Oleg Kashin, the Russian journalist who was beaten almost to death by assailants wielding an iron bar, on Friday regained consciousness after almost a week in an induced coma.
His wife, Yevgeniya Milova, said: “I was able to see him for a few moments. I told him that I loved him, that everybody was supporting him. He couldn’t speak, but he smiled and he squeezed my hand.”
Kashin, a 30-year-old reporter with the influential Kommersant daily, was attacked early last Saturday by two men who waited for him outside the central Moscow apartment block where he lives.
CCTV footage leaked to the media showed two men approaching Kashin, one carrying a bunch of flowers, before knocking him to the ground. One man propped up his shoulders as the other took a metal bar from the bouquet and hit him for 90 seconds.
The men fled, leaving Kashin with a smashed jaw, a broken leg and a fractured skull.
The attack has added to the fear felt by many in the Russian media. Since 2000, there have been 19 unsolved killings of reporters in Russia, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists.
Roman Anin, a 24-year-old correspondent for the Novaya Gazeta newspaper — four of whose reporters have been assassinated in recent years — said: “It’s frightening. We’ve just had an editorial meeting to discuss if every reporter should be given an electroshock weapon. Personally, I’m all for it.”
Kashin, a commentator on social issues, who writes a popular blog, was apparently attacked in revenge for his writing about government-backed youth groups or a controversial road-building project.
“Despite all the Kremlin talk about growing democracy, this reminds us there is still something sick in a society run by KGB officers and their business pals,” said Elizaveta Maksimova, a pensioner attending a picket of 300 in support of Kashin in Pushkin Square on Thursday.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev condemned the attack on Kashin.
“The criminals must be found and punished,” he wrote on his Twitter account.
On Monday, he told journalists: “Whoever contributed to the crime will be punished, regardless of his position or place in society.”
Those words were some comfort to Milova, a 28-year-old who writes about celebrity news for Kommersant.
“After Medvedev’s comments, the highest-ranking investigators got involved. There’s a real will to catch the culprits,” she said.
She added that she had no idea where the order to beat Kashin could have come from. “He could be cutting, he could be rude — but it’s not like he pointed at such and such a bureaucrat and said, ‘He’s stealing,’” she said.
Such personalized criticism may not be needed to provoke revenge. Two years ago today, Mikhail Beketov, 52, the editor of a local newspaper in Khimki, near Moscow, was beaten by unknown attackers and suffered brain damage.
Beketov’s mistake was, apparently, to criticize the planned destruction of a Khimki forest to make a new road from Moscow to St Petersburg, a project that will bring hundreds of millions of rubles to politically connected construction companies.
Another of Kashin’s targets is Molodaya Gvardiya (Young Guard), a youth organization linked to Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
This summer, the organization referred to Kashin as a “-journalist-traitor” and published his picture with the caption: “Will be punished.”
Vladimir Milov, an opposition politician, believes Kremlin-backed nationalist youth groups have helped nurture an image of journalists and human rights activists as whining, unpatriotic wreckers.
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