Stas has been killed. I can't believe it. Lanky, fun, foolhardy, mischievous, he never let anything get in his way.
The last time I spoke with him on the telephone was a few days ago. We talked about the Elza Kungaeva case.
He first came to Grozny with Anna Politkovskaya. He was the attorney for Astemir Murdalov, whose son Zelimkhan was brutally beaten at Grozny's October District police station in 2001. After the beating, Zelimkhan disappeared.
Only one suspect was ever brought to trial: Sergei Lapin. The trial did not begin until late 2003, and only ended in March 2005. The fact that Lapin was sentenced at all is to Stanislav Markelov's credit. For more than a year the judge could not bring himself even to order that Lapin be taken into custody, and at times, amazingly, the prosecutor acted as Lapin’s attorney. Only thanks to Stas’s talent, persistence, and fearlessness was Lapin finally convicted.
This is the rarest of incidents, when an executioner, sent to enforce the Constitution, gets real prison time for a crime committed in Chechnya. Thousands of executioners who have murdered and crippled ordinary citizens in the name of the state are still at large, thanks to investigators who for years would not question criminals in epaulettes; thanks to judges who believed that these criminals would meekly await sentencing at liberty; and thanks to the “courageous” police who refused to chase them down on Russia's broad expanses.
Who was Stas interfering with? Minin and Prilepin, Lapin's bosses, who the investigator did not consider necessary to hold responsible. It was only in court, thanks to Markelov's magnificent work, that their guilt was even disclosed and that they were declared wanted by the police—who are still supposedly looking for them, by the way.
Stas lived enthusiastically, no second thoughts. He daringly accepted any difficult case, especially when an innocent person needed defending. He hated violence, the personification of which for him was fascism. I only saw Stanislav angry once, and that was when people frivolously spoke about violence in front of him. That was when I realized why he threw himself into battle so desperately against those who create evil. For him they were all fascists.
The fight against fascism, no matter what shape it took, be it a skinhead teen or an inveterate soldier, was Stanislav's life.
For this he was not afraid to come to a ruined city where landmines were still going off, where APCs were driving up to buildings in the middle of the night, and where people were going missing.
No matter their rank, Stas was never afraid to denounce anyone.
He didn’t even run when he started getting very real text messages threatening his life.
Markelov's murder is a declaration of war. The question now is, which side is the state on?
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