threats by telephone and by letter continued: the threats were mostly of violence. Leaving the house became an ordeal. There were online death threats. The murder of Anna Politkovskaya shook her badly. Michail Ryklin later wrote, "Once acquitted by the court, she saw herself facing a community for whom the things for which she had fought and made sacrifices (initially it almost seemed and if this was about a common call for freedom of artistic expression) had completely lost their meaning. Over these years the art scene resigned itself to its defeat and even managed to profit considerably as a result. It was, it transpired, far easier to endure being a target of religious fanatics than having to put up with the repressive passivity of most of her fellow artists." Meanwhile, her daughter and grandchild in Moscow waited in vain for Alchuk to call. Over the next few years Ryklin and Alchuk concluded that they no longer had a future in Moscow. In November 2007 they moved to Berlin: Michail Ryklin accepted a post as a visiting professor at the Humboldt University. Death On March 21, 2008 Anna Alchuk left the couple's Berlin apartment, telling her husband she was going to the shops to buy washing powder. It was a public holiday and the shops would be closed, but Ryklin, his nose in a book, did not register that till later. It was wet, cold and windy and she was dressed appropriately. Three hours later he noticed she had left her Mobile phone behind. Three weeks later, on 12 April, he was visited by two detectives. A body had been found in the Spree. He recognised the wedding ring when he was shown a photograph of it. Stones had been found in the coat pockets, together with a water-damaged picture of Manjushri. (The couple shared an interest in Buddhism.) Blood tests indicated a sleeping drug intake twenty times the doze conventionally prescribed for insomnia. The larynx was damaged. There was a puncture on the right side of the body with a broken needle in it. A hat had been drawn down firmly over the forehead and eyes. The day after his wife disappeared Michail Ryklin shared some ideas with the investigating authorities in a letter. He urged them to take more seriously the possibility that there might be a political aspect to her disappearance: "Through her critical engagement with Russian