By March 2008, Marina had given up hope that Andrei Lugovoi would be extradited to Britain to face trial. So she asked her lawyer to petition the country’s coroner to hold a public inquest and reveal publicly the evidence that led it to charge Lugovoi with murdering her husband fifteen months earlier. In a first-person article in The Times of London, Marina said that Scotland Yard and David Miliband, Britain’s foreign secretary, had advised against the petition because such a hearing could prejudice any future trial. Marina said she proceeded anyway because “I cannot wait for another ten years for a slim chance that their approach would bear fruit.”
Marina was right—there seemed to be no chance that the British case against Lugovoi would advance any time soon. In the same vein, Alex Goldfarb, who had helped the Litvinenkos flee Russia, filed a freedom of information request with the U.S. Department of Energy seeking a trace on the origin of the polonium-210 used in the murder. Notwithstanding the confidence of British investigators, the Kremlin claimed that there was no hard evidence that the isotope came from Russia. But Goldfarb cited sources who had told him that the U.S. government’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory had examined a sample of the poison, at the request of British investigators. “We hope to show the polonium originated in Russia,” Goldfarb said.
The Continuing Fear
Ivan Safronov, a fifty-one-year-old retired lieutenant colonel in Russia’s Space Forces, which control the country’s military satellites and missile defense strategy, was one of the country’s leading military analysts. By most accounts, Safronov, a military affairs reporter for Kommersant, Russia’s leading business paper, was a happy man on March 2, 2007. He had rung up his editors to say he had a scoop on a backdoor government scheme to sell sophisticated fighter jets and missiles to Syria and Iran. The Russian officials behind the deal planned to use Belarus as the middleman state, to avoid being challenged by the West for arming nations that were under United Nations sanctions, Safronov said. A little before four p.m., Safronov arrived home after shopping for oranges, went up to the fifth floor of his apartment building, and, according to the official story, jumped to his death. Police ruled it a suicide.
Most of Safronov’s colleagues were skeptical of the police account. Safronov’s son, Ivan, was about to enter college, and his daughter, Irina, was pregnant with his first grandchild. As for his health, he had just had a checkup and, though his doctor warned him of an ulcer, he was told he was otherwise fine. “He had no reason to do it,” said one of his editors, Ilya Bulavinov.
A few people said that in fact Safronov’s mood had appeared a bit dark of late. And there was always the possibility that it was neither suicide nor foul play—that Safronov for some reason had gone out onto the ledge of the fifth-floor window for one reason or another, and fell. Yet, it was precisely his accomplishments as a reporter—revealing illegal and quasi-legal business deals involving huge sums of money—that could get a journalist into deep personal trouble. When one got in the way of a business deal, one could be in peril. In addition, Safronov was at an especially dangerous point in his reporting. He had the arms sale story already in his notebook but had yet to publish it. If those who would be damaged by the story knew that it was in hand, they might have decided to attack in hopes it would never be published.
As of the publication of this book, authorities still regarded Safronov’s death as a suicide.
Unlike in past years, the Safronov case was not accompanied by a spate of other sensational deaths. After Litvinenko, there seemed to be a sort of moratorium on lurid murder in Russia. But that had not eased the apprehension of some Russian journalists. In April 2008, a former Kremlin correspondent named Yelena Tregubova obtained political asylum in Great Britain. Tregubova had gained notoriety for her 2003 book, Tales of a Kremlin Digger. The combination of saucy insider detail and the thirty-year-old Kommersant reporter’s blond good looks made the book a Russian bestseller. One of her stories described a 1998 dinner with Vladimir Putin while he was FSB chief. Putin commandeered an entire sushi restaurant for the evening. Such an occurrence would normally be of no consequence, given the natural order in the Kremlin, but it attracted attention as the only thing approaching an indiscretion on Putin’s public record. “I couldn’t decide if he was trying to recruit me—or pick me up!” Tregubova wrote.
After the book’s publication, Tregubova said she received a few verbal death threats. In February 2004, a package left outside her apartment door exploded. She was fired from Kommersant. Finally, she decided it was too dangerous to stay in Russia and—on the same day that Boris Yeltsin died—sought asylum in Britain. She said that she seemed to be under surveillance by a woman similar in description to one who was said to be watching Anna Politkovskaya prior to that reporter’s death. “They would have found a way to kill me,” Tregubova said. “That is the reality in Russia today.”
Remembrance
Anna Politkovskaya’s friends and family worked to keep alive her memory—and the investigation of her murder. In March 2008, Russian prosecutors said they now knew the triggerman’s name and were hunting him down. But her newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, dismissed the announcement as a ploy meant in part to persuade a judge to continue to detain other suspects in the case. In an article, the newspaper noted that the chief police investigator had said precisely the same thing six months earlier. Her editors worried that authorities were seeking to warn Anna’s killers that they could be caught soon. “It’s easy to guess [that] the investigation has made significant progress. And some people [have begun] to feel anxious,” the newspaper said.
Before Anna’s murder, a doctor informed her daughter, Vera, that she was going to give birth to a girl. Vera and Anna discussed what to call the baby, but could not reach a decision.
Five months later, the baby was born.
There was no question what her name would be.
Anna.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book was the idea of Will Murphy, the incomparable editor at Random House. A couple of weeks after the death of Alexander Litvinenko, Will called to ask whether I saw a book in the assassination. The following discussion led to our agreement on a broader theme: what a string of untimely deaths in Russia said about the country. Will is a writer’s editor. He set a tight deadline, and made me swear I would meet it, but he did not say a word when I missed that date and two additional deadlines. Will edited the manuscript with his usual smart and elegant touch. Whatever success has been achieved is largely due to Will’s inspiration and support.
With Will’s idea in hand, I telephoned my friend Noel Greenwood. Noel, a former senior editor with the Los Angeles Times, is a freelance book editor and writer’s coach with whom I worked on my first book. I knew that I would need his counsel and skill to pull off the feat that Will demanded. After some hesitation on whether it was possible to write a serious book on Russia in a year, Noel signed on. He gave me the confidence to pull away from a third-person journalistic voice and write a more personal book. We worked as a tag team from beginning to end. It simply would not have been possible to write this book without Noel. His imprint is on every page.
Tom Wallace is the most loyal and supportive agent in New York. He never expressed a doubt that the book could and would meet Will’s expectations. Tom, himself a talented longtime editor, read the manuscript twice in its entirety, and supplied excellent commentary that much improved the book.