The New Tsar (55 page)

After the British authorities determined what poison had killed Litvinenko, polonium-210, they ultimately found residual traces of it everywhere the three men had been—not just on November 1, but during their previous meetings on October 16 and 17. It contaminated their hotel rooms, the conference room where they met at Erinys, the seat at Emirates Stadium where Lugovoi sat, the seat cushions at the Hey Jo strip club and a hookah at the Dar Marrakesh restaurant, which Lugovoi and Kovtun had visited. It irradiated two British Airways jets that flew between Moscow and London and even the couch in the house of Kovtun’s ex-wife in Hamburg, Germany, which Kovtun had visited only days before he flew again to London to meet Litvinenko the second time, and where, according to testimony made public years later, he asked a friend if he could recommend a chef who might be able to deliver a dose of poison.

Polonium-210 occurs naturally in minute quantities in the earth’s crust, in the air, and in tobacco smoke, but when manufactured it appears as a silvery soft metal. It was once used in the triggers of nuclear weapons and is produced in small amounts to eliminate static electricity in industrial machinery and to remove dust from film and camera lenses. It decays by emitting alpha particles that travel only a few inches and are easily stopped by a sheet of paper or a person’s skin. The only health risk comes when it is ingested. Easily and safely handled and lethally toxic—it is an ingenious weapon. Ninety-seven percent of the world’s industrial supply comes from Avangard, a Russian nuclear facility in the heavily guarded city of Sarov, where the Soviet Union built its first atom bomb.

—

A
s happened with Politkovskaya’s murder, Putin was traveling when Litvinenko’s death exploded into a global media frenzy. This time he
was in Helsinki for a summit with the European Union that had already gone poorly, and as he prepared for the ritual press conference that culminated such meetings, Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, delivered the news about Litvinenko’s deathbed accusation, knowing he would surely be asked to respond. Putin was livid, incredulous that he had been accused of being personally involved in Litvinenko’s death.
¹⁴
The timing, he and his aides believed, could not be a coincidence; it could only be a provocation.

When he appeared with the prime ministers of Finland, Iceland, and Norway, along with the European Union’s two senior officials, Putin’s discomfort was palpable. He grimaced, shifted, and stared at the ceiling. His aides on the sidelines suggested to reporters that he had a cold,
¹⁵
but he seemed to be suppressing the fury that Peskov said he felt. None of the leaders who spoke from the dais pretended that the meetings had been a success, though they diplomatically expressed hope that the efforts to forge closer economic and social ties would continue. After they finished speaking, the first question was about Litvinenko: Would Putin respond to the accusation that he was responsible?

Putin, normally cocksure in these press appearances, answered awkwardly. “A person’s death is always a tragedy,” he began, and then offered his condolences to Litvinenko’s family. As he had with Politkovskaya’s murder, he tried to play down the victim and obfuscate the circumstances. The British doctors, he said, had not indicated that this was “a violent death.” He suggested that the British authorities bore responsibility for protecting the country’s citizens. He offered Russia’s assistance
if
an investigation was warranted and urged the British not to “support any tendency to inflate any political scandals which are groundless.” As for the note, he questioned why it had not been made public while Litvinenko was alive: if it was written after his death, Putin said, there was no need to comment. “The people who have done this are not God and Mr. Litvinenko is, unfortunately, not Lazarus,” he said. “And it is very much a pity that even such tragic events like a person’s death can be used for political provocations.” As he had in Politkovskaya’s case, Putin sought to deflect blame elsewhere, to his enemies. And yet nowhere in his short, awkward remarks did he come out and explicitly deny that the Russians had done it.

—

N
o direct evidence has yet emerged that Putin had any involvement in Litvinenko’s death, or Politkovskaya’s, or any of the other mysterious
and unsolved crimes that bore the hallmarks of political assassination during his rule. By now, however, his standing in the West had sunk so low that few doubted that, at the very least, he had created a climate that made political murder grimly ordinary. In the wake of Litvinenko’s poisoning, older cases suddenly took on new significance. Yuri Shchekochikhin, a member of parliament and a journalist who also worked for Politkovskaya’s newspaper, died in 2003 after a sudden illness that suggested a poisoning; he had just written an article about a stalled investigation that now, three years later, was about to surface amid renewed intrigue. Another case involved the strange death of a man supposedly acting as a mediator in the Yukos affair in 2004; the victim, Roman Tsepov, an acquaintance of Putin’s in the 1990s, died in a manner that eerily foreshadowed Litvinenko’s case: he succumbed to radiation sickness only days after supposedly having been invited for a cup of tea at the FSB’s headquarters in Petersburg.
¹⁶

Litvinenko’s poisoning had all the intricacy and intrigue of a John Le Carré novel, minus only a coherent motive and a climactic resolution. Back in Moscow, Lugovoi and Kovtun did not act like suspects. Lugovoi had called Litvinenko twice after learning he was ill, but before anyone knew of the cause. This did not seem to be the action of a murderer. When his name surfaced as one of those who had met Litvinenko on November 1, he presented himself at the British embassy, agreeing to meet the diplomats to clarify the situation and to be interviewed by British investigators. The chair he sat on was so irradiated with polonium-210 that the embassy sealed the room.
¹⁷
On the day after Litvinenko’s death, he and Kovtun granted an interview to the radio station Ekho Moskvy, expressing bewilderment over the whole affair, and they continued to speak out for months afterward, denying any complicity. Later they insisted they were the intended victims—either with, by, or instead of Litvinenko. “To kill him, and more so in such an extravagant way, was absolutely beyond understanding,” Kovtun said. If he and Lugovoi were hired assassins dispatched to London, Kovtun insisted, they would have been sent after the most-wanted men on Russia’s list of enemies, not an insignificant one like Litvinenko. In fact, Lugovoi had met Berezovsky the day before Litvinenko’s poisoning. “Lugovoi always had the chance to meet with Berezovsky, Zakayev, with all of them together. Since he had the chance to meet any of them, it would be easy to kill the more important target.”
¹⁸
In the shadowy world they inhabited, the argument made a certain amount of sense.

Putin did his best to ignore the drama, but Russian officials vigorously tried to undercut the narrative taking shape around the world. They did so with more zeal than they showed in investigating the murder itself. When traces of polonium-210 were found in Kovtun’s system, the prosecutor general’s office announced an investigation into
his
attempted murder. A month later, it announced, without evidence or even explanation, that Litvinenko’s death was linked, somehow, to ongoing prosecutions against Yukos. When Putin appeared at a press conference in February 2007, he dismissed Litvinenko as an inconsequential guard in the border troops who had abused his oath of office and then fled the country. “There was no need to run anywhere. He did not have any secrets. Everything negative that he could say with respect to his service and his previous employment, he already said a long time ago, so there could be nothing new in what he did later.” Instead, he claimed, the enemies who sought to harm Russia were the “runaway oligarchs hiding in Western Europe or in the Middle East.” He clearly meant Nevzlin and Berezovsky, suggesting, with as little evidence as those who accused him, that they somehow had a hand in Litvinenko’s death. “But I do not really believe in conspiracy theories.”

Russia, though, had become fertile ground for conspiracies, real and imagined, and the deaths of Litvinenko, Politkovskaya, and the others challenged the carefully cultivated impression that Putin presided over an era of progress, stability, and renewed national pride that left behind the violent chaos of the 1990s. Many theories centered on the end of Putin’s second term as president, which was, by law, already on the horizon. Some saw the murders as a provocation to ignite a popular uprising before the election in 2008, the way Georgy Gongadze’s murder in Ukraine hastened the end of Leonid Kuchma’s rule. Others saw the dark hand of those inside Russia who wanted Putin to remain in power. By this logic, the opprobrium that would fall on Putin for orchestrating the murder of a critic in London would force him to remain in office to assure his immunity from criminal prosecution.

—

P
utin had been asked about his intention to revise the Constitution and seek a third term as president even before he had romped to reelection for a second term.
¹⁹
Over and over he insisted that he had no intention to change the Constitution to erase the term limits on the powerful presidency, and over and over appeals were drafted to do exactly that. Regional parliaments proposed holding referendums on the issue
from Primoriye in the Far East to Chechnya. The speaker of Chechnya’s parliament, Dukavakha Abdurakhmanov, echoed Ramzan Kadyrov in his fealty by declaring that Putin should have three or four more terms as president—that he should rule for life, if possible. “The number of terms should not decide the end of his presidency but rather his age and health,” he said.
²⁰
With a simple signal from the Kremlin, any of the initiatives to extend Putin’s rule would have passed easily, but Putin demurred, rebuffing the appeals, though he did not actively discourage them either. For the first time ever, the country had a legal, democratic mechanism for the peaceful transfer of power, but by Putin’s own design, it had become impossible to imagine anyone else in charge.

Putin once said he had been thinking about his potential replacement from the moment he took office, but by his second term, the question of succession had begun to concern Putin and his court the way it had the ailing Yelstin—or the discredited Kuchma in Ukraine. He disclosed as much in December 2004 when he was asked at a press conference about his plans after leaving office and whether he would consider returning to politics in the following election, in 2012? He joked, “Why not in 2016?” His coy deflections never put the question fully to rest, but he acknowledged that, like Yeltsin before him, he had begun to think about the coming “milestone” of the 2008 election, which he cryptically called “a critical line” for the country.

The search for Putin’s heir—“Operation Successor,” it was called—began in earnest in November 2005 when the Kremlin announced that Putin had promoted two of his closest aides: Dmitri Medvedev, then his chief of staff, and Sergei Ivanov, the minister of defense. Putin elevated Medvedev to the newly created position of first deputy prime minister while Ivanov became a deputy prime minister in addition to minister of defense. Like Putin before his appointment by Yeltsin, neither man had run for elected office, but of the two Ivanov seemed the more likely heir. He was thirteen years older than Medvedev and had risen to the rank of general in the KGB. Medvedev, by contrast, was a boyish, bookish lawyer who had co-authored a legal textbook and lectured at St. Petersburg State University’s law school before following Putin to Moscow as his trusted protégé. Putin told neither man whom he would choose, and in the following months, it seemed that both were being groomed for the role, slipped into the public spotlight to burnish their images, though they were “campaigning” for the only vote that mattered: Putin’s. They both now took prominent roles in policy initiatives. Medvedev oversaw
$5 billion in spending on “national projects” in agriculture, housing, education, and health care; Ivanov, the restructuring of the military and by 2006 a new commission to oversee military procurement. Both began appearing more often in nightly news reports, certainly more than their nominal boss, the colorless prime minister who ran the government, Mikhail Fradkov, who in his first year in office had become notable for his lack of political significance. As the speculation mounted, both Medvedev and Ivanov faced repeated questions about their political aspirations, and they became artful in deflecting the issue. In Putin’s court, no one dared to campaign openly, even if they harbored political ambitions of their own. They conspired instead.

The seeming solidity of Putin’s political control belied a subterranean struggle to influence his ultimate choice. It was an extension of the struggle for control over the redistribution of assets that the Kremlin had orchestrated in earnest throughout Putin’s second term.
²¹
As in any court, rivalries emerged. Igor Sechin, whose power had increased with the acquisition of Rosneft, disliked the prospect of either of Putin’s aides becoming president. He favored the prosecutor general, Vladimir Ustinov, who had played an important role in the Yukos affairs and whose son had married Sechin’s daughter. Unfortunately for both men, a transcript of one of their conversations was said to have landed on Putin’s desk in the spring of 2006.
²²
It had been taped surreptitiously by a deputy in Russia’s drug enforcement agency, which was then headed by Viktor Cherkesov, Putin’s KGB colleague from Petersburg. In the wiretapped conversation, Sechin was said to have suggested, improbably, that Putin was weak and Ustinov would make a suitable replacement. Whether it was true was not the point: Ustinov was nakedly ambitious, chairing meetings of prosecutors with “a presidential air,” which was a dangerous presumption.
²³
Emboldened by the takedown of Khodorkovsky and with Sechin’s blessing, he vowed publicly in May 2006 to prosecute “high-profile criminal cases” involving government officials, including, some argued, against Dmitri Medvedev.