Moscow

ON the night of Nov. 6, I was attacked by two young men armed with steel rods. The assault occurred a few feet from the entrance to my house, which is just a 10-minute walk from the Kremlin.

A month later, I am still in the hospital. One of my fingers has been amputated, one of my legs and both halves of my jaw have been broken, and I have several cranial wounds. According to my doctors, I won’t be able to go back to my job as a reporter and columnist at Kommersant, an independent newspaper, until spring.

A few hours after the attack, President Dmitri Medvedev went on Twitter to declare his outrage, and he instructed Russia’s law enforcement agencies to make every effort to investigate this crime. But no one has been apprehended, and I do not expect that the two young men will ever be identified or caught.

Three theories quickly emerged about who was behind the attack  which was, I believe, an assassination attempt. The first holds that it was the municipal authorities of Khimki, a town between Moscow and St. Petersburg. I had written several articles criticizing a proposed highway between the two cities that would run through the town, something the local authorities want but many residents oppose.