Galina Starovoitova was not the first Russian politician to be gunned down since the Soviet Union was dismantled. She was not even the first to die by the gun this year. Neither was she the first democrat to lose her life, nor by any means the most prominent member of the Duma to be killed.

Yet her death caught the public imagination in a way others did not. She was the first woman victim and, more importantly, an honest woman in a land in which political honesty is a commodity on the verge of extinction.

In its editorial condemning her death the Moscow Times was at pains, in its very first paragraph, to use the following words: "She had no significant known business dealings, just a powerful and admirable dedication to the politics of appealing to people's better natures."

People speak in shorthand in today's Russia. In plain English, no significant known business dealings means that she was not a crook, for the words business and crime are interchangeable these days.

She fought strenuously for her own vision of democracy from the days when Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost first permitted such a fight, until the night last week an assassin pumped three bullets into her head on the stairwell of her apartment building on the Griboyedov Canal in St Petersburg.

There is some evidence that the assassin was another woman, according to agents who examined the murder weapon. Neighbours say they saw a woman fleeing from the scene.

Several possible motives have been put forward. At her funeral on Tuesday Anatoly Chubais, a former privatisation minister, grasped Starovoitova's martyrdom to his breast and declared that sinister forces were out to destroy "us" and that "we" would not allow them to do so.

It cannot be said of Chubais that he had "no significant known business dealings", nor can it be said he was "dedicated to the politics of appealing to people's better natures". His attempts to claim some of Starovoitova's posthumous honour have been one of the more distasteful after-effects of the murder.

Chubais and the former prime minister, Yegor Gaidar, became involved in instant condemnation of "the communists" as responsible for the murder of Starovoitova. In return the communist speaker of the parliament, Gennady Seleznyov, offered a theory, almost Byzantine in its complexity, that Starovoitova's friends from the democratic movement had arranged her murder in order to attract sympathy for their cause.

No evidence was offered in either instance, but emotions are running high. Chubais and Gaidar have, understandably, been distressed by Starovoitova's death. The reasons for Seleznyov's emotional behaviour have been less well chronicled. In the run-up to local elections in St Petersburg in the past weeks a number of his own supporters have been shot. However, unlike Starovoitova, they have survived.

President Yeltsin's statement that he would personally take charge of the investigation into Starovoitova's murder rings hollow at a time when the man seems incapable of personally taking charge of anything. But at least he did not, unlike Chubais, Gaidar and Seleznyov, attempt to make political capital out of the murder.

Neither did the Prime Minister, Yevgeny Primakov, who is charged with holding a vast disintegrating state together at a time when few others have had the courage to take on the job.

There are few clues to the identity of the murderers or to those who may have paid them to kill Galina Starovoitova. Members of the Federal Security Service, the successor to the KGB, have recently admitted that in the straitened circumstances of today's Russia, contract killings are being carried out by those who have been so trained by the State.

Many of those who claimed Starovoitova as their political comrade in the days after her death were excoriated by her at one time or another. Although she was associated with Chubais and Gaidar and the former mayor of St Petersburg, Anatoly Sobchak, in the early days of the democratic movement, her relationship with all three became stormy in later times.

The war in Chechnya put paid to her previously unconditional support for President Yeltsin, and in 1996 she made the principled decision to stand against him in the presidential elections. She failed, however, to have her candidature accepted due to what was officially described as "technical reasons".

Galina Starovoitova had, therefore, political opponents across the spectrum. She simply opposed those whom her honest beliefs did not allow her to support.

But at the time of her death she was merely a deputy of the tiny Democratic Russia party in the Duma. Her moral strength was no longer matched by a political importance which could have posed a threat to anyone on the national scene.

It is at local level in St Petersburg, therefore, that the reason for her murder is more likely to be found. The election campaign there has been vicious even by Russian standards.

The city, whose mayor, Vladimir Yakovlev, or governor as he prefers to be called, has been a bitter opponent of Starovoitova, has become the centre of political mayhem.

The campaign for the local elections has been marked by the large numbers of mafiosi standing for office. Mafiosi, it should be noted, were strenuously opposed by Starovoitova. Ordinary citizens who happen to be namesakes of important candidates have been paid large sums to put their names forward in order to confuse voters. In some local constituencies up to five people with the same first and family names will be on the ballot papers.

It is both an irony and a tragedy that a woman who embodied the last vestiges of decency and honesty in Russian politics may have lost her life due to sordid provincial machinations in a city that once prided itself as being the centre of sophistication and culture of all Russia.