Medvedev's Signal: Don't Kill Novaya Gazeta Reporters

Dmitry Medvedev has noted in the past that Russians tend to look for signals from their leaders. But, since the Russian president doesn't come from the siloviki -- he is a former law professor, not a retired KGB or military officer -- nor from politics, he is not as noted as his predecessors for skillfully communicating through gesture.

So what was today all about? Why did Medvedev give Novaya Gazeta editor Dmitry Muratov bragging rights for publishing his first Russian newspaper interview (English version)?

My own thinking is that Medvedev is right -- to some degree, ruling in Russia is about signals, often informing a power group or an individual to watch its or his step. And one signal that's been clear over the last several years is that certain murders can take place with impunity -- killers somehow have correctly understood that they will not be held to account.

Novaya Gazeta, long the fiercest critic of Vladimir Putin's rule, wears its bloody past on its sleeve. To this day, the home page of its English-language web site is a full-page tribute to its fallen. They include Igor Domnikov, killed in 2000, Yuri Shchekochikhin, who died in 2003 from a mysterious illness, and, most dramatically, Anna Politkovskaya, slain in 2006.

There had been something of an interregnum since the November 2006 nuclear poisoning murder of Alexander Litvinenko. But in January, that apparent intermission ended. Human rights lawyer Stanislaw Markelov was shot in the back of the head by a killer on a crowded Moscow street in daylight, along with Anastasia Baburova, a Novaya Gazeta reporter who tried to intervene. Being abroad still doesn't make one safe. Last month, Chechen Sulim Yamadayev was shot dead in Dubai.

Medvedev is saying that he's a break from the past -- at a minimum, he doesn't support the targeting of Muratov's reporters. Indeed, this was Medvedev's second such signal -- he met with Muratov in January to mourn the Markelov-Baburina murders.

It's unclear that Russia's killers will honor the signal, nor whether Medvedev is yet a leader whose signals are generally respected. After all, the system of unpunished murder has seemed larger than even ultra-powerful Putin, who publicly mourned the death of Forbes editor Paul Klebnikov, whose murder nonetheless was never solved.

Yet, the gesture was clear.