Russian President Dmitri Medvedev held a surprise meeting on January 29 with the editor of Novaya Gazeta, Dmitri Muratov. Novaya is an independent newspaper that has established itself as one of the Kremlin’s sharpest critics and that 10 days ago lost a 25-year-old reporter. 
The President called Muratov to request a meeting, and during an hour-long conversation expressed his “deepest sorrow and compassion” over the death of the reporter Baburova, who was shot as she walked down a Moscow street with a human rights lawyer, Stanislav Markelov, who was also associated with the newspaper.
To the frustration of human rights advocates, the Kremlin had not previously released any comment about the killings.
At the meeting, which also included the former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, a major shareholder in the newspaper, Medvedev offered his reasoning for keeping silent after the killing. He told Muratov that he knew that any comment he made would be scrutinized and decoded by investigators, and “they might take it as a directive”.
After allowing some time for investigators to work efficiently and independently, while understanding that what had happened was a tragedy, he decided to invite Gorbachev and Muratov to express his condolences.
Muratov also had more general questions, and so did Gorbachev. They talked about Stalin again being referred to as an "effective manager," and Medvedev immediately and unconditionally expressed his support of building a center memorializing victims of Stalinism in Moscow .
Asked about the fate of imprisoned former executives from the Yukos Oil Company — imprisoned by the government on tax charges, among them Svetlana Bakhmina, Platon Lebedev and Mikhail Khodorkovsky — Medvedev told Muratov that he supported more lenient sentences for economic crimes.
Muratov described Medvedev`s gesture as “extremely sincere.” “Of course, practically speaking, what I expect from this meeting is that the president will watch over the investigations of the killings of our staff members: [Igor] Domnikov’s killing, whose masterminds have not been identified, Yury Shchekochikhin, Anna Politkovskaya, as well as Stanislav [Markelov] and Anastasia [Baburova]. And it seemed to me that that was the decision he made. Of course, he didn’t say that to me or to Gorbachev, but that is how I understood his interest in this matter,” he said.
As for liberal commentators, they are split on whether Medvedev was signaling a departure from the policies of his predecessor, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Writing on Yezhednevny Zhurnal, an independent online magazine, the journalist Yulia Latynina gave Medvedev credit for breaking his 10-day silence, saying that “it is psychologically much simpler to make a mistake than it is to admit it.” She noted, as well, that the move occurred while Putin was in Davos for the World Economic Forum. But her colleague Viktor Shenderovich thinks the gesture came too late. “If Medvedev had said something during the first hours after the killing, the security services would have understood that they would have to really hunt, prick their ears up and hunt,” he wrote. “Now everyone understands this is just PR.”
