Forbes Editor's Murder a Mob-Style Hit

July 14, 2004 -- The American editor of the Russian edition of Forbes said he believed the troubled country was entering a new era where businesses would not be run like mafia crime families, but when he was gunned down outside his Moscow office, the killing had all the signs of a mob hit.

Paul Klebnikov, 41, who opened the Russian edition of Forbes this spring, was gunned down Friday as he was leaving work. Before he died he reportedly said his killer had driven up to him and shot him from the window of a car.

According to the report on the Russian Web site Strana.ru, Klebnikov said he had never seen his attacker before and didn't know why he had been targeted. The car was found abandoned the next day, and police were examining it for clues.

The professional-style slaying of a journalist is all too common in Russia, where by some counts as many as 200 reporters have been killed since the collapse of the Soviet Union 13 years ago. In just a handful of those cases has anyone been convicted, a failure that human and journalists' rights groups say is a result of a combination of police and governmental corruption and an antipathy among officials toward journalists, especially those doing investigative work.

"There is a problem that those in power don't want a free press," said Oleg Panfilov, director of the Center for Journalists in Extreme Situations, a Moscow-based group that works to promote the development of free, independent media in Russia.

Klebnikov's killing also comes as a caution that any optimism about the development of an open business environment — with government by the rule of law, not by the gun — still must be guarded.

It was just that kind of optimism that seemed to be heralded when Forbes began publishing its Russian edition in April, and that Klebnikov expressed in May as he unveiled an issue listing the 100 richest people in Russia.

"Russia is entering a new stage of capitalism and I think all the participants on this list are happy to be entering that new stage," he said. "That's a stage moving away from the shadow economy, moving away from well, say, a black market type of mentality, towards a more civilized, transparent, open form of capitalism."