Date

29/04/2002  

First

Valery  

Surname

IVANOV  

Sex/Age

M, 32  

Incident

homicide  

Motive

J  

Place

car  

Job

chief editor  

Medium

print  

Federal District Plus

VOLGA  

Street, Town, Region

Togliatti, Samara Region  

Freelance

no  

Local/National

local, Tolyatinskoe obozrenie  

Other Ties

city duma deputy  

Cause of Death

shot, contract killing  

Legal Qualification

105 (murder)  

Impunity

investigation, halted  

FROM “PARTIAL JUSTICE” (JUNE 2009)

On 29 April 2002 Valery Ivanov, chief editor of the Tolyattinskoe Obozrenie (Togliatti Review), was shot dead, while sitting in his car outside his apartment block. At 11 pm a man knocked at the driver’s window. When Ivanov lowered the window to find out what he wanted his assailant shot him six times. There could be no doubt that this was a targeted killing. Official investigators and fellow journalists had strong suspicions as to who might have ordered and paid for Ivanov’s murder. Eighteen months later Alexei Sidorov, Ivanov’s friend and successor at the Togliatti Review was stabbed to death.

BACKGROUND

Togliatti (pop. 700,000) had already acquired the dubious reputation, with Moscow and a few other Russian cities, of being a place where those in the media were a regular target for assassination. No less than four other editors and directors of local press and television had already died in the car-making city on the Volga. The first was Andrei Ulanov in 1995, followed by Nikolai Lapin in 1997. In 2000 the general director and the chief editor of Lada TV, Sergei Ivanov and Sergei Loginov, died within a month of each another. When the first death occurred it was suggested that after production and distribution had been rapidly shared out, semi-criminal business interests were turning their attention to the media. By the time Valery Ivanov and Alexei Sidorov were killed there was talk of a Togliatti syndrome, spreading over the country, in which business and media interests became inextricably entwined.
Yet only four of the six deaths seem indisputably to have been contract killings and the motives for each, where they could be established, were different.

Valery Ivanov himself founded Tolyattinskoe obozrenie (Togliatti Review) in 1996. Funds were provided by a businessman friend Gennady Shkavrov and, contrary to common assumption, Ivanov retained only a one per cent share in the newspaper. From the beginning Alexei Sidorov played an active part and his father, a local professor, helped the Review to obtain its first premises. Soon the newspaper, which then appeared 2-3 times weekly, became popular and could afford its own offices in the centre of the city.

It was the first newspaper in Togliatti to document the serious problem the city and surrounding region faced with petty and organised crime and this was one reason for the Review’s success. A regular section covered the activities of criminals and the law enforcement agencies and this theme soon became the mainstay of the paper, taking up several pages and often the front page as well.

Estimates as to the Review’s print run vary from an official 10,000 to the editors’ own estimate of 30,000. When it became a daily, Sidorov said, the edition ran to 6,000 copies a day while the weekly issue had a print run of 21,500. Whatever the case, the Review became highly popular in Togliatti and the surrounding Samara Region: it was genuinely independent; it criticised the Region’s administration and legislative assembly; it was not controlled or influenced by any of the organised crime groups in the city.

Ivanov returned from Samara to Togliatti in the early 1990s and began working for local newspapers. The Togliatti Review made him a popular and well-known figure in the city and enabled him to begin a successful political career. Two years before his murder he was elected to the city duma or council.

INTERPRETATIONS

There have never been any second thoughts about the killing itself. All agree it was a targeted assassination and there are nuances of interpretation rather than major disagreements about the reasons why certain people wanted Ivanov out of the way.

Yury Kulenkovich, deputy head of criminal investigation at the Togliatti city police, says that those who ordered and paid for the shooting of Valery Ivanov were local crime bosses who had come into conflict with the chief editor of the Togliatti Review. They did not appreciate a series of publications about the “Chechen” crime gang which they controlled in Togliatti. When Ivanov would not accept money to cease publication he was threatened.

Their paths crossed again when Ivanov, this time as a member of the duma, insisted on an open tender for supplies of oil and fuel to the city. This led to a cut in the inflated prices charged by the “Chechen” gang and Ivanov received warnings from law enforcement officials that he would now be targeted.

Fellow journalists also supported these two suggestions and after Ivanov’s death they were widely discussed in the Togliatti Review. A third suggestion made by local journalists was that a local leader of United Russia, Vladimir Kozhukhov, was behind the killing. Ivanov’s widow Yelena also laid greater emphasis on her husband’s political activities: she had not wanted him to stand for the city duma but he had a very promising future as a politician and she could not dissuade him. She knew little about his work at the newspaper, she said.

After his death Yelena remained in the same flat with their daughter. Colleagues who came to express their condolences were struck by the modesty of the apartment. The family had never had much money, Yelena said.

INVESTIGATION

On 30 April 2002 the prosecutor’s office opened a criminal case under Article 105.2 of the Criminal Code (Murder). During the first weeks of the investigation officials from the police and prosecutor’s office publicly stated that the death was a contract killing linked to the activities of Valery Ivanov as a journalist. Several times, then and later, law enforcement officials announced that they knew who had ordered and carried out the murder.

The investigation was halted, however, because no suspects had been identified or detained. On 10 March 2005, almost three years after Ivanov’s murder, the case was re-opened, first for a month and then until August. Then, once again, the case was halted. The two principal suspects were long ago named as “Chechen” crime bosses Igor Sirotenko and Suleiman Akhmadov but they left the city soon after the killing. Today police admit that since the men thought to have organised and carried out the crime have both died there is insufficient evidence to charge anyone.

It is difficult to say how the investigation was conducted because the extensive case files remain inaccessible, even to Ivanov’s widow Yelena and her lawyer Karen Nersisyan. A year after the killing a Samara newspaper expressed its own doubts about the investigation. “Ivanov’s relations with those running the city police force were strained and the head of the district police where he was murdered had several times taken the Togliatti Review to court,” commented the Samarskoe obozrenie (19 June 2003). “Local detectives had no experience in solving contract killings. The million rouble reward and Prosecutor General Ustinov’s personal supervision of the case have not helped. The team of investigators is now working under its third head in a single year.”

Dozens of local politicians, businessmen and leaders and members of various criminal groups were interrogated during the investigation. The body of a man suspected to have been Ivanov’s killer was even exhumed for examination. Yet it remains unknown whether Sirotenko and Akhmadov were brought in for questioning. We do not know whether Utkin, the mayor of Togliatti, was interrogated concerning Ivanov’s murder (he had reacted strangely, failing to express condolences) or if his deputies and representatives of the firms supplying fuel and oil to the city were questioned.

Today a police officer Andrei Osipov is responsible both for the case of Valery Ivanov and that of his successor Alexei Sidorov. Osipov is working under the direction of the new Investigative Committee of the Prosecutor General's office and, alluding to “confidentiality of the investigation”, declined to talk to Yelena Milashina who conducted these two case studies for the GDF.

ANOTHER HYPOTHESIS

In 2005 a book was published in Moscow making sensational claims of a link between the killing of Valery Ivanov of the Togliatti Review and the deaths two years earlier of those who ran the local Lada TV company.

According to Ruslan Gorevoi’s Case No 13 Valery Ivanov was involved in a struggle to take over Lada TV and used his position in the city duma to obtain a controlling block of shares in the company, which was then waiting to renew its broadcasting licence. That explained the killing of Sergei Ivanov and the mysterious death of Sergei Loginov, both from Lada TV. It also provided a motive for Valery Ivanov’s killing since his interest in the company brought him into conflict with the main shareholder, Georgy Limansky, the mayor of Samara.

On examination this hypothesis proved to have no foundation. Valery Ivanov and Lada TV’s general director Sergei Ivanov were on good terms. They reached an agreement that once a week the TV company would broadcast a programme produced by the Togliatti Review, which served to popularise the newspaper. That was the limit and full extent of Valery Ivanov’s interest in local television. The former director general and chief editor of Lada TV Yevgeny Rabinovich (who worked at the company from 2001 until its sale to Avtovaz in 2008) said that Valery Ivanov probably did not pay for the broadcasts.

There was a suggestion he might have blackmailed those to be exposed by the publication: Ivanov had never made improper use of information obtained during a journalistic investigation, say colleagues who knew him well. As for other business interests, Ivanov set up various subsidiary companies shortly before his death. A license for a dealership in Avtovaz cars and a license to set up a tour company were obtained but their purpose was to finance and support the newspaper. By his death not one car had yet been sold, said his widow Yelena.