Anna had a long list of enemies. Almost every time she wrote a story, she was protesting an injustice that someone had suffered. That also meant she was attacking someone—the person or persons at fault. And Anna named names. So the number of characters who might have wanted her dead is large. Ramzan Kadyrov, the Chechen leader she repeatedly berated, is thought by many to be a prime suspect. He had publicly threatened her. The murder happened two days after his birthday, giving rise to speculation that it was a present from thuggish admirers. Three Chechens were among the ten men arrested in the case, perhaps an additional reason to focus attention on him.
My hunch is that this was not a murder that required approval at the top. But it is reasonable to suspect that the FSB was complicit in Anna’s death, at least at some level. Those who engineered her killing almost certainly assumed they would get away with it. They knew it would be seen as a political killing and that there would be repercussions. But they must have had reason to believe that they could weather the repercussions with relatively little effort. It is a level of confidence that one would expect to find within the FSB, or among those close to the organization. (One of the first suspects to be arrested was an FSB officer, who was accused of providing Anna’s address to the triggerman. Will it be shown that he was ordered by someone higher up to provide this assistance? Perhaps, but that’s not a requirement. He could have been operating under the usual understanding that certain people are fair game. The wisdom of former prosecutor Sergei Lapin may have application here.)
What about Putin? Did he order Anna’s murder? I have not heard anyone present a credible case against the Russian president. I don’t believe it happened at his explicit direction, or even his vague suggestion. Some have suggested a theory like the one linking Anna’s killing to Kadyrov—that it was a gangland-style present to Putin. She was slain on the exact date of the president’s birthday. In the end, though, such speculation is an almost pointless exercise. Putin is responsible because, as with Nord-Ost and Paul Klebnikov’s murder, he created the climate of impunity in which someone decided that Anna could die. Putin’s rule protects those who are inside the system or at least accept it. Outsiders cannot expect the same protection. That applies to business, politics, or journalism. Violence can be permissible against those deemed to be outsiders.
Anna’s legacy is that she made a difference, no matter Putin’s cold dismissal of her worth. She did what she did because she saw no one else doing it. She refused to be intimidated, and she made people’s lives better.
But I suspect that she didn’t care much about a legacy. For Anna, it added up to this: She did her best, she lived her life, and that was about it. Yes, it would have been pleasing to think that people would remember her. But would that have changed how Anna answered her calling? I think not.
Irina Fadeeva, one of the Nord-Ostsi women, who lost her teenage son, Yaroslav, in the theater tragedy, related the following to me:
A while after Anna’s death, Irina dreamed that the two of them were out walking. They came to a glass house, and Anna headed toward it.
“I’ll walk with you,” Irina said.
“No, you can’t come with me,” Anna replied. “With me it’s very dangerous. They could kill me.”
Anna pulled her hat tight over her eyes, and disappeared inside.
CHAPTER 9
The Traitor
Alexander Litvinenko: A Defector in London
SIX DAYS AFTER THE OCTOBER 7, 2006, SLAYING OF ANNA Politkovskaya, actress Vanessa Redgrave led mourners in a flower-laying ceremony at Westminster Abbey. A tribute to Anna followed at the House of Lords. Days later, a somber panel discussion was held at the Frontline Club, a popular West London inn and saloon run by former war correspondents.
A scruffy-faced blond man in the Frontline audience rose to his feet. “My name is Alexander Litvinenko,” he said in a mixture of English and Russian. “I’m a former KGB and FSB officer. Because I’m here, [I feel] I should speak up.”
The killing of the crusading journalist had unsettled the Russian defector, a fixture in London’s émigré community for nearly six years. He had known Anna during the last few years of her life and had admired her tough reporting on many of the same matters that occupied his interest.
Litvinenko quickly unloaded on Russia’s leader: “Someone has asked who killed Anna Politkovskaya. I’ll give you a direct answer—Mr. Putin, the president of the Russian Federation, killed Anna.”
Toward the end of his remarks, he rephrased the statement, but its essence was unchanged. “Without the sanction of Putin, no one would touch someone of Anna’s stature,” he insisted. “She was their political enemy, and that’s why they killed her.”
As far as I could tell, it was the first time that Litvinenko had publicly blamed Vladimir Putin for Anna’s death. His blunt accusations caused a stir in the room. Afterward, some in the audience invited him to speak elsewhere, and journalists who were present pressed him to elaborate. A five-minute videotape of his impromptu speech eventually found a global audience in the tens of thousands, through the magic of YouTube. Valid or not, Litvinenko’s remarks helped to bolster a growing suspicion abroad: The Kremlin was killing its enemies.
The onetime Russian agent had been tossing rhetorical hand grenades in the direction of the Kremlin ever since he and his wife, Marina, and their six-year-old son, Anatoly, arrived in Great Britain on November 1, 2000. After his nerve-racking escape from Russia and failure to obtain political asylum in the United States, Litvinenko settled into the life of an exile in London. He was a health fanatic who neither smoked nor drank, and ran alone up to twelve kilometers a day through north London. His wife adjusted well, taking English lessons and finding work as a dance instructor at a health club. The jowly, balding Berezovsky, also living in exile in London, made sure they were financially comfortable.
Well before fleeing Russia, the forty-three-year-old Litvinenko had experienced a kind of personal conversion. He found himself questioning the worth of his more than a decade in Russian counterintelligence, and the values that service represented. His gradual disillusionment had led to a change of heart so intense that he sometimes resembled a religious zealot.
In London, he embraced the Chechen struggle for independence from Russia. Two years after his arrival, he and Marina moved into a row house in north London. Soon after, Akhmed Zakayev, the European-based leader of the Chechen opposition, moved in across the street, and the two men became extremely close. At times, Litvinenko seemed to see himself as an adopted Chechen. That was most apparent in his articles for the opposition online news service, called ChechenPress. Marina sometimes felt that his writing was too emotional, “like a person in a bazaar,” causing him to “lose face.” She advised her husband to tone it down so readers would expect that “probably there is something serious” in any article bearing a Litvinenko byline. But her advice does not seem to have influenced what he wrote.
Litvinenko’s rejection of his past could be traced to his service in the First Chechen War; he saw firsthand the brutality of that conflict, including the torture of captured Chechens. His interrogation of a Chechen teenager strengthened his sense that this was no ordinary conflict. When Litvinenko asked the youth why he was not in school, the boy replied that his entire class had gone off to fight the Russian army. Litvinenko’s flight to England coincided with the Second Chechen War, the cruelty of which reinforced his belief that the Russian military campaign there was immoral.