Alexei Pankin is the Moscow Times token neo-Soviet bagman. Identified by the paper only as a "freelance journalist in Moscow" he is regularly put into service dredging up the most inane neo-Soviet propaganda for all the world to see, which then the rest of the Moscow Times stable of columnists can summarily shred to ribbons.

His most recent column trashing Anna's Politkovskaya is surely his magnum opus. He attacks Anna's champions for not saying a bad word about her, then he doesn't give her one serious specific credit for her achievements in journalism. He claims that many other Russian journalists were just as brave as Politkovskaya, then he doesn't name a single one. He claims it's improper to criticize a dead person until 40 days after the funeral, then he does so, impugning Anna's credentials and smearing her champions without saying one single critical word about her opponents. He claims he "knew" Anna well enough to know how she'd feel about the eulogies being written for her, and yet he admits he never worked one single day with her as a journalist; rather, they just read some of the same papers while serving on a journalism jury.

Is it just a coincidence that when you hear the name "Alexei Pankin" you can't think of a single important story he ever reported? La Russophobe thinks not.

Pankin refers to Evgenia Albats, commentator on Ekho Moskvy radio, as having "democratic sympathies that verge on Bolshevik intransigence." Yeah, those crazy wackos and their democracy ideas. They should all be shot!

He complains about the Financial Times in classic Russian nationalist rhetoric, claiming that it "described Politkovskaya as 'Russia's bravest reporter,' while the remainder of the article lectured Russians -- and Russian journalists in particular, based on Western experience -- on how to grieve properly for fallen comrades." The phrase "don't lecture Russia" is a stock formulation right out of the mouth of Vladimir Putin.

Alexei Pankin is exactly the type of Russian who has brought the country to its knees with his incomprensible gibberish rationalizing Russian behavior without the slightest sensitivity to facts or reality. He's the exact same sort of haughty, insular nutjob who populated the Politburo and hence destroyed the country.