by Ivan Maksimov

"Moskovskij Komsomolec", May 23, 1996, page 2

Still they have a dangerous profession - those journalists who are most courageous. One has been knocked off in a hot spot, another has been reached by other way. One of these days, the flat of our colleague Julia Kalinina has been broken and overturned upside down. Who made it, it's covered by darkness. But it is very remarkable, that this happened just after her exposures in mass media for what concerns of trillions of rubles provided for reconstruction of Chechen economy and dissolved without leaving a trace "in a blue sky". Her publication about using slave soldiers' labor while building the private dachas of general-colonel Vjacheslav Zherebcov - that one frenzied who demanded in the State Duma to increase term of military service for draftees because the army is supposed not to be "completed" - has caused sensation too.

Not limiting themselves by the ruination in Julia's apartment, some forces organized her baiting by means of letter and phone calls with direct threats. The situation became so serious that her friends decided to assist the MK journalist to leave the country for a while. It was reported yesterday on the session of the State Duma by Konstantin Borovoj, leader of the Economical Freedom Party. He proposed to the parliamentarians to make an interpellation on this situation to the Federal Security Service and Ministry of Interior, requesting to find out the source of threats and to defend the journalist. By the way, in the context of Kalinina's and others' publication the State Duma has requested earlier the responsible bodies to realize the situation with money provided for reconstruction of ruins in Chechnya.

However, the pro-Communist majority in Duma ignored both the fate of this assignments and the courageous journalist. Mr. Borovoj's initiative gathered only 77 votes while 99 against. The rest of 200 "people's elects" did not find time to press any bottom at all. And only after Konstantin Natanovich's appeal to the "men's dignity" of deputies who used in their own interests Kalinina's exposures, they returned to this question and voted for the respective interpellation.