"The fact that the Russian market is ready for the appearance of such a publication is a sign that Russian business has begun a new, more civilised stage in its development," wrote Paul Klebnikov in the first issue of the Russian version of the Forbes business magazine which he edited, cheekily launched in Moscow on 22 April, Lenin's birthday.

He believed that the gangster era of the early 1990s had given way to a more sober, normal way of creating wealth in his ancestral homeland to which he had moved to set up the magazine six months earlier. As a conservative Russian patriot with a strong sense of duty to his country, Klebnikov saw his journalism as part of a crusade for a better Russia.

His murder on the street outside his office 11 weeks after the launch proved him wrong. Russian business remains riddled with gangsterism, and at the mercy of state pressure and arbitrary laws that protect the strong against the weak. If the "oligarchs" or tycoons who became fabulously rich in the early years of Boris Yeltsin's rule have now been cut down to size, it is thanks only to the overweaning power of Vladimir Putin's regime, which trades wealth for loyalty.

In 1996 Klebnikov wrote a scathing profile for Forbes of one of the then most powerful tycoons, Boris Berezovsky, calling him a "powerful gangland boss". The article appeared to imply that Berezovsky was linked to the 1995 killing of the television journalist Vladislav Listev. Berezovsky sued the magazine in London, settled last year when Forbes admitted that there was no evidence linking the financier to the murder.

Klebnikov continued, however, to vent his anger at Berezovsky in a 2000 book, Godfather of the Kremlin: Boris Berezovsky and the looting of Russia (re-subtitled for the paperback "The Decline of Russia in the Age of Gangster Capitalism").

Yet some who knew Klebnikov in Moscow's expat community felt his campaign against the oligarchs - many of whom, including Berezovsky and the former oil-company boss Mikhail Khodorkovsky, now on trial in Moscow, are Jewish - was tinged with anti-Semitism.

Klebnikov's second book, Razgovor s varvarom ("Conversation with a Barbarian"), based on extended interviews with the Chechen warlord and gangster turned businessman and Islamist thinker Khozh-Akhmed Nukhayev, was published in Russian in 2003, but the author failed to find an English-language publisher. He sought to understand the mind of the "new barbarians", using Islam as an ideology of terrorism. "West Europeans are those who have turned a blind eye to this threat but will wake up to it in the not so distant future," Klebnikov warned. "They hope this wave of violence will not touch them. But of course, it will because Western Europe is a very good target."

But was his project an attempt to lend intellectual justification to President Putin's vicious war against the Chechens, believing Nukhayev would condemn himself out of his own mouth?

Klebnikov, who styled himself in Russia Pavel Yurevich Khlebnikov, was born in New York of a leading Russian émigré family, growing up speaking Russian as well as English. Two ancestors on his father's side were generals, while his grandfather fought in the First World War and subsequently against the Bolshevik regime in the White army. He later fled into exile. Klebnikov's father, Yuri, became a translator at the Nazi war crimes tribunal in Nuremberg and later headed the translation unit at the United Nations.

After attending élite schools in New York and New Hampshire, Paul Klebnikov graduated first from the University of California at Berkeley in 1984 before moving to the London School of Economics, gaining an MA in 1985 and a doctorate, on the thesis "Agricultural Development in Russia, 1906-1917: land reform, social agronomy and co-operation", in 1991.

In 1989, while completing his PhD, he began as a reporter for Forbes magazine, where he would work until his death. He covered a range of subjects from the growth of xenophobia in Europe to tax evasion in Italy, secondary education in France and Iran's "millionaire mullahs".

It was as a student in 1984 that Klebnikov first visited Russia and as the country opened up politically with the end of the Soviet regime he took the opportunity as he saw it to help reshape his ancestral homeland. But as a business journalist and a strong nationalist he soon grew disillusioned and outraged by the mass asset-stripping by crooked insiders during Yeltsin's rule.

As well as angering those who viewed his anti-oligarch campaign as anti-Semitism, Klebnikov also angered some Ukrainians by an alarmist article in 1996 warning that Ukraine was poised on the brink of conflict between Ukrainian- and Russian-speakers. "Russia is now a democracy, and the Russian president cannot ignore the pleas of the Russian-speakers in Ukraine if they ask for his help," he proclaimed, arguing that the two countries should reintegrate.

His critics scorned his Russian disdain for Ukrainians, ignorance of the country and the wrongness of his judgement (Ukraine, for all its severe problems, does not face ethnic conflict).

One project he failed to complete was to turn his LSE thesis on the reforms inaugurated by the last Tsar's prime minister Pyotr Stolypin into a book to be published in Russian. He regarded Stolypin as a hero and a guide to how to reform the Russia of today.

Felix Corley