Quotes of the Day

Neither cold weather, nor heavy rain, nor the wary eyes of police patrols could stop them. Last Tuesday, thousands of mourners trudged grimly along the kilometer-long path from the nearest bus stop to the Troyekurovskoye cemetery on the edge of Moscow. They had come to pay their respects to journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who had been assassinated three days earlier.

The political overtones were palpable. "Nature weeps when they bury an honest person," said a middle-aged woman in the crowd. The grief over a journalist murdered for her fearless coverage of war crimes in Chechnya and high-level corruption in Russia brought together a range of people who, in past decades, would never have found themselves in the same company — not voluntarily, anyway. Back in Soviet times, former kgb General Alexei Kondaurov chased dissidents. Now a maverick Deputy, opposed to what he sees as President Vladimir Putin's increasingly authoritarian regime, Kondaurov came to pay homage to a woman he had never met but whom he had long admired for her courage and integrity.

One of his former adversaries was standing just 10 m away: Maria Rozanova, a living legend of the Soviet dissident movement. The trial of her late husband, writer and thinker Andrei Sinyavsky, and his colleague Yuli Daniel back in 1966 marked the beginning of the dissident era of Soviet history. Soon after Sinyavsky's release from the Gulag in 1971, Sinyavsky and Rozanova settled in Paris where in 1978 they launched Sintaksis, a famous dissident magazine. It was a forum for the free flow of ideas and open discourse that in the U.S.S.R. were confined to home kitchens — which is just where they happen in Russia today.

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.

• YURI ZARAKHOVICH | Troyekurovskoye Cemetery
• As a murdered journalist is buried in the capital, Russians grieve — and protest