Masha Gessen - The Man Without a Face

As I lie here, I sense the distinct presence of the angel of death. It is still possible I’ll be able to evade him, but I fear my feet are no longer as fast as they used to be. I think the time has come to say a few words to the man responsible for my current condition.

You may be able to force me to stay quiet, but this silence will come at a price to you. You have now proved that you are exactly the ruthless barbarian your harshest critics made you out to be.

You have demonstrated that you have no respect for human life, liberty, or other values of civilization.

You have shown that you do not deserve to hold your post, and you do not deserve the trust of civilized people.

You may be able to shut one man up, but the noise of protest all over the world will reverberate in your ears,

Mr. Putin, to the end of your life. May God forgive you for what you have done, not only to me but to my beloved Russia and her people.

Doctors finally identified the cause of Litvinenko’s poisoning a few hours before he died. It was polonium, a highly radioactive substance that occurs in only minuscule amounts in nature but can be manufactured. Relatives and loved ones learned the cause from police shortly after Alexander Litvinenko died.

FIVE YEARS AFTER MEETING LITVINENKO and helping him escape, Goldfarb sat down to write a book about the man, coauthored with his widow, Marina. Less than a year later it would be published in several languages; its English title was Death of a Dissident: The Poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko and the Return of the KGB . A scientist, a longtime political activist, and a natural skeptic, Goldfarb was able to reconstruct the story of Litvinenko’s murder all the more convincingly because he had never really believed what he called Litvinenko’s and Politkovskaya’s conspiracy theories. But his own theory would have put some of theirs to shame.

At the time of the two murders, Russia’s policy in Chechnya was undergoing a transformation. Without admitting defeat or even openly negotiating—for Putin would have found either humiliating—Russia was pulling its troops out of Chechnya and giving free rein and extraordinary monetary subsidies to a handpicked young Chechen leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, in exchange for loyalty and the illusion of peace and victory. For Chechnya’s other warlords, big and small, this meant the end of the road: Kadyrov was ruthless with enemies and rivals alike. On the basis of extensive circumstantial evidence and some significant off-the-record interviews, Goldfarb concluded that one of these warlords had Politkovskaya killed in the hopes of making it look like Kadyrov had done it—and discrediting Kadyrov in the eyes of the Russian government. Politkovskaya had been highly and vocally critical of and even insulting to Kadyrov, but Goldfarb believed that the people actually responsible for the murder were Chechens from a rival clan.

Then, Goldfarb suggested, Putin found himself in the position of trying to prove he had not done it—and feeling like he had been framed. Except, thanks in part to his advisers, he did not think he was being framed by Kadyrov: he thought he was being set up by Berezovsky’s camp in London. The loudest person by far in that camp was the traitorous FSB agent Litvinenko, who was indeed accusing Putin of the murder. For this, Putin had him killed.

Goldfarb’s theory is logically impeccable; everyone in it has motive and means. But I find it too complicated, or, perhaps, too specific. The murder of Alexander Litvinenko is indisputably the work of the Russian government authorized at the very top: polonium-210, which killed him, is manufactured exclusively in Russia. Its production and export are tightly controlled by federal nuclear authorities, and the extraction of the needed dose from the manufacturing chain required top-level intervention in an early stage of the manufacturing process. The authorization for such an intervention had to have come from the president’s office. In other words, Vladimir Putin ordered Alexander Litvinenko dead.

Once the poison was identified, British police were easily able to identify their suspects in the murder: polonium, while harmless unless ingested, leaves radioactive traces everyplace it touches. This allowed the police to pinpoint the people who transported polonium to London and the exact place and time at which the poisoning occurred. The two men they identified were Andrei Lugovoy, the former head of security for Berezovsky’s business partner, who had gone on to build a lucrative private-security firm in Moscow, and his business partner, Dmitry Kovtun. For reasons the British police will not disclose, they have identified Lugovoy as the murder suspect and Kovtun as a witness. Russia has refused extradition requests for Lugovoy; moreover, he has been made a member of parliament, giving him immunity from prosecution, including extradition requests. Britain, for its part, has treated the case as a purely criminal matter and has not made political demands for Lugovoy’s extradition.

No other killing in the long line of murders of journalists and politicians has quite so clear-cut and obvious a story. It is indeed possible that Anna Politkovskaya fell victim to the power struggle in Chechnya. It is possible that Yuri Shchekochikhin was killed by some businessman or politician whose dirty laundry he had aired. It is possible that Sergei Yushenkov was, as the police later claimed, killed by a political rival. It is possible that Anatoly Sobchak died of a heart attack. But all of these possibilities, taken separately, seem unlikely, and taken together seem almost absurd. The simple and evident truth is that Putin’s Russia is a country where political rivals and vocal critics are often killed, and at least sometimes the order comes directly from the president’s office.

Writing now about Putin’s early years as president, I am struck by how quickly and decisively he acted. Even when I was covering the story in real time, it seemed to move at breakneck speed. Putin changed the country fast, the changes were profound, and they took easily. He seemed instantly to reverse Russia’s historical evolution. And for an excruciatingly long time, no one seemed to notice.

Or almost no one. After the December 2003 parliamentary election, in which Putin’s United Russia took nearly half the seats and the rest were divided among the Communist Party, the absurdist-nationalist and outrageously misnamed Liberal Democratic Party, and a new ultranationalist party called Rodina (Motherland) while all remaining liberals and democrats lost their seats, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) reported: “The… elections… failed to meet many OSCE and Council of Europe commitments, calling into question Russia’s willingness to move towards European standards for democratic elections.” The New York Times reported something entirely different, publishing a condescending but approving editorial titled “Russians Inch Toward Democracy.” The paper of record did not mention international observers’ criticism in its news story the day of the election but published a separate piece on the critics the following day; The Washington Post and The Boston Globe left the critics out of their coverage altogether. The Los Angeles Times went even further: in a mammoth news story, it managed to downplay the OSCE’s conclusion in such a way that it sounded like the opposite of itself. The paper quoted an OSCE official saying the balloting “was well-organized and we have not noted any major irregularities.” The paper also lauded Putin’s now unchallenged control of the Russian parliament as a chance for the president to “push through additional reforms, including cleaning up the entrenched corruption.”