Masha Gessen - The Man Without a Face

“I am sorry,” responded Kasparov. “But you must understand the position I am in.”

The hotel manager turned beet-red. Now he was as embarrassed as he had been scared.

“The hell with it,” he said. “We’ll give you rooms.”

That evening, only one of several dozen confirmed dinner guests showed up. The local organizer, an entrepreneur, claimed all the invitees had received threatening phone calls warning them against attending the dinner.

In Dagestan, Kasparov was scheduled to award trophies to the winners of a children’s chess tournament. But when our group arrived, the only person waiting for us was a local opposition journalist. He explained that the head of the Dagestan Chess Federation had received a phone call from the regional government telling him he would be fired if Kasparov attended the event, so the drivers—all of them local policemen, as it turned out—had taken us to the wrong place.

Everywhere Kasparov went, he was followed. There were usually at least two secret police agents, easily identifiable by their manner, their dress, and their standard-issue video cameras. Some of these men videotaped Kasparov, some posed as journalists—they always asked the same questions and refused to identify themselves—and some just trailed him. It was impossible to tell whether such extraordinary measures of security, surveillance, and general obstruction were taken on orders from Moscow or were a local initiative. In any case, they served to stimulate Kasparov by making him feel that the regime was scared, and they added weight to his words. At the same time, they marginalized him: even a world-famous genius begins to look slightly ridiculous when he is reduced to wearing ketchup-stained clothes, traveling in a beat-up hired van, and speaking to ad hoc gatherings in the street time after time.

Kasparov campaigned as doggedly and tirelessly as he had once played chess: he had played some of the longest matches in the history of the game, and as a perennial outsider in the Soviet sports establishment, he was no stranger to having the game rigged. But his political organization failed to grow: with a total television blackout, his voice, over the years, became more and more marginal. In the end, his money, his fame, and his mind proved powerless against the regime, even if it was true that the regime was scared of him. Once the institutions of democracy had been dismantled, it was impossible—it was too late—to organize to defend them.

On November 23, 2006, a man named Alexander Litvinenko died in a London hospital. He was forty-one years old, he was an FSB officer, and his final days had been broadcast virtually live by the British and some of the Russian media. “Just three weeks ago he was a happy, healthy man with a full head of hair who regularly jogged five miles a day,” the Daily Mail reported on November 21. Accompanying the piece was a picture of Litvinenko, gaunt and bald, a hospital gown opened on his chest, which was covered with electrodes. “Mr. Litvinenko can barely lift his head, so weak are his neck muscles. He has difficulty speaking and can only talk in short, painful bursts.” The day after the article was published, Alexander Litvinenko lapsed into a coma. The following day, trace amounts of the poison that was killing him were finally found in his urine: it was polonium, a very rare and highly radioactive substance. A few hours later, Litvinenko’s heart stopped for the second time in two days, and he was dead.

Litvinenko had been a classic whistle-blower. In 1998 he had appeared in a televised press conference with four of his secret police colleagues. They declared they had received illegal assignments from the FSB, including an order to kill Boris Berezovsky. The press conference itself had been organized by Berezovsky, whom Litvinenko had met following an unrelated assassination attempt in 1994, which Litvinenko had investigated. Both men valued being acquainted, and each seemed to place exaggerated hope in the other. Berezovsky believed knowing an honest man in the FSB conferred protection; Litvinenko trusted the influential billionaire to help him change what was wrong with the system. Litvinenko had been in the uniformed services since the age of eighteen. He was one of the youngest lieutenant colonels the Russian secret police had ever had; he was wholly devoted to the system that raised him, but he belonged to that rare breed of people who are incapable of accepting the system’s—any system’s—imperfections, and who are entirely deaf to the arguments of those who accept things as they are.

Vladimir Putin had been appointed head of the FSB in August 1998, amid allegations of corruption leveled against the previous leadership. “When he was appointed, I asked Sasha who he was,” Litvinenko’s widow, Marina, told me years later. “He said some people are saying he was never a street officer. That meant they looked down on him—he hadn’t come up through the ranks.” But Berezovsky arranged for a meeting between his protégé the head of the secret police and his friend the whistle-blower. This was the period when Putin believed his work environment to be so hostile that he held his meetings with Berezovsky in the disused elevator shaft in the FSB headquarters building. Berezovsky wanted the two men to see each other as allies. Litvinenko came bearing charts that he said showed improper connections among FSB departments and the routes that illegal instructions as well as money traveled. He also told Putin about the order to kill Berezovsky, which both the whistle-blower and the oligarch were convinced Putin did not know about. Putin, Litvinenko later told his wife and Berezovsky, was uninterested; the meeting lasted all of ten minutes. He came home dejected and worried about the future—and, as is the way of men like these, resolved to act.

His next step was to hold the press conference on illegal FSB activity. In addition to the order to kill Berezovsky, he claimed to have received instructions to kidnap and beat up prominent businessmen. Putin responded with a televised statement impugning Litvinenko’s character, claiming he was delinquent on alimony payments to his first wife (his second wife insisted she had personally made the payments every month and had the stubs to show for it).

Three months later, Litvinenko was arrested on charges of having used excessive force with a suspect three years earlier. The case fell apart, and in November 1999 a military court acquitted him. He was not allowed to leave the courtroom, however: FSB officers entered and re-arrested him on other charges. That case was dismissed without a trial, but a third case was launched immediately. A military judge let him out on his own recognizance, however, pending a new trial; but when Litvinenko learned that the hearings would be held in a small city about a hundred kilometers from Moscow, where few journalists or outside observers were likely to venture, he decided to flee Russia.

In September 2000, he told Marina he would be going to a southern Russian city to visit his elderly parents. He called her almost a month later and directed her to go on vacation. “I said, ‘It’s not a good time,’” Marina told me. “Tolya, our son, had started his music lessons, why would we go on vacation? He said, ‘But you always wanted to go on vacation. You should go now.’ And I realized—sometimes he just had this voice that I realized I had to turn my mind off and just do it.” She booked a two-week trip to Spain and went there with their six-year-old son. At the end of the two weeks, Litvinenko directed her to get herself to the airport in Málaga at midnight. She arrived, terrified and confused, and was met by an acquaintance who transported her and Tolya to Turkey in a private jet that probably belonged to Berezovsky. Alexander was waiting for her in Antalya, a Turkish resort.