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

The private NTV channel emphasised 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.

'The State is dead'

In a hard-hitting editorial headed "The Dead State," the daily Izvestiya newspaper 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 Starovoitova 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.

'The price of crazy reform'

Commenting on the significance of Mrs Starovoitova'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 Starovoitova 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.

'A purely political murder'

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 Governo Vladimir Yakovlev warned ominously: "It is quite possible that the murder ... is part of a large-scale provocation".