World

Thousands Mourn Russian Journalist

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

March 9, 2000 / 6:18 AM EST / CBS

Russia said goodbye Saturday to a journalist many described as courageous, as thousands of Muscovites, joined by the country's political elite, mourned the death of Artyom Borovik.

CBS News Correspondent David Hawkins reports Americans may remember Borovik as a special correspondent for the CBS News program 60 Minutes. He was a brash young journalist who, in perfect English, took viewers inside the previously forbidden worlds of the KGB and Russia's nuclear arsenal.

But for Russians, Borovik was perestroika's first investigative journalist. As a war correspondent in Afghanistan, he reported the gritty truths of the Soviet Union's doomed intervention.

"He was a breakthrough, because then people were afraid to tell the truth and he was fearless," said Boris Notkin.

Borovik and eight other people were killed when the passenger plane they were on crashed on take-off from a Moscow airport on Thursday. An oil company executive, Ziya Bazhayev of the Alliance Group, was also on the plane.

A spokeswoman for Russia's Emergencies Ministry said the Yak-40 short-range passenger jet with five crew and four passengers on board was bound from Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport to the Ukrainian capital, Kiev.

The spokeswoman could give no reason for the crash and a guard at the airport gates said the three-engine plane slammed into the runway soon after taking off.

A television show called Sovershenno Sekretno was dropped from state-owned RTR television in June 1999 and Borovik said the decision was linked to upcoming elections. A government official said the program was dropped because it dealt in "kompromat" or compromising material used to smear politicians.