Russian police are trying to make sense of the murder of Marina Pisareva, a 47-year-old production manager at Bertelsmann Media Moscow who was found at her suburban dacha Sunday, apparently stabbed to death by an antique dagger from her own collection. Because the small division of the Bertelsmann conglomerate specializes in art books, and earns little more than $1 million in annual revenues, spokespeople are quick to downplay the possibility that the killing was politically motivated, like the murders of journalist Anna Polikovskaya; the Moscow Times quotes a source in the prosecutor’s office who said the death “looked like a domestic squabble,” while the London Times provides the additional detail that “nothing appeared to have been stolen.” Nevertheless, investigators have not definitely ruled out a possible political element to the murder.
(A search on Google turns up a Russian artist named Marina Pisareva, and while it seems too coincidental that there’d be two women with that name in the Russian art world, I can’t at this time confirm the artist and the production manager are the same women, as their stated ages differ by four years. I’ll see what I can do to nail that down.)