Hate crime feared in death of hate expert

A year and a half ago, Nikolai Girenko wrote a booklet to guide prosecutors and police officers investigating the explosion of ethnically motivated crimes by skinheads, neo-Nazis and other hate groups. It may be needed to solve his killing. On June 19, two young men came to his apartment here and rang the doorbell. When his daughter, Katerina, asked from the other side of the door what they wanted, they asked for him by name. When he approached, they shot him through the wooden door. He slumped to the floor of the apartment's small foyer and died within minutes. He was 64. Through the peephole, Katerina saw only the shadowy silhouettes of her father's killers, but she had little doubt who they were. "It could only be these fascists," she said. In a city and country inured to violence and death, this killing has prompted strikingly little public outrage. But Girenko's family, friends and colleagues see their shared vision of Russia as a tolerant and harmonious multiethnic society as being ominously endangered. Officials say that Girenko's killing would represent an escalation of the recent wave of racial violence to include not only Muslims, Jews and migrants from Africa and Asia, but also one of the most prominent defenders of their rights. "This has brought us to a turning point," Aleksandr Vinnikov, a writer and human-rights campaigner, said at a memorial service held for Girenko at St. Petersburg State University on the bansk of the Neva River. "Either the society and the government recognize the dangers and take measures, including the use of force, or the murderers will get away with it."