PROFILE IN COURAGE….

Last year a reporter for Novaya gazeta, a small biweekly that has covered Kremlin moneylaundering scandals, was beaten to death with a hammer in one of Russia’s many unsolved political crimes. A second reporter, who suggested that the prosecutor general was soft on corruption, was severely beaten and slashed with a razor but survived. That reporter, Oleg Lurye, said last week that he has seen a secret report by the U.S. FBI that documents literally hundreds of meetings in the United States between Russian criminal figures and close advisers to presidents Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin. Lurye says the report, called “Eurasian Organized Crime on the Territory of the United States,” was delivered to President Clinton in December.