Brian Boyd pays tribute to Paul Klebnikov, the editor of the Russian edition of 'Forbes' shot dead last week
It's a funny thing to turn on the news and see the face of an old chum and colleague beaming straight at you. What's "Kalashnikov" gone and done now, I thought? I knew he had been made editor of the Russian edition of Forbes magazine and was busy exposing the sordid secrets of Russia's sudden rush of "bandit capitalist" billionaires so it must be some connection with his work. It was. He had been shot dead in a Mafia-style hit.
Paul Klebnikov was just 41 when he died. He had made powerful enemies through his investigative work of Russia's criminal classes. As he left work last Saturday, he was shot four times at point-blank range.
The investigation into his death continues.
I pored over all the reports. Buried deep in most of them was the fact that he had been a student at the L.S.E. (London School of Economics) in the late 1980s. It was there that I first met Paul - "Kalashnikov" was our stupid nickname for him because although American, he had Russian parents - in the offices of the L.S.E.'s student newspaper.
I had only gone to the office because a friend needed to pick something up. Without even looking at me, Paul thrust an album in my hand and said "500 words by Tuesday". I didn't know what he meant but it was explained to me later that he wanted me to do a review. The worst written album review ever was duly delivered. Paul scanned it and said "this can be rescued" and then laughed for half-an-hour when I tried to return my review copy of the album.
Over the next few weeks Paul sent me off to dank film review rooms in Soho, to glamorous West End plays and to local gigs. He had to do a lot of "rescuing".
The paper was called The Beaver, which all the US students found very funny indeed. The L.S.E. had been set up as a Fabian university by Sidney and Beatrice Webb and George Bernard Shaw at the end of the 19th century. As the Oxbridge universities invariably provide the Conservative Party's front bench, L.S.E. supply the Labour Party's front bench. It was always known as a bolshie sort of place, thanks to its perpetually rioting students and a genuinely radical academic staff. The Beaver was specifically charged with being an irritant to the school's governing council, ensuring they stayed true to the school's Fabian background. In reality this just meant referring to them as "fascists" every week in our editorial.
The term "collective" at the paper meant we attracted a certain type of staff and contributor. That, and the fact that we used to run four pages on Palestine every week. Paul had made me "arts editor", which was fine because I could do most of my work in the pub - and as long as you got in a reference to "cultural hegemony" along the way that would be enough to get admiring nods from the rest of the collective.
It was only when Paul made me news editor that I came to understand the term "office politics" - in its most literal sense. In my new job I had to dig up school stories - preferably ones where we could use the term "gross injustice" in the headline. The problem was that the "chief news reporter" (we did like our forbidden titles) was an ardent member of the Socialist Workers Party and the "chief news sub-editor" was an even more ardent member of the Revolutionary Community Party (Marxist-Leninist). The two now wouldn't talk to each other and all communication had to be mediated through me. And you soon learnt that people who spoke about Stalin a lot had to sit in a different room from people who spoke about Trotsky a lot.
Paul's big story arrived mid-way through the year. He had found out that the LSE was investing in companies which held shares in other companies doing business in apartheid South Africa.
In a rousing editorial which he dictated to me while pacing around the office, Paul wrote: under a headline of "We Must Say No To Vileness": "The LSE supporting apartheid? Are we learning economics only to skilfully exploit? Are we learning social administration to more effectively oppress? . . . We refuse to let our time at the LSE be an initiation into moral degeneracy".
He called for an occupation (God, how we loved our occupations) of the school's administration buildings. We all dutifully marched over, and brought the school to a standstill. We also got dragged to court when the occupation ended but that was just a Big Day Out for all concerned. Not long after, the school stopped investing in companies which had any links whatsoever with apartheid South Africa.
Just three months ago when Paul launched the first Russian language edition of Forbes magazine, he wrote in his first editorial that money wasn't everything (in Forbes!) and "moral values and a sense of citizenship" were truly important. In the next edition he published a list of the country's 100 wealthiest people, detailing what assets they held and how they had made their money. It was for this, everyone now believes, that he was killed by cowardly criminal scum.
I owe him a lot, not least my job. I still call people "fascists" when they don't agree with me and I still most probably know more about Palestine than Yasser Arafat. Thanks Paul. Thanks for everything.