The Moscow News reports two developments on Anna Politkovskaya and Svetlana Gannushkina, both profiled last Sunday on La Russophobe and currently on Publius Pundit as well.

First, on Anna:

More than 100 people gathered at a central Moscow square Wednesday to mark the death last month of investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya and the end of the traditional Russian 40-day period of mourning, The Associated Press reported. People stood silently holding lighted candles and portraits of the slain reporter, while others carried placards demanding that authorities solve the murder that shocked journalists, human rights advocates and foreign governments. Some placards read “Who Killed Her?” and “You Can’t Kill The Truth.” Outside the Moscow apartment building where Politkovskaya was gunned down on Oct. 7, passers-by laid flowers. Some criticized authorities’ muted response to her death. Meanwhile, Russia’s chief prosecutor said investigators are looking into the possibility that the slaying was ordered by a critic of the Kremlin living outside the country to escape prosecution. “We are checking a huge quantity of theories, including the theory of a foreign link,” Russian news agencies quoted Prosecutor General Yuri Chaika as saying. Politkovskaya had written passionately and critically about abuses by Russian and pro-Moscow Chechen forces fighting separatists in Chechnya. President Vladimir Putin has suggested that some of the Kremlin’s critics could have plotted Politkovskaya’s killing to discredit the Russian government, a frequent target of her investigations. Politkovskaya’s attackers have not been found. Rights groups said the killing underscored the risks faced by Russians who question or criticize the government. Putin and other officials have repeatedly suggested that outside forces, primarily in the West, were seeking to undermine Russia.

Then on Svetlana:

Russia’s domestic security service, the FSB, has refused to launch proceedings against the authors of a statement recently published on the Web, calling for extermination of antifascists and liberal figures, the Ekho Moskvy radio station reported Wednesday. The complaint was filed to the FSB by Svetlana Gannushkina, prominent rights activist and chair of the Civil Assistance committee. In comments for Ekho Moskvy Gannushkina said she was not surprised by such a response from the security service. “The reason for refusal to launch criminal proceedings is obvious,” she said. The FSB investigators had evidently ruled that the people whom the authors of the controversial statements had branded “enemies of the people” had no influence on political developments in this country and said the calls to eliminate them posed no risk to national security. Gannushkina recalled that earlier the prosecutor’s office issued a warning to the human rights group Memorial, after the group posted an analysis of Muslim texts on its website. “They [Memorial] did not even cite those texts, only claimed that those texts contained no calls for violence,” while the site that published the list of “the enemies of the nation” contains a tip “how to poison beggars by giving alms to them.” The government sees no danger in such calls, whereas the efforts by rights activists are seen as dangerous, she concluded.