Dmitry Pinsker, The Russia Journal’s political columnist, died Tuesday night from an internal injury following an accident on Sunday. He was only 30. Dmitry was one of those men whose own intellect and integrity made the subject he covered – Russian politics and politicians – seem trivial.

Our gentle, kind friend was a celebrated journalist who became an international authority on Russian politics. He was already well known in Russia. It will be hard for us to fill the void he has left. Many of our readers intuitively turn to Pinsker’s column, "On Politics" as the first thing they read in The Russia Journal.

Pinsker did not have a political agenda. After he and his colleagues from Itogi, others from Sevodnya and NTV and now TV6 were ousted from their jobs, he never succumbed to bias due to the persistent anger many journalists feel toward the establishment. His reporting was always objective.

Pinsker possessed a penetrating insight that could cut through the superficial pretensions of civility in Russian politics. He did not need to quote the Russian political elite to tell us what they were thinking – he already knew. He had the true gift of knowing the real intentions and machinations behind the smokescreens created by politicians and their spin-doctors. His understanding and analysis of the intrigue and machinations within the Kremlin, the State Duma and regional politics was always on the mark. Few could explain so much in so few words and articulate the complex world of Russian politics in such a simple and straightforward style. We all respected this quality in him.

Until last year, Dmitry was the political correspondent for Itogi news magazine. It was published by the media baron Vladimir Gusinksy, whose anti-Kremlin politics led to the sacking of all the journalists that had created the publication and the closure of his television station, NTV. Pinsker was out of a job, but he never quit. The following months were spent in patient preparation for a new magazine called Yezhenedelny Zhournal (The Weekly Magazine). To pay the bills in the interim, he worked at Echo of Moscow – where he had started his career in 1991 – and accepted our longstanding offer to write a column for us.

In 1999, in an effort to publish in-depth political commentary and news analysis for non-Russian speaking readers, we drew up a list of the top journalists in Russia. Pinsker’s name was on the top, and he was the first journalist we approached.

His first two articles got him into trouble with our young Western editorial team at the time. In 1999, his coverage of Yevgeny Primakov’s cabinet was harsh and unrelenting, upsetting some of our editors, who stopped running his articles.

However, in the summer of 2000, a new team of editors at The Russia Journal brought Pinsker back. He quickly became one of our most popular columnists in an impressive lineup. None of his analysis and commentary has ever been challenged by anyone.

Only last week he was planning an article about the degeneration of Russia’s right-wing politicians, the so-called "Yeltsin reformers" into an irrelevant political organization that is nothing more than a lobbying outfit with access to the Duma and the Kremlin.

Dmitry Pinsker is survived by his wife, Olga, and three children, Ilya, 9, Maria, 5 and Sofia, 3.

(A memorial service for Mr. Pinsker will be held Friday at the Dom Aktyora (House of Actors), 35 Arbat Ul., at 1 p.m.)