A single occurrence wiped the war in Chechnya and the allegations of immense corruption linked to the Kremlin from the top of Russia's front pages and the main slots on its radio and television news bulletins. That event was the death of a frail, reserved old man in St Petersburg whose passion in life was medieval Russian literature.
A solemn newsreader on the nationwide ORT television channel summed up the views of most Russians when he intoned the words: "Russia's last intellectual has died."
Dmitri Sergeyevich Likhachev was a man of immense cultural distinction. He received almost every honour his native country could bestow and he himself insisted that his years in Stalin's prison camps should be included in this category. He held honorary doctorates from Edinburgh, Oxford, Bordeaux, Sienna, Budapest, Sofia and Zurich universities.
As the USSR mellowed and moved from the harsh totalitarianism of Stalin, Dmitri Likhachev received the full panoply of honours which already sound so dated these days. There was a certain delicious irony in the fact that a man who was outspokenly anti-Communist and a fierce critic of Lenin could also be given awards such as: Hero of Socialist Labour; Order of Lenin; Order of the Red Banner of Labour; State Prize of the USSR; Prizewinner of the Presidium of the USSR Academy of Sciences; For Valiant Labour medal; Veteran of Labour medal; For the Defence of Leningrad medal and For Valiant Labour in the Great Patriotic War 1941-45.
The small planet number 2877 which orbits the sun between Mars and Jupiter was named "Likhachev" in his honour. In Russia he became the natural successor to his fellow member of the Academy of Sciences, Andrei Sakharov, in the struggle for human rights and democracy and even as his 90th year approached he could be found on the streets of his beloved St Petersburg demonstrating against injustice.
Though he never achieved the international fame which was bestowed upon Academician Sakharov, he was held at least in equal and perhaps even greater respect by Russians. His age, his erudition and his courage stood out in a country in which youth, sycophancy and the brash flaunting of new wealth inhabited the higher echelons of power.
When the Bolsheviks took power in Russia in the October Revolution in 1917 Dmitri Sergeyevich Likhachev was already nearly 11 years old. He remembered clearly the Tsarist era, the glittering fashion of old St Petersburg on the one hand and its appalling poverty on the other. He spoke of once having seen the young Tsarevich Alexei who was just two years his senior.
He spoke and wrote of his time in the dreaded northern Gulag of the Solovetsky islands and his forced labour on the construction of the grandiose but commercially useless White Sea Canal. Hundreds of thousands of prisoners began the canal's construction - very few survived.
He had become a prisoner due to a student prank when he was just 21. He and his friends celebrated an anniversary. Another friend jokingly sent a telegram of congratulations which purported to come from the Pope in Rome. The entire group was arrested and imprisoned.
One particular incident haunted him all his life. He discovered in 1929 that his name was on a list for execution as a reprisal for a mass escape attempt. He went into hiding within the Gulag and avoided the death sentence. Another man may have been executed in his place and he recounted later that he began to live two lives: "my own and the life of someone whose name I do not know".
Academician Likhachev, as he was respectfully known, wrote more than 1,000 learned works on Russian literature. He became a deputy in the parliaments of the Soviet Union and of Russia as well as head of the Soviet Cultural Fund, an organisation which, with the active help of the late Raisa Gorbachev, worked to help keep cultural institutions alive at a time when financial support was scant.
It was his work in the field of human rights, however, which brought him from academic seclusion to the centre of political and social affairs when he was already in his eighties. Presidents Gorbachev and Yeltsin sought his advice on cultural and humanitarian affairs. His old-fashioned elegance of language and of manners served as a link to pre-revolutionary Russia. He was truly the last of the old Russian intellectuals.
Dmitri Sergeyevich Likhachev: born 1906; died September, 1999