Tributes to slain Russian Duma deputy Galina Starovoytova poured in on Tuesday as politicians and media commentators warned that violent extremists had thrown down the gauntlet and the authorities must act decisively to defend Russian democracy .

Russian TV channels devoted extensive coverage to Starovoytova's funeral in St Petersburg, which was attended by crowds of mourners including numerous politicians.

The private NTV channel emphasized that St Petersburg governor Vladimir Yakovlev did not turn up for the funeral.

ITAR-TASS news agency reported that he was undergoing treatment in hospital, and his deputy Viktor Yatsuba was put in charge of the funeral arrangements.

Speaking at the memorial service, Anatoliy Chubais, a former first deputy prime minister who now heads the Unified Energy System monopoly, vowed that Starovoytova's democratic allies would continue her cause.

"They are killing our comrades.

They are killing our friends.

Do they want to stop us? Do they want to frighten us? It won't work," said Chubais, one of Russia's leading market reformers, who spearheaded mass privatisation.

"I know the cause to which Galina Vasilyevna dedicated herself.

I know what she gave her life for, and I know we shall pursue that cause to the end." Alongside Chubais, Russian TV showed several other key architects of Russia's market reforms, all of them now out of the government - Oleg Sysuyev, Boris Nemtsov, Yegor Gaydar, Sergey Kiriyenko and Viktor Chernomyrdin.

Deputy Prime Minister Valentina Matviyenko told the mourners that Starovoytova's death was "bitter, distressing and unbearably painful".

"It is terrible to realize that the murders of priests, journalists, bankers, businessmen and now deputies have become an almost routine occurrence in our lives, in which villains and gangsters raise their hands against a woman deputy, an outstanding politician." In a hard-hitting editorial headed "The Dead State," the daily 'Izvestiya' condemned the authorities' failure to tackle crime, saying Russia had been unable the replace the rule of "lies, fear and poverty" in the Soviet Union with law and order .

"Politicians and public figures, people with an excellent knowledge of the situation in the country, find nothing inconceivable in the fact that someone (a well-known politician! an unarmed woman!) should have been gunned down for the POSSIBLE intention of running for governor, in the fact that Starovoytova was killed for opposing the election of criminal deputies to the city's Legislative Assembly, or in the fact that she should have died at the hands of Nazis whom she had openly fought for many years," Izvestiya thundered.

"The gunshots on Griboyedov Canal showed that in Russia today evil fears nothing.

It has confidence in its absolute impunity... Not one of the high profile contract killings has been cleared up.

Officialdom, whether in the capital or in the regions, has embezzled on a Homeric scale and indulged in shameless tyranny, yet no-one has said a harsh word to the thieving bankers who have fleeced hundreds of thousands of investors.

The Nazis, multiplying like rats during the plague, are meeting with no rebuff, either.

All this means that there is no state in Russia today.

It is dead," the paper said.

Commenting on the significance of Starovoytova's death, the daily 'Nezavisimaya Gazeta' lamented the fact that Russia still lacked a democratic consensus powerful enough to thwart the extremists.

"The 'unified right' has not actually emerged - and the Russian ship of state has correspondingly tilted strongly, all but disastrously, to the left," said the editorial, which was headed "The Dead and the Living - the Murder of Galina Starovoytova as a Test of Russia's Survivability".

"The vacuum on the right is being increasingly filled by criminal and near-criminal political structures.

That is the price of crazy and irresponsible reformism - reformism that is greedy first, and reformist in its aim only second or third.

"Unfortunately the propaganda wave stirred up by the news of the dreadful murder in St Petersburg has gone exactly as you would expect it to go in our sick society.

The right accuse the left, the left accuse the right," said 'Nezavisimaya Gazeta,' which is financed by politician and business tycoon Boris Berezovskiy, one of Russia's richest men.

The liberal daily 'Kommersant' described Starovoytova's death as "a tragic illustration of the power vacuum in the country".

"Instead of accord we now have murder.

A murder which, as distinct from all previous murders of politicians and businessmen, cannot be put down to the general criminal situation.

It is a purely political murder.

This has become possible simply because the authorities, by giving ground, have finally ceased to be authorities," said 'Kommersant," accusing the Kremlin of "shirking any responsibility".

"There is only one way out - the re-creation of a real centre of power.

The president must return from limbo," the paper said.

In a statement quoted by ITAR-TASS, St Petersburg Governor Vladimir Yakovlev warned ominously: "It is quite possible that the murder ... is part of a large-scale provocation".