The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin (30 page)

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.

Ten

INSATIABLE GREED

W
riting 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.”

Publications outside the United States were more critical. The day before the election, the
National Post
of Canada ran a news item that had the whole story right in the headline: “Racists, killers and criminals run for Duma: Parliamentary elections. Two decades after decadent Yeltsin era, corruption plagues Russia.”
The Economist
declared the death of democracy in Russia in an editorial a month before the election, and then followed the election with a special report that called the new parliament “a democrat’s nightmare” and stressed the ballooning influence of ultranationalists.

But the world’s most influential media, with by far the largest journalist corps in Moscow, were asleep at the wheel. Why? In part, because U.S. politics took precedence. In the fall of 2000, when Putin was nationalizing television, American media were fully focused on the hung Bush–Gore election. I joined the staff of
U.S. News & World Report
then, and I idled through my first few months on the job: the magazine had no room for Russia.

Once the election story was finally over, American media had to deal with the aftermath of the dot-com bubble, beginning a wave of
budget cuts and rollbacks that would last more than a decade. Many media outlets cut back on their foreign coverage, including Russia—and sometimes beginning with Russia. It became a self-perpetuating story: having told their audiences and themselves that Russia was safely entering a period of political and economic stability, American media effectively declared the Russian story dead, cut the resources available to cover it, and thereby killed their ability to report the story. ABC, which had had several dozen staffers occupying an entire building in central Moscow, closed its bureau altogether. Other outlets’ cuts were not as dramatic but just as drastic: entire bureaus were replaced by part-time freelancers. Only a few papers—
The New York Times
,
The Wall Street Journal
, and the
Los Angeles Times
—maintained complete bureaus with full-time reporters and supporting staff.

In June 2001, George W. Bush met Putin for the first time, famously “looked the man in the eye,” and “was able to get a sense of his soul.” Exuberant press reports took little notice of the fact that Putin not only was considerably less enthusiastic about his new friend but actually warned the United States that the period of hostility that began with the NATO bombings of Yugoslavia in 1999 was far from over. Then 9/11 happened, and suddenly the Russian war in Chechnya was recast as part of the Western world’s struggle with Islamic fundamentalist terrorism—against all available evidence, which included, among other things, Putin’s abrogation of an agreement reached under Yeltsin, according to which Russia was to stop selling arms to Iran and selling arms to Arab states to the tune of several billion dollars a year. And by geographic happenstance, major U.S. media started viewing Moscow as not so much the capital of Russia as base camp for reporters traveling to Afghanistan and, later, Iraq. The hunger for war stories was insatiable, and Russia was relegated to the sort of story that reporters did on the run, between truly important assignments. Their dispatches from Russia were articles that could
only serve to affirm the existing narrative, shaped by the people who had invented the image of Putin the young, energetic liberal reformer.

That there was not a whole lot to report along this particular story line did not seem to concern most American journalists and editors. They glossed over the nationalization of the media, portrayed the appointment of federal envoys to supervise elected governors as making order out of chaos, completely ignored rollbacks in judicial reform—and increasingly chose to focus on economic topics. Unlike Yeltsin, who seemed always to take two steps forward and one step back on economic reform in a perennial effort to pacify the opposition, Putin filled both his staff’s and the cabinet’s economic arm with avowed liberals. His premier was the former finance minister, an apparatchik steeped in the Soviet bureaucratic tradition but one sincerely committed to building on the reforms actually instituted in the 1990s—and, conveniently for Putin, focused on this task to the exclusion of any other government business. Even before becoming acting president—while he was still merely the anointed successor—Putin had formed a think tank charged with creating a plan for the economic development of Russia, and appointed a liberal economist who had once worked for Sobchak to run it. After the election, the head of the think tank became minister for economic development, a post created especially for him.

Most notably, Putin appointed Andrei Illarionov to be his economic adviser. It was the president-elect’s first appointment, and it was intended as a resonant gesture. Illarionov’s views were well-known: a member of the 1980s St. Petersburg economists’ club, he had evolved into a full-fledged, articulate libertarian. In the United States, he would have been called ultraconservative (and, fittingly, he eventually took a post at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington, D.C.), but in Russia his views landed him on the politically liberal side of the spectrum. Illarionov did not believe in global warming and did believe in the limitless self-regulating potential of free markets. He was also known for his brilliant analytical mind and his testy temperament, which had kept him on the sidelines of most of the key events of the 1990s. His appointment came as a surprise to everyone, including himself.