Nemtsov didn’t live to see its publication. But his document was an important – and damning – piece of work. It features tragic photos: of young men, in their early twenties, wearing military berets and smiling with their girlfriends. And of a row of coffins, decorated in red satin, being unloaded from the back of a truck. And graves. Another photo, extensively examined and verified by the authors, shows a plume of smoke above the town of Torez. There is blue sky, cornfields, trees. The smoke comes from the rocket fired shortly before at Malaysian airlines MH17.
One of the mourners at Nemtsov’s funeral was Vladimir Kara-Murza. Kara-Murza is thirty-three years old, a prominent opposition activist and a member of the board of Nemtsov’s People’s Progress Party. His father – Vladimir Kara-Murza Sr – is a distinguished journalist with the same name. Kara-Murza Jr was closely involved in the publication of Nemtsov’s report. He works for Open Russia, a pro-democracy organisation funded by Khodorkovsky, with offices in Moscow, London and Prague.
Kara-Murza was an outspoken anti-Putin critic who was well known on both sides of the Atlantic. He was educated in England (reading history at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where contemporaries considered him brilliant) and had joint UK–Russian citizenship. There, he met Litvinenko and Bukovsky. He moved to the US and lived with his wife Evgenia and their three children near Washington DC. Latterly, he had gone back to Moscow.
Like Nemtsov, Kara-Murza badly annoyed the Kremlin. He played a key role in rallying support for a Magnitsky act and western sanctions against corrupt Russian officials; he lobbied on Capitol Hill and testified before Congress and European parliaments. He blogged for World Affairs, a US journal. Some wondered whether moving back to Russia was a good idea. Marina Litvinenko saw him in London in 2014. ‘I asked him how he felt about going back to Moscow. He told me: “I believe it will be fine.” I wasn’t so sure,’ she told me.
Nemtsov’s murder badly shook Kara-Murza. He spoke at the funeral. ‘A sense of political tragedy for Russia has been overshadowed by an irreplaceable personal loss,’ he wrote, summing up the mood among Nemtsov’s friends, and adding: ‘Boris Nemtsov will not live to see the day Russia becomes a democratic country. But when that day comes, his contribution to it will be one of the greatest.’
In April, Moscow police raided the offices of Open Russia. The NGO hadn’t registered with the authorities in an attempt to avoid the fate of other human-rights groups which had been shut down. Police said they were looking for evidence of ‘extremism’. Kara-Murza’s latest project was a twenty-six-minute documentary film, Family. Its subject was Kadyrov. It alleged that the Chechen president is guilty of widespread human-rights abuses, presides over a personal army of 80,000 fighters, and skims off money from the federal budget.
Two days after a screening in Moscow, Kara-Murza collapsed in his office. He lost consciousness. His symptoms – a sudden incapacitating illness leading to immediate multiple organ failure – were troubling and strange. An ambulance took him to Moscow’s First City Clinical Hospital. Doctors put him on life support. His condition was critical. As he hovered on the edge of death, Kara-Murza’s father said his son was suffering from some kind of ‘intoxication’. He believed he may have been poisoned.
Kara-Murza’s illness remained undiagnosed and undetermined. Doctors appeared reluctant to give an explanation or to use the word poisoning. His family were circumspect. They seemed fearful that even in hospital Kara-Murza might not be safe.
Later he recovered. It appeared the FSB’s poisons factory was still in business.
14
The Man Who Solved His Own Murder
Gray’s Inn, South Square, London, 21 January 2016
‘Hermione: Your honours all, I do refer me to the oracle: Apollo be my judge!’
For the Fourth Estate it was an early start. Soon after 7 a.m., the first reporters began to arrive at Gray’s Inn in London, one of four ancient Inns of Court. The entrance was a little hard to find, sandwiched between the Cittie of Yorke pub and the stationers Ryman’s. You went through a narrow passage. A little further on was a peaceful square. Here were Georgian buildings and a statue of the inn’s first senior member, going back in time some five centuries, Francis Bacon. The reporters filed through a doorway: the Benchers’ entrance.
They had come for an event known in the news business as a ‘lock-in’. At 9.35 a.m., Sir Robert Owen’s long-awaited report into the death of Alexander Litvinenko was due to be presented to parliament. What was in it? Nobody knew. There’d been no leaks. Sixty media representatives – ranging from the New York Review of Books to Germany’s ARD channel – had been invited to an embargoed preview, starting at 8 a.m. This was a sensible arrangement. It gave time to grasp the judge’s conclusions – if not, perhaps, his fine argument.
An usher ticked the journalists off against a list. They climbed to the first floor, past an ante-chamber hung with lawyers’ black cloaks, and up a grand oak staircase. Portraits of distinguished former members lined the walls. Here was Lord Burghley, Queen Elizabeth I’s secretary of state, and a series of bewigged gentlemen. All electronic devices had to be left in the library, a condition of entry. Once inside the lock-in you couldn’t leave. A bloke in uniform guarded the exit, just in case.
The mood was one of excitement. Over the previous half-year, Owen had privately sifted the evidence and cogitated. He then set down his independent conclusions. The media consensus was this: Owen would certainly rule that Kovtun and Lugovoi were murderers. After all, a fraction of the forensics available would have doomed them. His report, it was assumed, would find the Russian state guilty. Few expected him to point the finger directly at Putin.
Owen was the oracle. Now he was to deliver. Or, to use the language of Shakespeare, we were about to break up the seals and read.
The journalists filed into a red-carpeted space known as the Large Pension Room. Arrayed on a series of tables, and illuminated by chandeliers, were several copies of a chunky-looking booklet. It had a cerulean blue cover and was titled The Litvinenko Inquiry: Report into the Death of Alexander Litvinenko. There was a stuck-on note: ‘Strictly embargoed’. We took our places. This felt a little gigglesome: here were a group of middle-aged professionals, sitting together as if on the cusp of a high school test. At 8 a.m. we picked up the report. We began reading.
The report was 328 pages long but it took mere seconds to locate the judge’s stunning final ruling. On page 246 was a single sentence. It featured at the end of part ten, ‘Summary of Conclusions’.
The sentence said:
‘The FSB operation to kill Mr Litvinenko was probably approved by Mr Patrushev and also by President Putin.’
These eighteen words had an empirical solidity. They were hard judicial fact.
The sentences running up to this point were equally damning, and couched in psalm-like terms, with one striking repeated phrase: ‘I am sure’. These words had an especial legal meaning. They meant Owen was satisfied his conclusions met a criminal standard of proof.