THE Russian flag went up at the Council of Europe last week and with it were raised the hopes of millions of Russians for improved human rights in their once totalitarian country.
Moscow's accession to the European club came just a few weeks too late for Nikolai Pozhedayev, who had been languishing on death row in the central Russian town of Yelets for the last six years. His execution in January was legal but it went against the spirit of Russia's agreement with the council which among other requirements for democracy expect its members to abolish the death penalty.
I visited Pozhedayev in Yelets prison last November. His was an extraordinary case which had begun to attract the attention of the press. His story ended in a manner which shocked the journalists who had been involved with him.
Pozhedayev was no saint. He was nicknamed the flame because, with a gang of other thugs, he had set fire to a lorry after robbing and murdering the occupants. But he paid for his crime by suffering an agony of uncertainty which even some of his prison guards had come to feel was a violation of his human rights.
While Pozhedayev's mates received Russia's maximum custodial sentence - 15 years in labourcamp - the leader of the gang was given the death penalty in December 1989. Pozhedayev appealed for mercy to then Kremlin leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, and was refused. At that point, he could expect a knock on his cell door and a bullet in the back of the head fairly swiftly and he prepared himself accordingly.
Then in 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed. Pozhedayev was encouraged to appeal again to the new Russian president, Boris Yeltsin. Advised by an independent punishment review commission, Mr Yeltsin was commuting many death sentences in contrast with past Soviet leaders who had executed an average of 700 convicts a year. But Pozhedayev received no answer, neither yes nor no. His file was apparently lost. He waited for six years in limbo, fearing that every footfall in the corridor could be the arrival of his executioner.
When I met him in November, he said: "I thought it would be quick but it has dragged on. I hear noises in the corridor and think the moment has come. When you came, I thought maybe this is it. My mother comes to see me once a month. Each time I have said goodaye to her for the last time."
My visit to Yelets prison was arranged by a local newspaper reporter called Igor Chichinov. He had conducted a number of interviews with Pozhedayev, a character as sad as he was frightening. Pozhedayev, who was kept in solitary confinement and denied the exercise and other small privileges available to the ordinary prisoners, had been in and out of custody since the age of 11. His father had also been a convicted murderer.
Mr Chichinov's aim in writing about him was to get his fate clarified. A decision could mean death, of course, but since the number of executions had fallen under Mr Yeltsin, the journalist assumed the authorities would conclude Pozhedayev had suffered enough and commute his sentence to a long prison term.
After the New Year holiday, Mr Chichinov was shocked to learn that Pozhedayev had been transferred to a prison in Novocherkassk, Southern Russia, for as the authorities put it "the carrying out of the sentence".
Pozhedayez was executed on January 18th.
The prison service would comment no further on the case but the local court in Yelets told Mr Chichinov: "We received so many letters and phone calls as a result of your articles that we thought it was time to decide the Pozhedayev affair. Thank you for your useful work." Mr Chichinov said: "You can imagine how I felt."
Pozhedayev may turn out to be one of the last people to be executed in Russia. In an interview with the newspaper Trud last month, the head of the country's prison service, Gen Yuri Kalinin, said if it was up to him, he would not rush to abolish the death penalty in view of the crime wave in post communist Russia.
"But today the issue has practically been decided since we have decided to enter the Council of Europe, we must abolish the death penalty", he said.
Gen Kalinin said Russia currently had 710 death row inmates who might now be given life sentences instead. But the country had only one jail able to accommodate prisoners for life. Five or six more high security prisons would have to be built because labour camps were not secure enough for lifers.
Mr Pristavkin, of the Punishment Review Commission, noted that, while Mr Yeltsin had shown mercy to scores of death row inmates at the start of his presidency, he had become tougher of late, perhaps because of the coming elections when crime will be a major issue.
Perhaps too the authorities disliked the fuss the press made about Pozhedayev. In these days of economic hardship, Russia's prisons are overcrowded, the prisoners poorly fed and the prison officers kept waiting months for their low wages. Before Russia entered the Council of Europe, it was a simple matter to execute Pozhedayev, one less body requiring a bed, one less mouth to feed.