MOSCOW, Oct 14 (Reuters) - Two deaths framed my four years in Moscow.
The first was the murder of crusading political journalist Anna Politkovskaya, shot dead in her apartment building on then-President Vladimir Putin's 54th birthday, a month after my arrival in Russia.
I had read Politkovskaya's essays "Putin's Russia" before starting my assignment, struck by the bleakness of the picture they painted but encouraged by her boldness.
Surely a government that tolerates such journalists could not be as bad as she made it out to be?
Politkovskaya's death was a harbinger. The succeeding four years in Moscow were punctuated with the violent deaths of investigative journalists and human rights workers.
Defence correspondent Ivan Safronov fell from a fourth floor window after researching Russian arms sales to the Middle East. Although he was still alive after hitting the street and neighbours called an ambulance immediately, help only arrived once he had died. Investigators returned a verdict of suicide.
Anastasia Baburova, a young reporter with the opposition Novaya Gazeta, found herself in the wrong place at the wrong time: walking along a central Moscow street in broad daylight after a news conference with Stanislav Markelov, a rights lawyer appealing against the release of a jailed army killer and rapist. Both were shot dead.
The killings largely achieved their aim of silencing critical, independent voices in the Russian media. Alexei Venediktov, editor of Ekho Moskvy radio, says that many journalists have left the profession altogether or emigrated to freer neighbouring states such as Ukraine.
Despite the bloodshed, Western media depictions of Putin's Russia as a totalitarian police state or a rebirth of the Soviet Union are wide of the mark.
Russians have retained the biggest freedom they won with the demise of the Soviet Union, the right to travel freely abroad. The Russian Internet remains largely free and foreign journalists have far more freedom to travel, interview and write than in China or much of the Middle East.
Today's Russians -- especially those in the elite -- are far too fond of consumerism and Western comforts to want a return to the shortages, queues and austerity of the Soviet era.
Much more striking about Putin's Russia are two other aspects: its corruption and its old-fashionedness.
Corruption in Russia is as old as the tsars and bribe-taking is widespread across much of the emerging market world.
Yet the scale of it in Russia is staggering. The government itself estimates that $300 billion a year is paid in bribes. Unlike other countries, much of the cash is not handed over to secure lucrative contracts -- though that also happens.
Instead, officials charge protection money in return for not closing down your business, not imprisoning you on a trumped-up charge or not confiscating your assets on a pretext of a tax investigation. It is not bribery. It is extortion.
A Moscow restaurateur says bribes are her main business expense each month, amounting to more than salaries, rent or food. The officials who visit her to collect their money work in rotation -- one month the tax police visit, the next the labour inspector, then the hygiene and sanitary service, the fire inspector and so on.
And then there is the young graduate who joined the traffic police. Five years on, he holds a humble post handing out licence plates -- yet he owns two apartments and a Mercedes.
When Putin put many of his former KGB associates into key positions of power back in 2000, he believed that their professionalism, patriotism and experience would make them trusted and loyal administrators of a new Russia.
Instead, many of what former FSB director Nikolai Patrushev termed "the new nobility" started behaving like the old Tsarist aristocracy -- using their positions to amass huge personal fortunes and live astoundingly sybaritic lives.
Stand outside one of Moscow's more expensive nightclubs at night and see how many of the black Mercedes S-Classes and Bentleys disgorging expensively clad young men and their under-dressed girlfriends bear special passes in their windscreens from the Presidential Administration or the FSB.
No surprise then, that ambitious Russian students say their top career preference is a job with the government. As the joke goes, you live like an oligarch but the job security is better.
President Dmitry Medvedev has declared a war on corruption but Russians' expectations are low: after all, this is a leader who has spent nearly two decades inside the system and who knows perfectly well how high corruption reaches.
In contrast to an emerging market competitor like Brazil, where a vigorous free press campaigns against abuses of power, Russia's intimidation of investigative journalists and civil society activists dooms any campaign to name and shame corrupt officials to failure.
And the other death which framed my time in Moscow?
The political death last month of Yuri Luzhkov, Moscow's veteran mayor. Fired summarily by Medvedev, Luzhkov embodied both those hallmarks of the Putin era: old-fashionedness and corruption.
Popularly elected in the 1990s and originally praised as a dynamic leader who restyled Soviet central Moscow into a ritzy 21st century capital, Luzhkov drew increasing fire as he stayed at the helm of Europe's largest city for 18 unbroken years.
Eventually it was his public criticism of Medvedev that led to his downfall, though the fortune of his billionaire property developer wife Yelena Baturina did not help.
Luzkhkov's strident, old fashioned political views sat ill with Medvedev's Russia. Gay pride marches were "satanic" and Stalin's contribution to victory in World War Two was honoured with posters displayed around the city.
But far from being a maverick exception, Luzhkov was in many ways a typical example of the type of politician who has flourished under Putin.
When President Barack Obama criticised Putin before his first visit to Moscow for having one foot stuck in the past, some commentators felt his criticism had merit.
Famous for his phrase that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century, Putin has at times looked awkward in a 21st century where soft power and knowledge economies trump tanks and torpedoes.
Russia's brief war with Georgia in 2008 was an example. The Kremlin responded to Georgia's attack on the pro-Russia breakaway region of South Ossetia by launching an all-out air and land invasion of its tiny neighbour.
Such Great Power military moves were de rigueur in the 19th century and still popular in the 20th.
But in the 21st century they helped trigger a catastrophic meltdown of the Russian stock market, a flight by investors and serious damage to Moscow's standing among key emerging market nations. Even the country's closest allies shunned the move.
Perhaps the root of Russia's problems lies in its seat of power. Nestled next to the river in central Moscow and occupying 68 acres of prime land enclosed by fairytale high red walls, the Moscow Kremlin is a beautiful, mystical world unto itself.
Tread the creaking wooden parquet floors of its long, carpeted corridors under dim clusters of light bulbs enclosed in Soviet-era shades and you walk back in time.
The large office suites on the fourth floor, home to top officials, boast armies of secretaries, banks of old-fashioned white secure telephones and an eerie, tomb-like silence where the 21st century barely intrudes.
Ensconced in what Putin's former private secretary Igor Sechin described as a "holy and deeply significant" place, would any Russian ruler worry about the rapid rise of neighbouring China, the explosive growth of India's technology industry or the risk that Russia might be getting left behind?
Returning for a moment to the theme of death, if Putinism faces a mortal threat over the long term, it is unlikely to come from the familiar bogeymen he evokes: the West or the political opposition.
It is much more likely to come from corruption or old-fashionedness. (Editing by Janet McBride)
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