The New Tsar (54 page)

At the end of his short life, his interest was piqued by rumors that Putin might be gay or bisexual, based in part on a brief, unsubstantiated anecdote in the memoirs of Yuri Skuratov, the former prosecutor, recalling Putin telling him that he believed a videotape existed showing him in a sexual tryst. The videotape has become a legend among Putin’s critics, including former officers purged when Putin took over the FSB
in 1998, who claim that various copies have been secreted abroad for safekeeping. No one seems to have actually seen it, and the accounts vary between an encounter with a young man in 1984, when he trained as a KGB foreign operative, to a tryst later in the same apartment where Skuratov was taped.
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In Litvinenko’s mind, though, a mere probability could easily become an indisputable truth. On July 5, less than four months before his poisoning, Litvinenko published his insinuation about Putin’s sexuality after Putin awkwardly lifted the shirt of a young boy visiting Red Square and kissed him on the stomach. His article appeared on the website of Chechnya’s rebel movement, a cause Litvinenko increasingly embraced after befriending another exile in London, the actor turned rebel spokesman Akhmed Zakayev, who had moved into a row house on the same street as Litvinenko in North London. Oleg Kalugin, the spy in exile, warned him when they met only months before his death that peddling unsubstantiated innuendo was dangerous. “Sasha, it’s too much,” he told him.
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Litvinenko, already a traitor in the eyes of the FSB, had lost any sense of caution in what he presumed was the safety of exile. Even his daughter thought he was “a little crazy.” “Any conversation would end up with him going on about Putin’s regime,” she said. “He would wind himself up to such an extent he couldn’t stop, as if he was out of his mind.”
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Litvinenko continued to work for Berezovsky, but their relationship waned and by 2006 Berezovsky had reduced the stipend he had been giving him to support his family. In search of steady income, Litvinenko then offered his services as a private investigator and researcher for firms that advised businesses on managing risk in Russia. His knowledge of the inner workings of the FSB, his obsessive collation of material, and his willingness to share led him into a labyrinth of investigations in the heart of Putin’s Russia. In April 2006, he traveled to Israel to meet with one of Khodorkovsky’s former Yukos partners, Leonid Nevzlin, who later said that Litvinenko had passed on information that “shed light on the most significant aspects of the Yukos affair,”
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though what precisely this consisted of was never made clear. A month later he was in Spain, where he met security officers and a crusading prosecutor, José Grinda Gonzalez, with whom he discussed the activities, and locations, of several figures in the Russian mafia. He presented a thesis, which Grinda later endorsed, that the Russian government, through the FSB and the foreign and military intelligence branches, controlled organized crime gangs and used them to smuggle arms, launder money, carry out assassinations, and otherwise
do whatever the government “cannot acceptably do as a government.” Grinda was on the trail of Russian criminals in Spain, including a reputed mafia boss named Gennady Petrov, who was in business during Putin’s time in Petersburg and for a time had been a shareholder in the institution that united Putin’s inner circle of friends, Bank Rossiya.
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Litvinenko kept these visits secret, traveling on the British passport he had received when granted asylum, but then he consciously thrust himself into the public spotlight after what was, until his own death, one of the most shocking murders of a Putin critic.

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O
n the night of October 7, 2006, Putin’s fifty-fourth birthday, an assassin followed Anna Politkovskaya into the hallway of her apartment building and shot her four times as she stood in the elevator. The assassin dropped the pistol beside her, the signature of a contract hit. Her murder was intended to shock, and it did. Politkovskaya had never relented in covering the war in Chechnya, even as most Russians turned away from what had become a grinding counterinsurgency operation, now largely carried out by forces loyal to Ramzan Kadyrov, the son of Putin’s anointed leader, Akhmad Kadyrov, who had been assassinated in Grozny in 2004. Two days before Politkovskaya’s murder, the younger Kadyrov had turned thirty, making him legally old enough to take over as the republic’s president. Putin had already made him the republic’s prime minister, a post that was a mere formality, since Kadyrov and his fighters held absolute control in Chechnya.

At the time of her murder, Politkovskaya was preparing an article about the torture of a Chechen migrant from Ukraine, who was beaten and electric-shocked until he confessed to committing murders—another horrifying, though not exceptional, example of the brutality of Russia’s war. (Her newspaper,
Novaya Gazeta
, published the article six days after her death.) Even she wondered whether these accounts of the war’s atrocities had any impact on a population that tacitly supported the government’s harsh tactics simply by not paying attention. Another article found in her computer was titled “So What Am I Guilty Of?” It amounted to a lament for what journalism in Russia had become. “I have never sought my present pariah status and it makes me feel like a beached dolphin,” she wrote.

In the same article she pointedly criticized Putin’s unblinking support for the younger Kadyrov. Putin, she wrote, appointed him as Chechnya’s prime minister “with blithe disregard for the fact that the man is
a complete idiot, bereft of education, brains, or a discernible talent for anything other than mayhem and violent robbery.”
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And yet, Putin’s strategy in Chechnya ultimately proved ruthlessly effective. Aslan Maskhadov, the elected president of the republic during the brief period of independence between 1996 and 1999, had been cornered and killed in March 2005 in a basement only twelve miles from Grozny. His replacement as the political leader of the rebellion, Abdul Khalim Saidullayev, was killed a year later—betrayed by an informer, Kadyrov taunted, for the price of a dose of heroin. Months later, in July 2006, an explosion in Chechnya’s neighboring republic, Ingushetia, killed Shamil Basayev, the notorious military commander and self-professed terrorist who had organized the sieges of
Nord-Ost
and Beslan, among dozens of other attacks. The FSB claimed it was a special operation, while the insurgents claimed it was an accident, but the impact was indisputable. The string of killings decapitated the leadership of the rebellion that Putin had fought from the moment he rose to power, driving its adherents even deeper underground. The cost in blood and treasure was extraordinary, with thousands of Russian soldiers killed and thousands more Chechens displaced or “disappeared.” The brutality, the violence, the impunity—the repressive political and security tactics that characterized all of Russia, but were amplified in the mountains on the southern border—would create disenfranchisement and grievance that would fester into an Islamic-tinged insurgency that the authorities could never snuff out. And yet, Putin’s tactics—and his support of the younger Kadyrov—had succeeded in crushing Chechnya’s independence movement. Three months after Politkovskaya’s death, using the authority he imposed after Beslan, Putin appointed Kadyrov Chechnya’s new president. He was little more than a satrap, but Putin repaid his loyalty to the Kremlin by giving him absolute sovereignty to run Chechnya as his fief, which he did with ruthless cruelty against enemies and critics, people like Politkovskaya. She was one of the last casualties of Putin’s victorious war. In 2008, too late for her to wield her acerbic wit against it, Kadyrov renamed a portion of the main street in the battered capital Grozny, which was at last being rebuilt with a massive infusion of cash from the federal budget. In the center of a city that had been flattened on Putin’s command, Victory Avenue became Putin Avenue.

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G
iven Politkovskaya’s prominence, her murder drew immense international attention—and conspicuous silence from the Kremlin. Since
she had an American passport, having been born in New York to Soviet diplomats at the United Nations in 1958, the American ambassador, William Burns, delivered an official démarche expressing concern and demanding a thorough investigation of the death of an American citizen. The deputy foreign minister he met, Andrei Denisov, seemed shocked by the murder and insisted that “no one in a position of authority had anything to do with the crime,” adding that “many individuals could have benefited from Politkovskaya’s death.”
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Yet neither the Ministry of Foreign Affairs nor the Kremlin said anything at all. Few had any authority to speak out, especially on so sensitive a case, until the president himself signaled what the official line would be. And Putin said nothing until three days later, the day Politkovskaya was buried in a heavy rain with thousands of mourners lining up to pass her coffin.

Putin had arrived that day in Dresden, his old KGB posting, for an official visit with Angela Merkel, the new chancellor who had replaced Schröder, as well as with business executives, promoting Russia’s ever-expanding energy prospects. When they appeared together, Merkel joined in the international condemnation of Politkovskaya’s assassination, but Putin said nothing in his comments. He addressed it only when a German reporter followed up with a question. Putin called it “a horribly cruel crime,” but he then belittled the journalist’s work and suggested the true motive for her killing was to besmirch Russia’s reputation. “This journalist was indeed a fierce critic of the current authorities in Russia, but as the experts know and as journalists should realize, I think, her impact on Russian political life was only very slight.” Her murder, he said, dealt a greater blow to the authorities than anything she had written. He expounded on the theme later that night, when he told Russian and German officials meeting in the semiannual forum known as the Petersburg Dialogue that Politkovskaya’s assassination had been orchestrated by enemies of Russia. This would become a recurring theme: the enemies of Russia, of Putin, were conspiring to discredit him. “We have reliable, consistent information that many people who are hiding from Russian justice have been harboring the idea that they will use somebody as a victim to create a wave of anti-Russian sentiment in the world,” he told them.

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T
his was exactly what Litvinenko sought to do. He considered Politkovskaya a friend—whenever she visited London, the two traded information about Chechnya and the security services working there
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—and her
death enraged him. On October 19, less than two weeks before he fell ill, he attended a panel discussion in London on Politkovskaya’s murder and declared that Putin himself was culpable. He rose from the crowd to address the panel, beginning in halting English and then continuing in Russian as a woman sitting beside Akhmed Zakayev translated. After emphasizing that he had nothing to hide and repeating several times that the journalists there should feel free to quote his remarks, he said that Politkovskaya herself had received a warning that Putin had put her on a hit list. “I know very well that only one person in Russia could kill a journalist with the standing of Anna Politkovskaya—and that is Putin, no one else.”

Thirteen days later, he collected the “evidence” he was sure would help him prove the case. An Italian security analyst, Mario Scaramella, who traded in the same secrets he did, shared emails that had been sent by another Russian in exile purporting to be the hit list of an association of KGB veterans called Dignity and Honor. Politkovskaya’s name was on the list. So were Litvinenko’s and Berezovsky’s. And yet Litvinenko seemed to let his guard down when he left his lunch meeting with the Italian to meet the two Russians who would become the chief suspects in his murder: Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitri Kovtun.

Lugovoi, also a veteran of the KGB department that provided protection for government officials, had once run security for the television station controlled by Berezovsky. He now owned a security company called the Ninth Wave and remained in contact with Berezovsky. Kovtun was a childhood friend of Lugovoi’s who served as a captain in the Soviet Red Army’s military intelligence branch in East Germany and owned a business consulting company. Litvinenko knew Lugovoi through his connection with Berezovsky and was eager to bring him into his orbit of contacts, which included Erinys, a security company where Litvinenko sometimes worked as a consultant. Lugovoi introduced Kovtun during that visit in October, meeting at Erinys and afterward at a Chinese restaurant. The authorities in Britain later disclosed that the first attempt to kill Litvinenko had happened at the security company, using the same radioactive poison.
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He felt sick afterward, vomiting that night, but he recovered.

The three met again on the November day he fell gravely ill. It was Litvinenko who urgently insisted on seeing them this time, before a meeting already planned for the following morning. He was eager to share what he had learned from the emails that Mario Scaramella had
shared over lunch. Their meeting at the Mayfair Millennium’s Pine Bar was short since Lugovoi, who was traveling with his family, had tickets to a soccer match between Arsenal and CSKA Moscow that night at Emirates Stadium. When his son arrived at the bar, he introduced him to Litvinenko, and then he left to change his clothes for the match. Kovtun thought Litvinenko looked strange, agitated, and, perhaps, unwell. “He didn’t close his mouth,” he said.
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As Kovtun waited for Lugovoi in the lobby, Litvinenko clung uncomfortably close to his side. “I was standing too close to him,” Kovtun said. “He kept talking and talking.”