Russian assassins do not generally fire six shots without hitting anything. Russia’s killing industry, at least, is world class. For this reason, Moscow police were inclined to see the amateurish March 18 attack on central bank chairman Sergei Dubinin’s apartment as a coincidence. High state officials have so far been immune from the murder wave sweeping finance and industry, and apparently feel confident about remaining so. The government apartment block which Dubinin recently moved to had no visible security, despite a recent near-fatal attack on a legislator who also lives there. Yet neither the method nor the object of the attack quite added up. Russian gangsters like to hit at their targets directly, leaving women and children out of range. The standard warning mechanism is to destroy a car. By firing wildly from the street into a fourth-storey window, while Dubinin’s family awaited his return, his attackers hardly advertised their seriousness. Consequently an arrest warrant was issued on the uniquely Russian charge of “malicious hooliganism distinguished by its content of exceptional cynicism”. It is also hard to think what the assailants might want from the affable central bank chief. Rumours immediately circulated that powerful Moscow region boss Konstantin Shor had also been assaulted twice in recent weeks, though his spokesman insisted that he was “not aware of any concrete attempts” against his boss’s life. Killing to reduce interest rates or reserve requirements struck observers as a more abstract goal than the Mafia usually sets itself. The business daily Commersant leapt in with an elaborate theory about Chara Bank, a boutique investment fund for the Moscow/St Petersburg intelligentsia. This collapsed in late 1994 with debts of $200 million, but the paper pointed out that its licence was finally revoked only days before the shooting. But Moscow security circles remain unimpressed. “Sometimes a guy like this will stage the event himself to increase his political standing,” growls Sergei Stepnov, a veteran homicide detective who now heads the Lions detective agency. Sources close to the laid-back Dubinin, who was vice-president of Bank Imperial before being drafted back into public service, found this version of events less than credible. Craig Mellow
