Shchekochikhin graduated from the Journalism Department of
Moscow State University in 1975. He worked as an
investigative journalist at
Komsomolskaya Pravda (1972–1980) and
Literaturnaya Gazeta (1980–1996), and then as a deputy editor of the liberal newspaper
Novaya Gazeta (from 1996). Beginning in the 1990s, he published many articles critical of the
First and
Second Chechen Wars, human rights abuses in the
Russian army, state
corruption, and other social issues. In the summer of 1988, Shchekochikhin published an interview with a lieutenant colonel of the
militia Aleksander Gurov, in which the existence of organized crime in the
Soviet Union was first publicly stated. That brought fame to both Gurov (who became the head of the 6th Agency of the MVD of the USSR which struggled against organized crime) and Shchekochikhin. Yuri Shchekochikhin began his political career in 1990, when he was elected as a representative to the
Congress of People's Deputies. He was elected to the Russian
State Duma from the liberal
Yabloko party in 1995. He was a member of a Duma committee on the problems of
corruption, and was a
UN expert on the problems of organized crime. He was a vocal opponent of the
First and
Second Chechen Wars. Since early 1995, he has been an author and host of an investigative journalism program called "Special Team" on
ORT, Russian television's first channel (then owned by
Boris Berezovsky). In October 1995, the heads of the channel closed the program. According to Shchekochikhin, the reason was an episode called "For Motherland! For Mafia!", which was devoted to the Chechen War and was unleashed, in his opinion, by the "leading banks of Russia". From 2002, Shchekochikhin was a member of the
Sergei Kovalev Commission, which investigated allegations that the
1999 Moscow apartment bombings had been orchestrated by the Russian
Federal Security Service (FSB) to generate support for the war. One of Shchekochikhin's last articles before his death was "Are we Russia or KGB of Soviet Union?". It described such issues as the refusal of the FSB to explain to the Russian Parliament what poison gas was released during the
Moscow theater hostage crisis, and the work of secret services from
Turkmenistan, which operated with impunity in Moscow against Russian citizens of Turkmеn origin. He also tried to investigate the
Three Whales Corruption Scandal and criminal activities of
FSB officers related to
money laundering through the
Bank of New York and illegal actions of
Yevgeny Adamov, a former Russian Minister of Nuclear Energy. The Three Whales case was under the personal control of President
Vladimir Putin. In June 2003, Shchekochikhin contacted the
FBI and received an American visa to discuss the case with US authorities. ==Death==