That’s Russian journalist Yelena Tregubova, holding a copy of her 2003 book Tales of a Kremlin Digger. In June 2007, The Independent newspaper published Tregubova’s “Open Letter to the G-8″ in which she cried out to the leaders of the Western democracies, pleading for their intervention at an upcoming summit meeting against the neo-Soviet dictatorship of Vladimir Putin. Tregubova wrote:

I am writing to you because I fear that a tragedy is befalling Russia, with the restrictions on political and personal freedoms worsening every day. Having done away with the domestic opposition, Putin, on the eve of the G8 summit, has now decided to deal with the external “enemies”. I have personal experience of Vladimir Putin’s regime and the way the Russian President operates. I have been forced to seek asylum in Britain for criticizing the Kremlin as an independent journalist. I have come to realize that to return to my homeland would be suicidal for me.

Journalists being murdered for anti-Kremlin reporting is no paranoid fantasy where Russia is concerned. Just ask Anna Politkovskaya — but you can’t, because she was gunned down outside her apartment building for writing furious criticisms of the Kremlin’s war in Chechnya in the pages of the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta. Since Putin came to power, 211 journalists have died of unnatural causes. At least a dozen of them perished in confirmed contract hits.

Featured in a major recent report by Radio Free Europe, Tregubova was granted political asylum by Great Britain a week ago. RFE says of her book: “There is the story of an intimate lunch with Putin, then head of the FSB, at a sushi bar in downtown Moscow. ‘I couldn’t tell whether he was trying to recruit me, or chat me up,’ she writes. Tregubova recounts the bungling attempts of factory bosses to impress the president on regional tours, and presidential blunders that his PR men try to cover up.”

As soon as the book’s popularity began to rise, she came under attack:

Tregubova lost her job, was thrown out of the Kremlin reporters pool, and started to receive death threats. An explosion went off outside her door that she says was certainly intended to kill her. Then, a year ago, she got another threat. “I was abroad at the time, and I got information [that] I would be in mortal danger if I returned to my homeland” she says. “Of course, I knew that there was a difference between bravery and suicide. I’m not a kamikaze.” She says even the boldest of her Kremlin-reporter friends have been reduced to writing flattering anecdotes about the president. No one dares to criticize or write anything different today, she says, because they fear the consequences.

That’s just print media. “As for television, she says, it has become a ‘nightmare similar to what was shown in Communist Party leader Leonid Brezhnev’s era.’ Russia’s three main television channels are either state-controlled or owned by Kremlin-friendly enterprises, which means you never see news that’s critical of the government, Tregubova says.”