Death of a Dissident (53 page)

“They will kill Rybkin,” said Sasha over lunch. “Tell him he should come to London and ask for asylum. I know a good lawyer.”

I spent that night on the telephone, trying to add signatures on a petition to the Danish government not to give up Zakayev. Vanessa Redgrave originated the appeal, so it had an impressive list of names from the international left, from the Danish film director Lars von Trier to the American intellectual Susan Sontag. I was trying to rally a Russian constituency. It was easy for me to enlist dissidents: Elena Bonner, Vladimir Bukovsky, Boris Berezovsky, and Sergei Kovalyov. Then came a surprise.

As I was talking to Bukovsky in his home in Cambridge, England, he passed the phone to a visitor, Vladimir Kara-Murza Jr., a functionary in the Union of Right Forces (SPS), the centrist party of Chubais and Nemtsov.

“Have you tried Nemtsov?” asked Kara-Murza.

“He would never sign,” I said. “He’s in Putin’s pocket.”

“Why don’t we try? He is highly supportive of Rybkin and even wanted to join the negotiations.”

Twenty minutes later he called back: “We reached Nemtsov in Moscow. He is signing.”

Surprised, and pleased that I was wrong about Nemtsov, I faxed the list of Russian signatories to Vanessa Redgrave and went to see a movie.

When we walked out of the movie theater I had three messages from Kara-Murza to call as soon as possible.

“Nemtsov has recalled his signature,” he said. “They leaned on him, full force.”

Kara-Murza reported that within an hour after talking to Bukovsky, Nemtsov had received a call from Chubais, who yelled at him, “Borya, what do you think you are doing? They will cut the oxygen to SPS. We can forget about staying in the Duma after the next elections. Are you out of your mind?”

Chubais said that Vladislav Surkov, the Kremlin deputy chief of staff, had just contacted him to warn that if Nemtsov signed the appeal, the president would consider the SPS an enemy party. The consequences were obvious.

“It’s Saturday, past midnight in Moscow,” observed Sasha. “Do you understand what happened? Surkov is not sitting in the Kremlin eavesdropping on Nemtsov’s conversations. That means the FSB monitors his phone in real time, not through a recording. It took only an hour between Nemtsov talking to London and Chubais calling him. Just imagine: an analyst must be on hand all the time to assess the contents of our phone calls, with enough brains to know what to report. Then it goes up the chain of command to a liaison officer in the FSB, then it’s passed to the duty officer in the Kremlin, who alerts Surkov. All via secure lines. All verbally, because there was no time for transcribing and filing. That means there is a whole team working, with standing orders to report all contacts with us as a top priority. I wouldn’t be surprised if Putin runs the operation personally.”

Indeed, some time later, Nemtsov told a mutual friend in Moscow that Putin scolded him for the Zakayev appeal, saying he should be “vigilant against Berezovsky’s provocations.”

Weeks passed. The uncertainty over Zakayev dragged on, with the Danish court twice extending his remand. Finally, the gallant Danes came through. On December 3, citing “insufficient evidence,” the Danish Justice Ministry released him. A litany of protests came out of Moscow. “It seems Denmark has its own interpretation of how one fights international terrorism,” said a spokesman for the Russian prosecutor’s office.

“A Free Man in Copenhagen,” extolled the
Wall Street Journal
in an editorial. “The Kremlin warmongers, who have unleashed an inhuman war against the Chechen people, today are doing everything to neutralize those politicians who seek an end to the conflict,” said a triumphant Zakayev on the steps of the Danish jail before going back to London. But the Russians weren’t ready to let him remain free, not yet.

London, December 11, 2002: Akhmed Zakayev, facing another extradition charge—this time in Britain—is released on £50,000 ($80,000) bail posted by actress Vanessa Redgrave. Russia’s charges include kidnapping, torture, mass murder, and armed rebellion. Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov sharply criticizes the decision not to take Zakayev into custody, comparing him to Osama bin Laden
.

It had been two years since the Litvinenkos had arrived in England. Their life had gradually taken on a rhythm and a routine. The rhythm came from Tolik’s school, to which Marina took him every morning. Sasha usually slept late after staying up in front of his computer or watching Russian videos. There was a peculiar difference between them. Marina did not miss Russia at all, except for her mother of course, and did not tend to cling to things Russian; she was wholly absorbed by her new surroundings. Sasha, by contrast, needed a daily fix of Russica: the latest news from the Internet, Russian
DVDs, and Russian books. It was not that he suffered from nostalgia; the remembrance of the old country did not haunt him. But thanks to the wonders of the information age, a part of him simply kept on living in the old country. One of the reasons, of course, was that he continued to be a public figure back in Moscow. His fans and detractors argued about his books on the Internet. The Moscow bureaus of Reuters, the Associated Press, and Radio Echo Moscow kept calling for his comment. But in London, even his neighbors had no idea who he was.

Within the marriage, he and Marina gave each other room. Just as it had been in Moscow, Marina did not care that she was not a part of the world he shared with Felshtinsky and Trepashkin, Boris and Putin, the FSB and the Chechens.

His work was not entirely confined to the Kremlin’s wars, however. Toward the end of 2002 he told me that he became “involved” with a large security company specializing in risk analysis and overseas operations, run by ex-British secret service officers. He did not go into much detail, but I understood that it had to do with his old area of expertise: Russian organized crime. Only after his death did I learn that this side of his life kept expanding and that he ended up consulting with law enforcement agencies in several European countries, from Estonia to Georgia to Spain. Among other things, he took part in efforts to free the British banker Peter Shaw, who had been kidnapped in Georgia in 2002, and was instrumental in the arrests of Russian mafia suspects in Spain in 2006. By Marina’s estimates, in 2006 roughly half of his income came from security consulting. It was like in the old days in Moscow: he would just disappear for a few days and then reappear, cheerful as ever.

What they both longed for during the first two years in London was more stability. They had rented a furnished flat that never quite felt like a home. Marina wanted to have her own things to arrange the way she liked: a home to decorate, a kitchen to equip. Sasha, the most domestic man I have ever known, was even more keen to build a nest. One day he made a calculation: their Kensington rent was more than a mortgage payment on a decent home in the suburbs. They started to look for a new home.

Every Saturday morning Marina took Tolik to a Russian-language school in Finchley, in the north of London, because they were determined that he not forget the mother tongue. She used those Saturday mornings while he was in class to explore the area. She talked to real estate agents and toured houses. Finally, on the fourth or fifth Saturday, she discovered a new development of single-family homes in Muswell Hill, with some units still under construction. One of Boris’s companies bought the house and rented it to Sasha and Marina.

They moved into their new home in February 2003. It was a two-story, three-bedroom unit, with a huge kitchen for Marina and a basement that Sasha converted into a gym. He was a fitness freak who spent a fortune on all kinds of exercise equipment. They bought new furniture, kitchen equipment, and linens. It was the happiest time of their life together. He was extremely proud of the new home and invited everybody to see it.

Among the guests at their housewarming party was Akhmed Zakayev. He was looking for a permanent place as well, after spending a year in an exceedingly expensive rental in Chelsea. Zakayev needed a much bigger house; he lived in the traditional Chechen way, with his two married sons and countless grandchildren under one roof. There was an empty lot across the street from Sasha’s that looked big enough. But as he later said in his speech at Sasha’s funeral, the main reason he picked that location was the ancient Chechen saying: “Know your neighbor first, build your house next.” From the moment they met each other, they became the closest of friends: a mercurial oper and a weathered freedom fighter, the “Chechen Che,” as I described him to my friends in America.

April 2, 2003: Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, fighting extradition to Russia on fraud charges, is released on £100,000 ($160,000) bail by Judge Timothy Workman, pending hearings scheduled for October. Speaking to reporters outside the Bow Street Magistrates Court in London, Berezovsky dons a satirical mask of President Putin to underscore his claim that the case was a farce
.

For those not intimately familiar with international law enforcement, the processes of asylum and extradition may seem like mirror images. In practice, however, they are very different. Of the millions of asylum seekers around the world, the vast majority have never had problems with criminal law; most tend to be victims of discrimination, genocide, or political persecution who are seeking a safe haven. The granting of asylum is an administrative process carried out in secrecy by immigration authorities. In the United States, applicants are seeking a green card; in the United Kingdom, a residence permit.