15, 2007. In the meanwhile, Fail Sadretdinov was sentenced to 9 years of imprisonment on an unrelated fraud charge [3].

In August 2006 a source close to the case told Reuters the investigation was now focussing on a possible link between Klebnikov's murder and his interest in the possible misappropriation of Russian funds intended for the reconstruction of Chechnya, ravaged by a decade of fighting between Chechen rebels and Russian troops [4].

Michael Klebnikov, Paul's brother, said it was a remarkable coincidence that the same eight jurors also acquitted the same two men of the murder of Yan Sergunin, a former Russian deputy prime minister of Chechnya, with whom Klebnikov had been in contact; Sergunin was shot dead outside a Moscow restaurant just two weeks before Klebnikov's murder.

[edit] Legacy

In 2004, the Committee to Protect Journalists posthumously named Klebnikov one of four winners of the CPJ International Press Freedom Awards.

In the wake of Paul’s murder in 2004, colleagues, friends and family joined together to form the Paul Klebnikov Fund. The Fund’s mission is to promote a civil society in Russia by strengthening a free and independent press and by fostering community values through the preservation and protection of neglected but historic buildings. Each year the Directors award the Paul Klebnikov Fund Prize for Courage in Journalism. The recipients spend several weeks workings at an American newspaper, developing an appreciation for American journalistic standards. The Fund also facilitates internships and training programs with western media organizations in Russia. The Fund is a non-profit organization, administered by the International Center for Journalists in Washington, D.C. (to make a donation see [5]).

In 2005, to honor Klebnikov's commitment to scholarship and research on Russia and the former Soviet states, the London School of Economics established the Paul Klebnikov Prize for outstanding masters degree students in Russian and Post-Soviet Studies. The inaugural prize was awarded to Olga Levitsky and Joseph Wolpin on November 1, 2005.

Also in 2005, Paul's Exeter classmates endowed an annual Klebnikov Lecture to honor his memory. The first Klebnikov Lecture was held on May 12, 2006 at the 25th reunion of Paul's Exeter class (1981), and featured remarks by Wall Street Journal correspondent and Exeter alumnus Jon Karp.

Project Klebnikov website is a global alliance specifically devoted to developing new information on the Klebnikov murder and to furthering some of the investigative work Paul began, with reporters and editors drawn from the full spectrum of international media outlets.