He did not go to Iraq or Afghanistan or down a dark alley in Pakistan. Unlike Danny Pearl or Michael Kelly, American journalist Paul Klebnikov did not think he was going to war. But late Friday evening last week, as he left his Moscow office, Klebnikov, the editor of Forbes magazine's newly launched Russian edition, became a victim in an undeclared war - the assault on free speech in Russia.

Under Vladimir V. Putin, the wise and the knowing in Moscow like to say, life has grown "quieter." Politics and the economy have become so stable, the Russian press corps now speaks with dread of a return to Brezhnevian stagnation. Yet the veneer of stability has come at a cost. So far, few beyond Moscow have taken notice. But last week the fateful turn - for the free press in Russia and for the remaining hopes for reform and the rule of law under Putin - was hard to miss.

The week's headline, or so the Kremlin hoped, was to be the arrival of Putin's self-described "dictatorship of the law." After 10 months in jail, oil baron Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Russia's richest man and Putin's chief rival, was coming to trial on charges of fraud and tax evasion. His case, an unsavoury mix of Byzantine politics and Siberian oil, had been touted as an example of equality under the law. But by week's end, the script had abruptly changed.

There is little doubt that Klebnikov's was a contract killing. Moscow hadn't seen the contract killing of an American citizen since 1996. Although during Putin's presidency 14 reporters have been killed, with one exception they were all Russians, so Americans thought they were safe. Business, imagined Western reporters covering the rise of Russian capitalism, had matured. The bosses of the underworld and the lords of the oligarchy had learned. Disputes were settled in courts, not bloody sidewalks. How wrong we were.

Klebnikov's slaying was not the only fatality of the night. Only hours earlier, Russian television viewers saw the final show of the country's last independent-minded political news programme. Kremlin muscle had shut down "Svoboda Slova" - "Freedom of Speech." It was a rarity in Putin's Russia: a national news show featuring a heady mix of debate and muckraking. It was the only show on Russian television that offered viewers dissenting voices. Despite government assurances to the contrary, the programme is dead.

Its history is telling. The show was a diluted version of "Vox Populi", the political soapbox that ruled prime time under Boris N. Yeltsin. Not long after taking over Yeltsin's throne, Putin and his men wrested control of NTV, the host network for "Freedom of Speech", from an unruly oligarch, Vladimir Gusinsky. Formerly shown live, the show was forced to air taped. NTV had come under increasing pressure. Only last month, the channel's most popular anchor, arguably the most capable journalist on Russian television, Leonid Parfyonov, was forced from the air. His crime? Refusing to drop an interview with the widow of a former Chechen leader who was murdered in Qatar. A Qatari court recently found two Russian security officers guilty in the case.

Klebnikov's slaying carried a bitter irony. Long before his arrival in Moscow this spring, he had made his name known among the Russian elite. In the darkest days of the Yeltsin era, he had written a scathing expose in Forbes of Boris Berezovsky, the oligarch, calling him a "gangland boss." Berezovsky fled Russia in 2000 after the government seized control of his media empire and filed criminal charges. Klebnikov's investigation of him, in the article and later in a book, reverberated in Moscow boardrooms and dachas. But although Klebnikov knew his way around the shadowy corridors of the Russian market, he had come to Moscow with a new outlook.

Author of a dissertation on Russia's prerevolutionary land reforms, the New Yorker had moved to Moscow with an Arcadian dream of the land of his grandparents. Recently, he had taken a trip into the Russian provinces. Days before his death, he told a colleague of his unexpected joy at seeing the outlying regions doing well. Now more than ever, he said, he believed in the future of Russia. But after four fatal shots from two hit men, his stunned colleagues knew the truth.

A war is on in Moscow. The last round has gone to the opponents of free speech. And the fire, thus far, has gone unreturned.-Dawn/The LAT-WP News Service (c) The Los Angeles Times.