Colleagues of the murdered Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya put out a 16- page newspaper last week with tributes to her investigations of human-rights abuses, excerpts from her writing, and a list of the 211 journalists who have been killed in Russia since 1992. Backed by the independent Russian Union of Journalists as well as foreign journalists working in Russia, this expression of professional solidarity stood in stark contrast to the indifference of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who observed on the day of Politkovskaya's funeral that her influence on political life in Russia had been "very minor."  Putin's callous remark reflects an attitude that is all too common among power holders, whether in make-believe democracies or real ones. Putin implied that Politkovskaya's death should not be accounted a great loss to Russia, since her stories about the unpunished murders, rapes, kidnappings and torture perpetrated by Russian forces in Chechnya left intact the hierarchy of power in Russia.  But in fact Politkovskaya and like- minded journalists around the world often constitute the last line of defense against unaccountable regimes. The cliché is that they speak truth to power. More often, they are simply foraging for nuggets of information that the powerful prefer to keep hidden. Or they are trying to disclose the lies told by those in power.  "What have I done? I only wrote about what I witnessed and nothing more," Politkovskaya said in notes that were found on her computer after her death and printed in the special newspaper her colleagues published in her honor. Journalists like herself are treated by the Kremlin as "outcasts," she observed in that unfinished speech or essay. And she lamented that the compliant majority of her fellow scribes was staging a "jesters' show" meant to praise and flatter Putin, the president of Russia's Potemkin democracy.  Putin's manipulation of the media was on display Wednesday when he answered carefully culled questions from a nation-wide television audience. Two million queries were filtered down to 55 that received authoritative czar-like responses from Putin. His sole allusion to Politkovskaya during his three-hour colloquy was to answer a question about her assassination by saying it is "the obligation of the state" to complete investigations of "the killings of mass-media representatives."  More than any lack of compassion or generosity, Putin's comment revealed a telling conception of the Russian state he is molding. In that state, a Politkovskaya can only be thought of as a representative of one interest group in a corporatist system, not as a brave woman who risked death to tell her compatriots about the crimes being committed in their name, in Chechnya, by Putin's Kremlin.