Death of a Dissident (62 page)

Regardless of Scotland Yard’s confidence that they know “who did it, where, and how,” they are unlikely to ever see their suspects in court. Lugovoy and Kovtun will never talk because they will never be extradited. That much, Russia’s prosecutors have already told the British. Instead of assisting the British investigation, the Russian government has been pursuing its own.

The Russian probe is designed as a mirror image of the British: there are detectives, witnesses, suspects, and a working theory,
which balance everything that the Brits have to offer. Every British finding has a Russian counterfinding, every statement a counterstatement. Even the rhetoric is reciprocal. The Russians are using classic disinformation tactics, which are as reminiscent of the old KGB style as is the murder itself. The Kremlin-controlled press blasts the Western media for a cold war-style propaganda campaign.

As was outlined in a
New York Times
interview of Kovtun and Lugovoy published on March 18, 2007, the Russian countertheory regards them, not as perpetrators, but as “an injured party,” the victims of a murder attempt with polonium that occurred during their first visit to London on October 16. After being contaminated, they claimed, they carried traces of polonium back to Moscow, and then again to London on their second visit. In the Russian frame of reference, the reciprocal pair of suspects are Zakayev and Berezovsky.

In April 2007 Russian investigators flew to London to question Boris and Akhmed, balancing Scotland Yard’s visit to Moscow to interview Lugovoy and Kovtun in December 2006. If and when the Brits indict the two Russians in Sasha’s murder, the Russians are likely to retaliate by charging Boris and Zakayev with an attempt on Kovtun. Because the case will never go to court, the question of who killed Sasha will never be officially resolved. The press will keep presenting a “balanced” view. Without a judicial conclusion, Sasha’s murder will turn into a zero-sum game between two conflicting conspiracy theories, each the mirror image of the other. On the two ends of the hall of mirrors—with Sasha’s body in the center—are the two main protagonists of this story, Boris and Putin, one the nemesis of the other. One of them did it. The choice is in the eye of the beholder.

A friend of mine who lives in Moscow said, “For you it’s Putin, which is understandable because you work for Boris and live in the West. But I live in Moscow and Putin is my president. Not just a president, but someone who, rightly or wrongly, is adored and revered by most of the people. He restored our national pride and self-confidence. He is like the queen of England. If I imagined for a moment that he is the murderer, I couldn’t live in this country. So it simply must be Boris, regardless of what evidence you produce. Boris is
supposed
to be vile.”

My friend represents a better part of Russia, its conscientious class. He wants to believe it was Boris. The majority, I am sure, are the opposite: they want to believe it was Putin—and they are proud of him for it. Litvinenko, in their view, was a traitor, and the president got him. With polonium. Serves him right. That’s what vlast should be: awesome.

A remarkable case in point illustrates the depth of the self-delusion of the Russian educated class with regard to their vlast. Yegor Gaidar is the former prime minister who, along with Chubais, was the architect of the economic reforms in Russia early in Yeltsin’s presidency. Gaidar, an internationally respected figure, is presently a director of an economic think-tank in Moscow. He happened to be in Ireland at the time of Sasha’s death, attending a conference at the National University of Ireland in Maynooth. In what was perhaps the most bizarre, albeit underreported, twist of the Litvinenko affair, on the morning of November 24, Gaidar was poisoned too.

Here is how he described what happened to him in a December 7, 2006, letter to the
Financial Times
, entitled “How I was poisoned and why Russia’s political enemies were surely behind it.”

“After I crossed the threshold of the conference hall, I collapsed in the university hallway,” Gaidar wrote. “I can remember very little about the events of the following several hours. Those who tended to me as I lay on the floor found me bleeding from the nose, with blood and vomit flowing from my mouth. I was pale, unconscious. It appeared as though I was dying.”

After spending a night in an Irish hospital, Gaidar insisted on returning to Moscow, where he underwent a thorough checkup. His “doctor was unable to explain such large-scale and systemic changes in the body [by] illnesses known to medicine, nor any of their most exotic combinations.” Gaidar is sure that he was poisoned, and that he would have died had he collapsed fifteen minutes earlier, when he was alone in his hotel room.

“Who of the Russian political circle needed my death on the 24th of November 2006, in Dublin?” he wrote. “I rejected the idea of
complicity of the Russian leadership almost immediately. After the death of Alexander Litvinenko on November 23 in London, another violent death of a famous Russian on the following day is the last thing that the Russian authorities would want…. Most likely that means that some obvious or hidden adversaries of the Russian authorities stand behind the scenes of this event, those who are interested in further radical deterioration of relations between Russia and the West.”

In his letter Gaidar stopped short of naming the “adversaries of the Russian authorities.” But later, several Russian Web sites published a facsimile of a letter sent by Gaidar to none other than George Soros, apparently in response to his get-well wishes. The “Dear George” fax was dated November 29, 2006. It named Boris Berezovsky as a suspect behind Gaidar’s poisoning. Gaidar asks Soros to “remind [Western] public opinion” about “who we are dealing with” in Boris.

“His main goal today is to make trouble for V. V. Putin, to undermine his regime,” wrote Gaidar. “His means [to that end] is harming Russia’s relations with the West.

“As someone who is not much of a friend with the Kremlin,” argued Gaidar, Soros would be “particularly effective” in smearing Boris. He suggested that in doing so Soros should allege Boris’s “cooperation with international terrorism.”

The publication of the leaked letter to Soros caused a storm in the liberal camp. Most commentaries urged Gaidar to disavow it as a fabrication. But Gaidar remained silent. Eventually Soros’s office in New York confirmed to a reporter, without comment, the receipt of the letter.

In early April 2007, in the departure hall of Berlin Airport, I bumped into Katya Genieva, a prominent liberal figure in Moscow who had accompanied Gaidar to the Dublin conference. I was curious to learn more. Is it possible that Gaidar had simply had a stomach bug and made a fool of himself over nothing?

“Good Lord, Alex! How could you say that?” responded Katya in horror. “He nearly died. I was poisoned too.”

It turned out that she was having breakfast with Gaidar that morning. Apparently she got a much lower dose, and her symptoms
were milder, but she was very ill for four months and her own doctors believe that she had been poisoned by an unknown substance. She had no doubt it was an attempted assassination. She also confirmed the authenticity of the Soros letter.

“Is it possible that Gaidar was blackmailed by the Kremlin into smearing Boris?” I wondered.

“Of course not,” said Katya. “Yegor Timurovich really believes Berezovsky is behind it.”

I agree with Gaidar on one thing. His poisoning was related to Sasha’s and was meant to reinforce its public effect. There are only two theories worthy of consideration explaining these events, and two principal suspects. If one of them is not the murderer, the other is. The problem is, as far as I am concerned, only one theory stands up to scrutiny of the facts.

Moscow April 16-17, 2007: Thousands of protesters battle riot police in the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg in two days of anti-Putin demonstrations. The White House calls the Russian authorities’ reaction “heavy-handed.” Observers note that the disturbances may be a prelude to a bloodless revolution of the kind that toppled governments in Ukraine and Georgia. “Previously, the CIA would channel money to opposition forces in the countries…. Now opposition forces are being financed through a system of various institutions and foundations. This probably explains why such organizations have been mushrooming in this country,” observes ex-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev
.

London, April 19, 2007: In a letter to Home Secretary John Reid, Yuri Fedotov, the Russian ambassador to the United Kingdom, urges the British government to take immediate action over Boris Berezovsky’s recent comments calling for the overthrow of the Putin regime. “The absence of a reaction would have some impact on
bilateral relations,” the letter warns. A copy of a warrant for Berezovsky’s arrest, signed by the Russian prosecutor general Yuri Chaika, is also enclosed
.

Writing about death, it’s impossible not to think about one’s own mortal self. Sasha died before my eyes the most horrible death imaginable, long, torturous, and inescapable. Visions of atomic annihilation—from the mushroom cloud of Hiroshima to the fallout of Chernobyl, which haunted my generation, turning millions into neurotics—came back to me as I watched him fading away. He had no chance from the instant he swallowed that tea: the doctors said that he received a dose equivalent to being in the epicenter of the Chernobyl catastrophe
twice
. All of those who were there
once
died within two weeks. His case will make medical history as the only instance of exposure to such a high dose of radiation from within: the initial gastric and intestinal symptoms; then a latent period of comparative well-being, referred to as the “walking ghost” phase, when the body’s cells, devoid of functioning DNA, continue running by inertia, until all organs and systems start failing one by one. The worst possible way to die.