Nikolai Patrushev, the FSB’s director, later claimed that the sacks merely contained sugar, and that they had been left in the basement as a ‘training exercise’. The Duma’s communist opposition queried this. Now, Litvinenko, together with his friend Yuri Felshtinsky in the US, launched his own investigation. The pair concluded the FSB was responsible for the bombings. And that Putin covertly sanctioned the operation – involving the mass slaughter of men, women and children – to provide a casus belli for his pre-planned attack on Chechnya.
Their findings became a controversial book, Blowing Up Russia. It argued that the apartment bombings were the foundational act in Putin’s rise to power, a plot akin to the 1933 burning of the German Reichstag. The war in Chechnya boosted Putin’s public profile and catapulted him into the Kremlin. The Soviet Union’s collapse had put Russia’s spy agencies on the back foot. With Putin’s ascent to the presidency the KGB achieved its ultimate goaclass="underline" ‘absolute power’. The FSB, Litvinenko argued, is a thoroughly criminalised entity and part of a government– mafia state.
Sometimes the agency makes use of organised criminals; sometimes it eliminates or jails them. Litvinenko gives a gruesome account of the FSB’s special operations in the 1990s – contract killings, shootings, ambushes, abductions, with victims burned alive and their eyes gouged out. The ‘agencies of coercion’ are involved in all sorts of crimes. They include bribe-taking, money-laundering and protection rackets. Their agents are untouchable. They have official ID.
Litvinenko’s knowledge of criminal structures was formidable. In the introduction, Felshtinsky warns the reader that Blowing Up Russia isn’t ‘superficial journalism’ but ‘something between an analytical memoir and a historical monograph’. Dense as it sometimes is, it’s a compelling piece of research. And an empirical one, flowing directly from Litvinenko’s personal knowledge of investigations.
Much of what Litvinenko wrote turned out to be correct. He was the first person to predict what would happen if Putin came to power. According to Felshtinsky, Litvinenko warned in early 2000 that people would be killed and arrested, and Putin’s opponents purged: ‘I can feel this. He will kill all of us as well. Trust me. I know what I’m saying.’ The book was published in 2001. The Moscow newspaper Novaya Gazeta ran extracts, and a documentary film – Assassination of Russia – followed in 2002.
Claims that the FSB was behind the apartment bombings gained traction. Litvinenko was invited to give video evidence from London to a parliamentary commission which launched its own investigation. Its deputy chairman was a Duma member, Sergei Yushenkov. He recruited a prominent Soviet dissident, Sergei Kovalyov, as chairman. The commission included journalists, lawyers and Tatiana Morozova, the daughter of a woman killed in the explosions. It asked the FSB and prosecutor general for documents, especially in relation to Ryazan.
The FSB’s apparent reply was characteristic. In August 2002, Vladimir Golovlyov, a Duma deputy who had helped to distribute the film, was shot dead. Then, in April 2003, Yushenkov was assassinated outside his Moscow home. Two months later, Yuri Shchekochikhin, a member of the Novaya Gazeta team and a senior Russian MP, was mysteriously poisoned and died in agony.
Felshtinsky had given Shchekochikhin a manuscript copy of Blowing Up Russia for publication. As well as working for the newspaper that serialised the book, Shchekochikhin was also a member of Kovalyov’s commission and had separately investigated FSB corruption. His symptoms – blistering on the skin, dramatic organ failure, coma – suggest he was the victim of a deadly toxin, most probably dioxin. The authorities refused to give Shchekochikhin’s family his medical records. These were classified as a state secret.
The commission’s legal counsel, Mikhail Trepashkin, was arrested. Trepashkin was Litvinenko’s close friend and had taken part in the 1998 press conference; sacked from the FSB, he became a lawyer. The charges against him were absurd. Road police placed a handgun in his car and then accused him of illegally possessing a firearm. He was further charged with espionage.
An initial print-run of Litvinenko’s book was successfully smuggled into Russia. In 2003, the FSB seized a second shipment and impounded 5,000 copies, on the grounds that it revealed state secrets. This was the first time a book had been banned in Russia since Solzhenitsyn. Nonetheless, it prevailed: in 2002 a poll suggested that 40 per cent of Russians doubted the official version of events. The Kremlin remains twitchy about Blowing Up Russia. In 2015 it was placed on a federal list of so-called ‘extremist’ literature.
In 2001, the Home Office granted Litvinenko indefinite permission to remain in the UK. This made his position more secure, at least on paper. In fact, there were continuous threats emanating from Moscow. Bukovsky recalls how Litvinenko and Anatoly, then eight, visited him in Cambridge:
‘It was springtime. We were walking in Cambridge, beautiful sight, the birds are singing and suddenly there was a call on his phone, so he answered it and became rather gloomy. By his replies, I understood that it’s some kind of threat. I asked him after the phone call was over: what was it?
‘Litvinenko said: “Some former colleagues from Lubyanka, the headquarters of the KGB. They said to me: ‘Do you feel yourself safe, secure in Britain? Come on! Remember Trotsky.’”’
Trotsky’s ice-pick murder in Mexico in 1940 was probably the most spectacular extra-territorial assassination of the communist era. Stalin had personally ordered it; the NKVD carried it out. Asked if Litvinenko understood the threat, Bukovsky replied: ‘Oh, definitely.’
The person who called Litvinenko in Cambridge was Ponkin, his old associate, now apparently back informing for the FSB. Ponkin told him that Russia’s prosecutor general was making up a case against him. According to Litvinenko, the prosecutor’s message was unambiguous.
Litvinenko said Ponkin told him that he should return alone to his own country as soon as possible, and then nothing would happen to him. ‘And if you do not return yourself then you will either be brought back in a body bag, or you will be pushed under a train,’ he reported his saying. Litvinenko interpreted the call as an attempt at negotiation. He told Ponkin: ‘This is a very nice offer but I refuse it.’ Ponkin relayed that Marina ‘wouldn’t be touched’.
The warnings continued via different channels. Russian spies traced Litvinenko’s home address in London – at the behest, Litvinenko believed, of FSB chief Patrushev. FSB agents shadowed him in Britain. In March 2002, a diplomat from the Russian embassy, Viktor Kirov, turned up at the family’s flat. He rang the doorbell, demanded to speak to Litvinenko, and said he wanted to give him ‘a package’. Marina refused to let him in. He came back the next morning.
Litvinenko went to his local police station and complained. He told them Kirov was the deputy rezident, that is, the number two in the UK bureau of the SVR, Moscow’s foreign intelligence service. Litvinenko’s solicitor George Menzies wrote to the Home Office asking it to ‘take whatever steps are in your power’ to stop the embassy from harassing the family. The Home Office said there was nothing it could do.
That autumn, Trepashkin emailed from Moscow with gloomy news. He had met Colonel Viktor Shebalin, another former FSB colleague, and a man with vast contacts among serving officers. Trepashkin wrote that Litvinenko’s publication of Blowing Up Russia had sealed his fate: