Statement of Lev Levinson, member of Directory Board of the Club Khramov - Association for Libertarian Reforms.

Moscow, November 23, 1998. ``Galina Starovojtova is assassinated. She was a remarkable person, politician, human rights activist.

But today it's hard to us not only because, that she is killed. And not only because, that - as it also happens usually - there is a crowd around a not yet buried body wishing to privatize her name. We with notice bitterly, they try to use a political murder as an occasion for restriction of civil liberties. They all - from the prime minister up to an indignant person from crowd have started talking in one voice about revelry of criminality and gangsterism. With a shiver of indignation in voice they say us: "The woman is killed on the threshold of her own house. It's time to put the end to arbitrariness".

In Leningrad there were already political murders: Kirov's murder, for example. It is known, to what it prefaced. But Galina Starovojtova isn't Kirov. Starovojtova's murder as justification of cleansing in cities? Lawless check-ins on the streets? Hunts for "persons of Caucasian nationality", homeless people and drug addicts? Starovojtova's murder as justification of tortures in militia? Interdictions? Borders?

There were not Chechens who have killed Starovojtova. And not drug addicts.

Starovojtova - be she alive - would struggle together with us against the "fighters with criminality", because the criminals in traditional totalitarian understanding appear not the murderers of Starovojtova, but common citizens filling the streets and preferring to live on this earth by their own life, dirty- and blood-free.''