Baku — Rushana Huseynova celebrated the second birthday of her son Aslan this week, quietly and sadly. She watched a video of his first birthday, when her husband Elmar Huseynov raised a glass of red wine and toasted. "As time passes," he said, "you lose friends and gain enemies."

It was a odd toast for an infant's birthday, but strangely prophetic. Five months later, the prominent magazine editor was gunned down in the stairwell just steps from his home, making him the latest victim of the dangerous politics of this corrupt oil state.

Azerbaijan wants to portray itself as a European-style democracy in a parliamentary election Sunday, which will pit the New Azerbaijan Party against the Azadlig (Freedom) bloc of opposition groups and a wide array of independent candidates.

On the surface, among the clothes boutiques and fashionable cafés of Baku, this seems almost plausible. But the people who oppose the regime have the scars to prove otherwise.

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Before his death, Mr. Huseynov was regularly followed, harassed, and threatened for publishing investigative articles about government corruption among the handful of families who control most of Azerbaijan's government and wealth.

Now, his 27-year-old widow sits in his old offices, editing a weekly newspaper called Bakinskiye Vedomosti. She inherited the staff of 20 from her husband's magazine, Monitor, but she also took on his problems: She has been approached by government agents, she said, and instructed to keep quiet or leave the country. Burly men wait outside her apartment and follow her around the city; she recognizes them as the same ones who used to follow her husband.

Chain-smoking nervously, she said she won't abandon her work.

"I will never leave Azerbaijan," she said. "It was Elmar's dream that his son would live in a democratic country. He already did a lot of work toward that, and I will continue it."

On paper, Azerbaijan has been a democracy since it gained independence during the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. But one family has controlled the government since former Soviet leader Heydar Aliyev took office in 1993. He collapsed twice in 2003 and passed the mantle to his son Ilham.

The regime has taken pains to seem like a secular democracy, especially after joining the Council of Europe in 2001. But few observers believe the country has ever experienced a fair election.

This time, after protests over accusations of vote-rigging in 2003, the government has implemented several safeguards as recommended by the international community, such as inking voters' fingers and allowing exit polls. But concerns have been raised about how these measures are implemented, and the government has refused to reform the election authority as recommended.

For centuries, Azerbaijan was dominated by a succession of empires. It broke away from Russia for a few years after the First World War, but was soon swallowed by the Soviet Union. The government that eventually emerged from the crumbling Communist system wasn't markedly different from its predecessors; while the country's constitution now guarantees freedom of speech, of the press and of assembly, international observers complain that these rights are ignored.

Those kinds of abuses have prompted Western intervention in other former Soviet countries such as Ukraine, where money has poured into democratic initiatives.

But the West treads more carefully in Azerbaijan -- partly because of its strategic position beside Iran and among the unstable Caucuses, partly because of its growing struggle with militant Islam, but mostly because of oil.

Western companies have spent billions developing the Caspian oil reserves, and after a pipeline to Turkey opened in May, it's hoped that the flow will provide a much-needed alternative to Russian and Middle Eastern energy.

For years, the best information about Azeri politics came from Mr. Huseynov. He quit his job at a newspaper in the early 1990s, because his editors refused to publish his pro-opposition columns, and founded his own weekly magazine, Monitor.

He worked in a cramped, spare office downtown. His wife says he never took notes and wrote his stories from memory. The government repeatedly shut down his printing presses and removed the magazine from store shelves, but Mr. Huseynov always managed to find more printers and vendors willing to help with his project.

"Many small printing offices in Baku would help us secretly, at great risk to themselves, by printing batches of each edition," Ms. Huseynova said.

At the time of his death, 6,000 copies of Monitor were published every week with a glossy cover. The articles covered human rights, torture in prisons, corruption and other themes left untouched in a country where the news media are usually controlled directly by the state or by businessmen with no interest in stirring up trouble.

Mr. Huseynov was working on a feature article on the legacy of Heydar Aliyev when he was shot seven times in the stairwell outside his apartment. Police detained and questioned six cab drivers after the attack but no charges were laid. Diplomats and human-rights workers in Baku widely assume the killing was politically motivated; Ms. Huseynova bluntly accuses the government of ordering a hit.

Asked whether she's afraid about continuing to defy the government, Ms. Huseynova does not hesitate.

"After I saw Elmar killed, I can't be afraid of anything else," she said. "When I opened the door he was standing there with seven shots in him, and he was still trying to stand. He showed such courage, and I'm trying to do the same."