It seems that we can add another body to the pile. Last Friday, Kommersant military affairs correspondent, Ivan Safronov mysteriously fell to his death from a stairway window of his apartment building. At first, Safronov’s death was ruled a suicide, but Taganka police confirmed today that a criminal investigation has been opened to probe the incident.

The incident was not without a few witnesses. According Kommersant:

Two students who live in the building across the courtyard witnessed his death. “At about 4:00, my friend and I stepped out onto the balcony to smoke,” recounted Lena, a psychology student at the Sholokhov Pedagogical Institute. “Suddenly we heard a thud, like snow falling off the rooftop. It was almost empty in the courtyard, and we immediately noticed a man lying directly in front of the canopy over the second entranceway to building No. 9. He was lying on his stomach, and it seemed to us that he tried to get up, but couldn’t.” Noticing the open window on the stairway between the fourth and fifth floors and the fact that the man’s shoes had come off and his jacket and sweater were pulled up to his armpits, the girls called an ambulance. Their call was not accepted, however. “We cannot collect all the drunks in Moscow on Friday night,” they were told, along with the advice to call back in half an hour if he was still there. He did not go away. On the contrary, he stopped moving altogether.

Lena and her friend report that they did not see anyone near Safronov, nor anyone in the windows of the stairway or leaving through that door. At least three of his neighbors on the fourth and fifth floors, an elderly lady, a young mother and a middle-aged housewife, were hole at the time. They did not hear any suspicious noises on the stairway.

Evidence of foul play has not been found, but to colleagues and friends, the idea that Safronov committed suicide seems completely implausible. True, Safronov was recently diagnosed with a stomach ulcer, but that is hardly a reason to throw yourself out a fourth story window. No suicide note was found, and according to phone records collected by Kommersant, everyone who talked with Safronov before the incident didn’t recognize anything to suggest that he was distraught, let alone on the verge of offing himself.

The question is then if Safronov didn’t commit suicide, they why was he killed? Kommersant points a recent story he was working on:

Kommersant deputy editor-in-chief Bulavinov noted that Safronov’s death may have been violent and related to his professional activities. “We cannot exclude that possibility, even though there is no direct evidence,” he said. The newspaper is aware of only one sensitive topic that Safronov was working on.

Safronov stated that he would check information that he had received on possible new deliveries of Russian weapons to the Middle East while at the IDEX 2007 arms exhibition in the United Arab Emirates. That exhibition opened February 17. Safronov was interested in the sale of Su-30 fighter jets to Syria and S-300V missiles to Iran. He had information that those deals would be concluded through Belarus, in order for Moscow to avoid accusations in the West of selling weapons to pariah states. Safronov called the editorial office from Abu Dhabi to say that he had found confirmation of his facts.

“In the first days in Abu Dhabi, Ivan was perky and cheerful as usual,” recounted journalist Vladimir Stepanov. “But on the fourth day, he seemed to change. His mood became steadily bad. He even stopped coming to dinner, saying his stomach hurt. Once he woke up the front desk at 6:00 in the morning to ask for analgesic.” Stepanov said that Safronov had no personal conflicts with anyone there, however.

Back in Moscow, Safronov did not return to work because of his health. He did attend a press conference held by the head of the Federal Service of Military and Technical Cooperation Mikhail Dmitriev at ITAR-TASS on February 27, however. There he told colleagues that he had found information that more contracts had been signed between Russia and Syria for the sale of MiG-29 jets and Pantsir-S1 and Iskander-E missiles. He added that he would not write about those deals, however, because he had been warned that doing so would cause an international scandal and the FSB would made charges against him of revealing state secrets stick. Investigations of Safronov for revealing state secrets had been started before, but no charges had veer been filed against him. He did not say who had warned him. The same day, Safronov called Kommersant and said that he would dictate his story about arms deliveries through Belarus over the telephone. He did not do so, however.

This explanation of course fuels an already smoldering fire when it comes to journalists in Russia. If Safronov’s death turns out to be murder, he will be the 14th journalist killed since Putin became president. Not to mention the several Kremlin critics who’ve recently ended up whacked. These facts are already causing news reports to connect a variety of dots that begins with Anna Politkovskaya, runs through Alexander Litvinenko, twists around Paul Joyal, and now is looking to lasso Ivan Safronov. All of this has got to perk the suspicions of even Putin’s most ardent supporters.

Talk about a script writing itself! Sony and Warner Bros. who are both developing films about the Alexander Litvinenko murder might just get their third act after all. Johnny Depp won’t need to look too deep to get inspiration for his role as Sasha the Spy. The shooting, ahem . . . carjacking, or is it mugging, no wait, shooting of Paul Joyal has revived a case that by all appearances seemed all but closed. Last week, Paul JoyalLitvinenko acquaintance, security expert and “a longtime critic of the Putin regime,” was shot in his DC suburban neighborhood shortly after he uttered these words on Dateline NBC: “A message has been communicated to anyone who wants to speak out against the Kremlin: ‘If you do, no matter who you are, where you are, we will find you and we will silence you — in the most horrible way possible.’” Talk about prescience!

Of course speculation immediately turned to the Kremlin, whose fabled long reach is not just about ice picks and radioactive substances anymore. However, that assumption was quickly questioned when police told the Washington Post that “Joyal was driving a Chrysler 300, a vehicle sought by carjackers, suggesting that the assailants might have followed Joyal home rather than waited there to attack him. Police have described the suspects as two black males.” The police officers claimed that Joyal was robbed of his wallet and briefcase.

Hey, I’ve seen that episode of the Sopranos! You know the one from the first season where Uncle June learns that Tony is going to a shrink and moves to whack him. He also hires “two black males” to make Tony’s murder seem like a “carjacking.” And I thought this all sounded too Hollywood before! Can we expect Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin™ to get writing credit?

But now Joyal’s wife claims that her husband was neither robbed nor carjacked. Though, “She did not say what happened to the items or how she knew they were not taken.” Okay . . . Well, at least it appears that Joyal is in good condition from the bullet in his belly. We can expect his version of events any day now. I suspect that Berezovsky’s public relations people are on a plane right now to coach Joyal into giving us the necessary hyperbolic twists this unfolding script needs.

Arkady Ostrovsky’s article “A Difference in Class” in Sunday’s Financial Times proves to be an interesting read. Ostrovsky, who left from the Soviet Union as a youth only to return years later as FT’s Moscow correspondent, ventures out to discover what has and hasn’t changed in his native Moscow. Sixteen years of capitalism has made Moscow look like another planet. All the shops and homely d?cor that stir in Ostrovsky’s memory are long gone. “The bakery with its smell of freshly baked buns for 3 kopecks” he writes “is now an Asian fusion restaurant, charging 50 cents for a slice of bread. The cafeteria on the ground floor of a Stalinist building where my mother took me after my music classes to drink sweet, milky coffee has undergone several transformations, often accompanied by mafia shoot-outs. The ice-cream parlour is now a beauty parlour and the restaurant we used to visit as a family has been bricked up.” Determined to find some semblance of his past, Ostrovsky set out to check up on his former secondary school. But still, that even proved to produce a sense of time displacement. “I was stepping into my past - but I was also walking into Russia’s future.”

“A Difference in Class” is not some lament of a Soviet Union long gone. Nor is it some kind of Marxist nostalgia cum class analysis. For Ostrovsky, Marx’s (and Lenin’s) specter is as absent as the Soviet regalia that once adorned the school. No, Moscow Grammar School 1543 in the South West (formerly known as Ordinary Secondary School No 43 named after Yuri Gagarin) is now a public school for Moscow’s elite. Middle class Muscovites clamor pay 500 rubles a month (the rest is paid by the state) for their children, who are selectively picked out at age 11, to attend.

Instead of the communist ideology Ostrovsky learned as a member of both the Pioneers and the Komsomol, capitalist ideology seeks to shape students like Andrei Martinyuk and Artem Streletsky into the archetypes of the New Capitalist Man. These lads are cosmopolitan, liberal, individualistic, well traveled, and armed with the dyad of middle class entrepreneurialism and the intricacies of global pop culture. Concepts like “business,” “banking,” “economics,” and “real estate” roll off their lips as easy as “socialism,” “internationalism,” “class,” and “dialectical materialism” probably once did off of Ostrovsky’s. So much so that the school’s director, Yuri Zavelsky estimates that “that some 20-30 per cent of the school’s alumni end up living abroad,” presumably to take advantage of the opportunities in the West. Yet Andrei and Artem want to stay despite the fact that they worry that one day Putin’s behemoth of a state might interfere in their prosperity. Still like the sons and daughters of the Soviet elite, there is a consciousness that in many ways they are the state. “I like this country because I was born here and if we don’t pull this country up who will? We, the graduates of this school, are the elite,” Andrei tells Ostrovsky.

Indeed Moscow Grammar School 1543 in the South West may look and feel different, but perhaps one should a bit hesitant to allow the content to sublimate the form.