Wet Jobs: The Putin Regime, Terror, and Political Murder
This article covers the strange and often grotesque series of deaths, assassinations, and terrorist attacks that occurred during the early years of Putin’s reign. It is the eighth article in the series “Spy, Bureaucrat, Killer, Thief: The Many Faces of Vladimir Putin.” While it is not necessary to read the previous entries, it is recommended.
The first article provides a brief history of Russia’s intelligence services and a definition of “Disinformation” and “Active Measures.”
The second article describes Vladimir Putin’s early life and his experiences as a KGB Officer in Russia and East Germany.
The third article describes how elements of the KGB laundered billions of dollars of Communist Party money into the West as the USSR collapsed.
The fourth article describes the rise of the post-Soviet oligarchic system and the role Eurasian organized crime played in facilitating it.
The fifth article covers Putin’s tenure as Deputy Mayor of St. Petersburg and his enduring relationship with organized crime.
The sixth article covers the organized crime and intelligence service links to the Bank of New York money laundering scandal.
The seventh article covers Vladimir Putin’s rise to the Russian Presidency and the mysterious and controversial September 1999 Moscow Apartment Bombings.
Purchase my book, While We Slept: Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and the Corruption of American Democracy, available here.
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Vladimir Putin’s reign in Russia has been punctuated with disturbing frequency by the killings and mysterious deaths, in some cases in spectacularly grotesque fashion, of opposition politicians, investigative journalists, émigré dissidents and other perceived enemies of his regime.
This campaign of death has taken place both within and without Russia’s borders, across Eastern and Western Europe, and has been executed with particular ferocity in the United Kingdom.
Immediately preceding and during the early years of Putin’s reign, Russia also experienced a number of horrific terrorist attacks. The shadowy origins and true perpetrators of several of these incidents remain largely unexplained to this day.
The previous article examined the circumstances around Putin’s rise to the presidency and the events around the September 1999 Moscow apartment bombings that occurred roughly contemporaneously. Many of the deaths in the years that followed involved individuals who were investigating these events, and the further attacks of terror that followed.
While these areas of inquiry are, unsurprisingly, the subject of furious controversy, misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theory, a basic understanding of them is necessary if one wishes to gain a glimpse into the essential nature and character of the Putin regime.
We also have a moral obligation to remember the dead, to learn about their haunting lives, and in some cases, to carry on the important work they were doing, speaking truth to power, before they were cut down.
Political assassination may appear shocking by the standards of contemporary statecraft, but it has long been utilized as a tool by the Russian state security and intelligence services.
Numerous Russian Tsars were assassinated. Indeed, the first Russian intelligence service the Okhrana was established following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. The practice continued, with even greater frequency, after the Bolshevik Revolution.
The Soviet Chekist term of art for assassination was ‘wet job’.
Political Assassinations During the Soviet Era
In addition to perpetrating the mass extra-judicial killings of the Red Terror and the Stalinist purges, the Cheka and NKVD also engaged in a program of targeted assassination.
Despite official claims that the death of the Soviet Union’s founder Vladimir Lenin was due to natural causes, a number of historians have argued that he was in fact assassinated by means of poison.
As recently as 2012, Dr. Harry Vinters, Professor of Neurology and Neuropathology at UCLA, and Lev Lurie, a Russian historian in St. Petersburg, agreed at a clinicopathological conference hosted by the University of Maryland that poison was the most likely cause of Lenin’s death. Their chief suspect: Joseph Stalin.
The matter remains up-for-debate and unsettled.
Stalin’s Great Terror of 1934, which liquidated much of the Russian elite, was launched following the assassination of Sergei Kirov, the communist party chief of Leningrad.
Kirov was shot by a lone assassin at the Smolny institute in Leningrad. In a speech to the Twenty-second Communist Party Congress in 1961, Nikita Kruschev suggested that Stalin was behind Kirov’s death.
Contemporary Russian archives reveal that Kirov had doubts about Stalin’s increasingly violent domestic policies. Stalin placed the blame for Kirov’s murder on a terrorist conspiracy and used it as a pretext to start a historic domestic crackdown.
Referring to the Kirov mystery, esteemed author and Russia historian Amy Knight argues that “there is a convincing case against Stalin.”
In the wake of the Great Terror, Russia’s foremost writer and a founder of the socialist realist literary method, Maxim Gorky, who had supported the Bolsheviks against the Tsar, found himself increasingly in conflict with the Stalinist regime.
Gorky died in June, 1936, of pneumonia. He spent his final days surrounded by Kremlin doctors and there has long been speculation that, far from providing care, these doctors ensured the writer died.
The Bolsheviks had been testing poisons on political prisoners at a secret toxicological laboratory known as the “Special Office” since 1921.
The head of the laboratory, NKVD director Genrikh Yagoda, was a regular presence at Gorky’s household during the writers final days.
Yagoda had just a month earlier poisoned his own boss at the NKVD, Vyacheslav Menzhinsky.
Russian investigative journalists and historian Arkady Vaksberg and other researchers have argued that Yagoda poisoned Gorky during his illness to ensure his death on direct orders from Stalin.
The most notorious assassination of the Stalin era was the killing of Leon Trotsky, whom Stalin considered his arch-nemesis and most dangerous poltical opponent.
The NKVD officer in charge of the operation was Pavel Sudoplatov, who was later involved with the mission that infiltrated the Manhattan Project.
After falling out with Stalin, Trotsky left the Soviet Union and lived in exile in Mexico. Sudoplatov established three autonomous agent networks operating within Mexico to fulfill the mission.
Ramón Mercader, a Spanish Marxist who had been recruited by the NKVD during the Spanish Civil War, succeeded in gaining access to Trotsky’s home in exile in Coyoacán, Mexico.
Mercador befriended Trotsky and on August 20th, 1940, fatally wounded him by striking him in the head with an ice axe.
Throughout Stalin’s bloody rule Soviet intelligence was responsible for numerous assassinations of Soviet émigrés, suspected foreign agents and political dissidents.
It has even been credibly suggested that Stalin himself was poisoned.
Stalin’s death by no means ended the Soviet assassination program. In one notable instance that would resonate years later, in 1954 a KGB officer named Nikolai Khokhlov was sent on a mission to supervise the assassination of the chairman of the National Alliance of Russian Solidarists, an anti-communist organization.
Instead of carrying out the mission, Khokhlov warned the intended target and defected to the United States.
Three years later in Frankfurt, Khokhlov grew violently ill after drinking a cup of coffee at a conference. His severe symptoms led a famous American toxicologist to conclude that he had been poisoned with radioactive thallium.
It is believed by some that the attempt on Khokhlov’s life is the first known use of radioactive poison by the Russian intelligence services.
Former KGB members have maintained that rather than thallium, the radioactive substance polonium was used.
Another notable KGB assassin in the 1950s was Bogdan Stashinsky. His weapon of choice was a gun designed by a KGB weapons laboratory that fired a small amount of poison gas from a crushed cyanide ampule that caused cardiac arrest.
In 1957 Stashinsky used the gun to kill the Ukrainian political writer and anti-communist Lev Rebet, and in 1959 he assassinated Stepan Banderas, head of the militant wing of the Ukrainian independence movement, using the same method.
Two years later Stashinsky defected and alerted Western intelligence about the Soviet’s fearsome assassination capabilities.
In 1978, Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian dissident who had been speaking out against communism on British radio, was walking by Waterloo bridge in London when he was stabbed by an umbrella which injected him with a capsule filled with the toxic substance ricin. Four days later he was dead.
At the request of the Bulgarian communist regime, the KGB had placed Sergei Golubev in charge of carrying out the mission.
At first British doctors were unable to determine the cause of Markov’s death. It was only after another Bulgarian defector, Vladimir Kostov, alerted authorities after reading about the curious incident with Markov and the umbrella that the events began to make sense.
Kostov reported that he had been stabbed by an umbrella a month prior while in Paris. French doctors subsequently extracted a pellet containing ricin from Kostov that had failed to contaminate him. Markov’s body was subsequently exhumed and a similar pellet was discovered.
In 1980, a similar assassination was attempted in the United States.
Seven years earlier, the Polish national Boris Korczak had managed to infiltrate the KGB before being exposed as a CIA double agent in 1979. After fleeing to the United States, Korczak was shopping for food in Vienna, Virginia when he was shot by an air gun.
The gun fired a cross-drilled platinum iridium pellet containing ricin, which lodged in his kidney but failed to release the toxin. The pellet was removed by doctors, who discovered that the pellet had been sealed by wax designed to be melted by the internal temperature of the human body.
Post-Soviet, Pre-Putin Assassinations in Russia
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, targeted assassinations continued apace.
In 1994, 27-year-old journalist Dmitry Khodolov was working on a story for the paper Moskovskii komsomolets about corruption and mafia connections at the highest levels of the Russian military.
Khodolov alleged that a “mafia” clique within the Russian military, including then Minister of Defense, Pavel Grachev, was illegally selling planes, helicopters and thousands of tanks onto the black market.
Kholodov was killed in an explosion when he opened a brief-case booby-trapped with explosives that he believed to contain incriminating documents.
During this period, the explosion of organized crime led to an exponential increase in gangland hits. The suffusion of Russian intelligence into the Russian mafia during this period adds yet another layer of complexity.
A case-in-point was the murder of Ivan Kivelidi in 1995.
Kivelidi was a prominent Russian banker and president of the Russian Business Round Table. He had become involved in liberal politics, championing the rule of law.
Kivelidi and his secretary were killed after coming into contact with a military-grade poison that had been smeared on their office phone receiver.
The fact that Kivelidi had been killed was unexceptional, 16 bankers had been killed in the prior 18 months and police estimated there had been over 500 contract killings in 1994 alone. It was the manner of Kivelidi’s death that raised eyebrows.
In a closed-door trial, Kivelidi’s business partner Vladimir Khutsishvili was convicted of murdering him over a business dispute. Russian authorities claimed that the poison, an organophosphate nerve agent, had been sold into the black market by a scientist named Leonid Rink.
Rink worked at a secretive government chemical facility on a team that developed the novichok nerve agents, chemical weapons that Russian scientists claim to be the deadliest ever devised, more potent than VX.
Novichok would later be used in 2018 on former Russian spy Sergei Skirpal and his daughter in Salisbury in the United Kingdom.
Rink was suspected by authorities to have sold military-grade poisons to Chechen gangsters, and eventually admitted in trial that, under the threat of violence, he had in fact sold “poison designed for humans” to criminals.
Years later, after spending eight years in prison, Rink disavowed his previous testimony and claimed that he had sold the criminals “rat poison,” and that everything he did was done under the watchful eye of the FSB.
Boris Kuznetsov, a prominent Russian lawyer, represented Khutsishvili and maintains his innocence to this day. In 2018, Kuznetsov told Reuters that he believed Kivelidi was poisoned by rogue agents at the FSB.
The Kivelidi case is indicative of the difficulty these cases present to those who wish to get to the truth.
Death in St. Petersburg: The Murder of Democracy Activist Galina Starovoitova
On November 20th, 1998, four months after Putin had risen to become the head of the FSB, the democratic reformer Galina Starovoitova was shot to death in the entryway of her St. Petersburg apartment.
Her press secretary, Ruslan Linkov, was also shot but survived the attack.
Starovoitova’s murder sent shockwaves across Russia. She was a giant among Russia’s nascent democracy movement, known for her forceful advocacy for Russia’s many minorities and her fight against corruption in St. Petersburg. She was an elected member of the Duma and had founded a parliamentary bloc called Democratic Russia.
Starovoitova believed that Russia’s chief problem was that the same officials who had ruled the Soviet Union, particularly members of the KGB, were still largely in control of the country. In 1992, she introduced a bill to remove all those in the Russian government who had been responsible for human rights violations.
Ruslan Linkov, who survived the attack, later testified that he saw two shooters. Certain facts, however, raised questions about Linkov’s role in the incident. Though Linkov was himself shot, the shootings took place several minutes apart.
Despite his claims of being grievously wounded, Linkov was able to make two phone calls and contact neighbors in the building, who heard a conversation in the hallway before Linkov knocked on their door.
The question of why the professional killers failed to kill Linkov has never satisfactorily been answered.
Later at the hospital, Linkov refused to speak with anyone about the murder other than the head of the FSB: Vladimir Putin. Putin returned to St. Petersburg and spoke with Linkov privately about the details of the case.
Linkov claimed to have known Putin personally for several years before Starovoitova’s slaying. The physician treating Linkov had cared for Putin’s wife after a 1993 car accident.
Though Putin was in Moscow at the time of the murder, he had scrupulously maintained his relationships in St. Petersburg, especially with the head of the local branch of the FSB, Viktor Cherkesov. Cherkesov was infamous for his persecution of dissidents in Soviet times.
In the years following the assassination, Linkov made a series of dubious and outright false claims to reporters, including saying the Putin considered himself a supporter of Starovoitova’s democratic reform agenda, which was demonstrably untrue.
In 2005, an official Russian inquiry found that Starovoitova’s murder had been organized by a contract killer named Yuri Kolchin. The ultimate identity of who ordered Kolchin to arrange Starovoitova’s assassination has never been firmly established.
Kolchin was a member of Russian military intelligence, and linked with the Tambovskaya Bratva , St. Petersburg’s most powerful mafia organization. He was sentenced to 20 years in jail.
Vitali Akishin, Kolchin’s accomplice and the actual triggerman, was sentenced to 23 years.
Also arrested in relation to the case were two right-wing St. Petersburg politicians who were political enemies of Starovoitova’s and were also linked with the Tambovskaya, Mikhail Glushchenko and Vyacheslav Shevchenko.
After years in a Siberian hard labor camp, Kolchin admitted in 2011 to having organized the crime and claimed that Glushchenko had given him the order.
In 2014, Glushchenko, who was serving time for another series of murders, admitted his guilt and claimed that the mastermind of the assassination was Vladimir Kumarin (AKA Vladimir Barsukov), the infamous Night Governor and head of the Tambovskaya Bratva criminal syndicate.
Putin’s links with Kumarin during his tenure as deputy mayor of St. Petersburg have been firmly established.
In 2007, Putin personally ordered that Kumarin be arrested.
In his capacity as the head of the FSB, Putin and his loyal subordinate Cherkesov oversaw the Starovoitova investigation. The investigation, which dragged on for two decades, raised more questions than it answered.
Starovoitova’s sister, Olga, has stated publicly that she does not believe Kumarin ordered the hit.
Starovoitova’s death removed from the scene a powerful liberal voice and a politician who was advocating policies that directly threatened the FSB. Furthermore, the affiliates of the Tambovskay who were rounded up and arrested in relation to the crime all would have had first hand knowledge of Putin’s corrupt dealings with the gang in the 1990s.
While the question of who ordered her killing remains unanswered, Putin undeniably walked away a beneficiary.
“I never found out who ordered the killing of Galina Starovoitova,” Masha Gessen, a close personal friend of the slain democracy activist, wrote in her biography of Putin. “Nor did I ever find out why.”
What I did find,” Gessen continues, “was that throughout the 1990s, while young people like me were constructing new lives in a new country, a parallel world had existed alongside ours. St. Petersburg had preserved and perfected many of the key features of the Soviet state: it was a system of government that worked to annihilate its enemies — a paranoid, closed system that strove to control everything and to wipe out anything that it could not control. It was impossible to determine what had gotten Starovoitova killed, precisely because her standing as an enemy of the system had made her a marked woman, a doomed one.”
Corruption in Putin’s FSB and the Beginnings of the Alexander Litvinenko Saga
On November 17th, 1998, three days before Starovoitova’s murder, six current and former members of the FSB held an extraordinary press conference on Russian television.
Four of the men wore masks and dark glasses to conceal their identities, while the other two, Alexander Litvinenko and Mikhail Trepashkin, revealed their identities publicly.
The agents explained on national television that the FSB unit in which they worked, the Department for the Investigation and Prevention of Organized Crime, known as URPO, was itself operating as a criminal enterprise.
Their most explosive charge was that higher-ups in the FSB had ordered them to assassinate Boris Berezovsky, one of Russia’s wealthiest and most powerful oligarchs.
Litvinenko, the ringleader of the press conference, was a military veteran who joined the KGB in 1991.
After the KGB was “disbanded” and renamed the FSB, Litvinenko was assigned to the Economic and Organized Crime Unit. He was not a spy but rather a criminal investigator.
During this time, Litvinenko investigated the activities of the Tambovskaya Bratva, led by Kumarin. He uncovered evidence that the Tambovskaya was involved with smuggling Afghan heroin into Western Europe via Uzbekistan and St. Petersburg.
Most explosively, Litvinenko had uncovered evidence that former-KGB officials such as Putin and Nikolai Patrushev actively colluded with the Tambovskaya in their criminal activities.
Litvinenko maintained that a colleague of Putin’s in the Leningrad KGB, Viktor Ivanov, had forged strong ties with Kumarin and the Tambov gang.
According to Litvinenko, it was Ivanov who connected Putin with Kumarin. At the time, the Tambov gang was involved in a turf war with its rival the Malyshev gang.
Ivanov appeared to side with the Tambov faction and the Russian security services helped them drive out their rivals and establish firm criminal control over St. Petersburg.
Putin took charge of laundering the gangs profits through the real estate company SPAG, which may also have been laundering Columbian drug money.
After being transferred to URPO in the summer of 1997, Litvinenko grew deeply concerned over what he saw as the criminal nature of the orders he was given. Three operations were particularly disturbing.
The first involved Mikhail Trepashkin, a former FSB officer who had uncovered a network of corrupt FSB officials and was involved with court proceedings against his former agency.
Litvinenko and his colleagues were ordered to physically assault Trepashkin and steal his FSB identity card. He refused to obey the order and later befriended Trepashkin.
Litvinenko grew further concerned when he was ordered to kidnap a Chechen businessman in a mission in which they were authorized to kill the policemen guarding him.
It was the order to assassinate Boris Berezovsky, however, that eventually drove Litvinenko to become a whistleblower.
Litvinenko’s association with Putin’s arch-nemesis Berezovsky, a corrupt Russian oligarch with organized crime connections, adds an enormous layer mystery and confusion to this story.
In 1994, Litvinenko had investigated an assassination attempt against Berezovsky in which a car bomb decapitated his chauffeur and left the oligarch injured but alive. Through the experience, Litvinenko and Berezovsky became friends.
Their friendship was further cemented when Litvinenko, fearing Berezovsky would be murdered in police custody, prevented him from being arrested following the still unsolved murder of Vladimir Listiev, the most popular TV presenter on the Berezovsky owned station ORT.
After receiving orders to assassinate his friend, Litvinenko instead alerted Berezovsky to the plot.
Litvinenko then informed Yeltsin’s Deputy Chief of Staff, whose only advice was to lodge an official complaint with the Military Prosecution Service.
Berezovsky, worried that violence might be visited on one or all of them, suggested that Litvinenko create a video record of his allegations, which he did on the evening of April 18th, 1998.
Angered by Litvinenko’s actions, which he considered a betrayal, the head of the FSB, Nikolai Kovalyev, summoned Litvinenko to a meeting in which he demanded that he withdraw his allegations. Litvinenko refused to do so.
On June 7th, 1998, Boris Yeltsin replaced Kovalyev as the head of the FSB with Vladimir Putin.
Berezovsky immediately suggested that Litvinenko meet with Putin. Given the evidence that he had uncovered about Putin’s criminal associations in St. Petersburg, Litvinenko was uncomfortable with the request.
“When [Putin] was appointed, I asked [Alexander] who he was,” Litvinenko’s wife said years later. “He said some people are saying he was never a street officer. That meant they looked down on him — he hadn’t come up through the ranks.”
Berezovsky was insistent and the meeting was arranged sometime in July.
“He came out from behind the desk… to greet me,” Litvinenko later wrote of his first and only meeting with Putin. “Apparently, he wanted to show an open, likeable personality.”
“We, operatives, have a special style of behavior. We do not bow to each other, do without pleasantries — and so everything is clear. Just look into each other’s eyes and it becomes clear, do you trust the person or not. And I immediately had the impression that he is not sincere. He looked not like an FSB director, but a person who played the director.”
Litvinenko told Putin of the corruption at URPO and brandished comprehensive charts detailing the individuals involved. The meeting was short and throughout Putin displayed a lack of interest.
Though he said nothing at the time, Putin clearly believed Litvinenko was guilty of the worst crime imaginable: betrayal.
Shortly after the meeting, Putin disbanded URPO and redeployed its officers. By October, the Military Prosecution Service closed its investigation without any charges.
Undaunted, Berezovsky and Litvinenko soldiered on.
On November 13th, in a move that no doubt infuriated Putin, Berezovsky published an open letter to Putin in the pages of his newspaper Kommersant asking him to clean out corrupt elements within the FSB.
Four days later the infamous press conference took place. That December Litvinenko and all the other officers who participated in the press conference were fired from the FSB and an investigation was opened into Litvinenko’s record.
On March 28th, 1999, Litvinenko was arrested and detained at the infamous FSB Lefortovo prison. Though he was acquitted of the initial charges, Litvinenko was seized in the courtroom by FSB agents and immediately charged with new crimes. Litvinenko was again acquitted by the courts, but his passport was confiscated.
At this point, Litvinenko feared he and his family could be killed.
In the meantime, Berezovsky had dramatically fallen out with Putin and was forced into exile, eventually settling in London.
With financial support from Berezovsky, Litvinenko fled Russia in September of 2000 and eventually settled in London with his family where he was offered political asylum.
Berezovsky, still believing he belonged in the corridors of power in Russia, and Litvinenko would form the core of an anti-Putin cadre of exiles and activists. Few of the original members of the group survive today.
Anna Politskovskaya, War in Chechnya, and Murder in Putin’s Russia
Putin had just ridden a wave of fear and popular rage to the Presidency following the suspicious 1999 apartment bombings and the subsequent savage war visited upon Chechnya. What had been initially described as an anti-terrorist operation was actually an all-out, full-scale war.
The Chechen capital of Grozny was carpet bombed, reducing vast tracts of the city to ruble, killing thousands of civilians and leading to a mass exodus of refugees out of the city. After the bombardment of Grozny, Russian forces engaged in “clean-up” operations and perpetrated widespread war crimes including murder, rape and violence against civilians.
Putin then installed a Kremlin-friendly regime in Chechnya that turned a blind eye to the atrocities being committed in return for financial rewards under the leadership of Akhmat Kadyrov.
Covering the conflict proved to be a dangerous business. Russian forces were committing widespread war crimes and the Kremlin did not want anyone inside or outside Russia to know about it.
In the year 2000, five Russian reporters died covering the conflict. Three died in war zones, but two, Iskander Khationi and Adam Tepsurgaev, were assassinated.
A correspondent for Radio Free Europe, Khationi was murdered by an axe-wielding assailant outside of his apartment.
Tepsurgaev, a cameraman for Reuters, was shot to death while reporting in a Chechen village.
The frozen corpse of murdered Italian journalist Antonio Russo, who had traveled to Georgia to report on the plight of Chechen civilians, was discovered by the side of the road after a large blunt object had crushed four of his ribs and he succumbed to internal bleeding.
Perhaps the most famous and dogged of all Russian investigative reporters to cover the Second Chechen War was the indefatigable Anna Politkovskaya, who would emerge as one of Russia’s bravest and most internationally respected journalists.
Writing for the investigative newspaper Novaya Gazeta, Politkovskaya painstakingly documented in graphic detail the war crimes being committed in Chechnya.
Born in New York City in 1958, Politkovskaya was the daughter of Soviet Diplomats. Upon Putin’s assumption of power she quickly became one of his most vocal critics.
“I have wondered a great deal about why I am so intolerant of Putin,” Politkovskaya wrote in her powerful and poignant 2004 book of essays Putin’s Russia: Life In A Failing Democracy.
“What is it that makes me dislike him so much as to feel moved to write a book about him? I am not one of his political opponents or rivals, just a woman living in Russia. Quite simply, I am a forty-five-year-old Muscovite who observed the Soviet Union at its most disgraceful in the 1970s and 1980s. I really don’t want to find myself back there again.”
The Investigations into the September 1999 Moscow Apartment Bombings
Back in London, Berezovsky was fiendishly scheming his revenge against Putin. Though Berezovsky had been key in elevating Putin to the presidency, the Godfather of the Kremlin as reporter Paul Klebnikov referred to him was now dead set on doing everything he could to bring Putin down. He began to promote Litvenenko’s controversial and explosive findings about the Russian President.
In addition to Putin’s links to organized crime in St. Petersburg, Litvinenko also began to suspect that the Kremlin was behind the 1999 bombings.
It is important to pause here to note that Boris Berezovsky and to a certain extent the group around him that he supported financially cannot be exclusively relied upon as unvarnished sources of truth.
Judge Elizabeth Gloster, who presided over Berezovsky’s multibillion dollar lawsuit against Roman Abramovich, publicly stated in a London courtroom that she found Berezovsky to be an “unimpressive and inherently unreliable witness” who would “say almost anything to support his case.”
“[A] major reason for the difficulty involved in identifying those responsible for the September 1999 Moscow bombings,” writes John Dunlop, former acting director of Stanford University’s Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian studies and author of the most comprehensive study on the bombings, “has been the energetic and resourceful efforts at muddying the waters of two discreet groups: one of them, the Russian secret police, or FSB, working in consort with the Russian General Procuracy, and the other, the so-called “BAB Group,” a small but hyper-kinetic cluster of publicists looking to exiled Boris Abramovich Berezovsky (BAB) for material support and leadership.”
Dunlop points out, however, that contemporary investigations by a Russian free press prior to Putin’s crackdown, investigations by individuals without links to the BAB Group and the information unearthed by the Public Commission for the Investigation of the Bombings of the Apartment Houses in Moscow and Volgodansk, have provided scholars with a wealth of information about these events that is untainted by Berezovsky.
In March of 2002, Litvinenko and a collaborator, Russian historian Yuri Felshtinsky, released a book entitled Blowing Up Russia, in which they presented previously unseen evidence that implicated Putin’s security services in the bombings.
The book was serialized in the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta and was released in tandem with a documentary entitled The Assassination of Russia.
The FSB used every tool at its disposal to prevent the Russian public from ever seeing the book or documentary. Blowing Up Russia was immediately banned by Russian authorities and placed on a list of extremist materials, with all physical copies that could be located confiscated by the FSB.
The owners of movie theaters that attempted to show the documentary were in some cases physically assaulted.
“On the evidence I heard,” wrote Sir Robert Owen, a former British Judge on the High Court of England and Wales and Chairman of the The Litvinenko Inquiry, “the book was more than a political tract — it was the product of careful research. Professor Service’s view [Service is a Professor of Russian History at Oxford University] was that the two men had ‘credibly investigated’ the issue and, although their contentions about it had not been ‘proved 100 percent,’ he considered they were more likely than not to be accurate.”
Also in March, Berezovsky, Litvinenko and Felshtinsky met with Duma member Sergei Yushenkov, a Russian liberal politician and democratic activist, and encouraged him to establish a public commission in Moscow to investigate the bombings.
Yushenkov did so, co-founding the Commission for the Investigation of the Bombings of the Apartment Houses in Moscow and Volgodansk with a fellow Duma member and “old-time Russian dissident” Sergei Kovalyov. The Commission consisted of 15 members, including politicians, lawyers and journalists as well as one of the daughters of the victims.
Tania Morozova’s mother had been killed in one of the Moscow blasts. Morozova, a Russian émigré living in Wisconsin, was contacted and after watching The Assassination of Russia, decided to become involved.
Her addition was important, Litvinenko explained, because under Russian law Morozova as a victim was entitled to look through the FSB’s case files.
Yushenkov reached out to Mikhail Trepashkin, the same investigator who had been hounded out of the FSB and participated in the press conference with Litvinenko.
Trepashkin, who had been aiding the Commission’s investigation, was also a lawyer. It was therefore decided that Trepashkin would act as Morozova’s attorney, giving him the right to view the FSB case files.
By April, Litvinenko and Felshtinsky appeared on the brink of a major breakthrough. The FSB had named a Russian citizen from the North Caucuses, Achemez Gochiyaev as the chief organizer of the bombing. Gochiyaev, the FSB alleged, was a Wahhabist fundamentalist who had received $500,000 to conduct the bombings from a Saudi warlord Ibn al-Khattab waging jihad in Chechnya.
Following the publication of Blowing Up Russia, a Chechen intermediary contacted Felshtinsky and told him that Gochiyaev wanted to meet with the authors of the book in the Pankisi Gorge, a lawless region between Georgia and Chechnya.
It was a risky proposition, Felshtinsky was acutely aware of the risk that they could be walking into an FSB trap or kidnapping plot.
After Berezovsky agreed he would pay their ransom if it came to that, Felshtinsky and Litvinenko travelled to where they were offered protection by Badri Patarkatsishvili, the richest man in Georgia and a close ally of Berezovsky’s. Upon their arrival, Patarkatsishvili flew into a rage when he learned that Litvinenko, the FSB’s enemy number one, had risked the trip to Georgia, which sat on Russia’s doorstep.
Patarkatsishvili told them that it was far too dangerous for them to travel the Pankisi Gorge, a region so crawling with Chechen militants that even the FSB dared not enter.
Litvinenko and Felshtinsky met with another Chechen intermediary at a predetermined rendezvous point under the Freedom Monument in Georgia’s grand central square.
Felshtinsky explained that they would not be able to travel to the Pankisi Gorge and asked if Gochiyaev would meet with them in Tbilisi. Out of the question, the intermediary replied, the city was swarming with FSB agents, some of whom were watching them even as they spoke.
The impasse was finally broken when it was agreed that the intermediary would be provided with written questions, film Gochiyaev’s responses and return the next day with the footage.
The next day Litvinenko and Felshtinsky were forced to flee after it was discovered that their driver had been seized by the FSB. Fearing that he may have alerted the Russian security services to the purpose of their visit, they left Tbilisi immediately without retrieving the tape.
Upon landing in Frankfurt, they learned their driver had been murdered.
A few days later Felshinsky met with another intermediary at a hotel on the Champs-Elysées and was handed Gochiyaev’s hand written responses to their queries.
Its contents were explosive.
Gochiyaev vehemently proclaimed his innocence and insisted that he was hiding from the authorities because he feared for his life.
He further claimed that he had rented the rooms used for the apartment bombings at the request of a business associate who he now suspected worked for the FSB.
Gochiyaev said that following the first bombing he had contacted the police and alerted him to the risk of further attacks at the other buildings where he had rented out rooms for his associate but that no actions were taken.
In July 2002 Litvinenko and Felshtinsky provided this information via video link in sensational testimony the independent Commission that had been established to investigate the bombings.
The task of verifying Gochiyaev’s extraordinary claims fell on the shoulders of Mikhail Trepashkin, who was then conducting his own investigation into the bombings under the auspices of acting as Tania Morozova’s attorney.
Trepashkin had spent much of the 1980s in the KGB investigating the underground stolen art and antiques trade. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, he was transferred to the FSB’s Department of Internal Affairs, where he worked under Nikolai Patrushev, who would later succeed Putin as head of the FSB.
It was in this capacity, investigating internal corruption, that Trepashkin’s life and career would be derailed.
Trepashkin was a far cry from a radical reformer or political activist. A loyalist to the Soviet state, he had believed in his mission and had favored preserving the Soviet system. Trepashkin was horrified by the direction he saw the country and the FSB, the organization he had loyally served for years, going.
“In case after case,” Trepashkin told investigative reporter Scott Anderson, “there was this blending. You would find mafiyas working with terrorist groups, but then the trail would lead to a business group or maybe to a state ministry. So then, was this still a criminal case, or some kind of officially sanctioned black operation? And just what did ‘officially sanctioned’ actually mean anymore, because who really was in charge?”
In 1995, Trepashkin was supervising an elaborate sting operation against a bank-extortion syndicate led by a Chechen rebel leader named Salman Raduyev.
By that time, the year-old first Chechen War had ground to a bloody stalemate in what was seen as a Russian military debacle. Chechen criminal groups had long punched above their weight in the Russian underworld and corrupt Russian army officers were selling sophisticated weaponry to Chechen mobsters who then sold them onto the very seperatist rebels that were fighting Russian forces.
The question was, were these corrupt officers rogue individuals or did the scandal go higher?
On the night of December 1st, 1995, Trepashkin’s sting operation led to an armed FSB raid on a Moscow branch of Bank Soldi. Two-dozen members of the bank-extortion syndicate were seized, the conspirators included two FSB officers and Russian-military general.
Trepashkin’s men also discovered that electronic bugs linked to an outside surveillance van had been planted throughout the building by the syndicate to ensure that they weren’t walking into a trap.
When they traced the serial numbers on the bugs, they found the equipment had come from the FSB or the Ministry of Defense. As access to such equipment required clearance from the highest levels, Trepashkin immediately realized the sickening implication.
Senior officials in both the Russian security services and military were in league with a criminal gang led by a Chechen separatist leader that was raising funds for an ongoing war with Russia itself.
“By the standards of any country,” Anderson wrote, “that wasn’t just corruption, it was treason.”
Before Trepashkin could pursue these shocking new investigative leads, he was removed from the case by Nikolai Patrushev. No charges were filed and those who were caught up in the Bank Soldi dragnet were released.
Patrushev then launched an investigation into Trepashkin himself that lasted for a full two years.
Left with few alternatives, Trepashkin eventually documented his findings in a letter to Boris Yeltsin. The letter was turned over to the FSB and Trepashkin was forced to resign from his position. Undeterred, he filed a lawsuit against his former employer.
It was at this time that Litvinenko, in his position as URPO, was ordered to assault Trepashkin but instead warned him of the plot against him.
Twice, during this period, attempts were made on Trepashkin’s life.
Following the apartment bombings, which Trepashkin found suspicious at the time given his prior experience with Patrushev, who had succeeded Putin as head of the FSB, Trepashkin began receiving phone calls from Litvinenko in London.
In January 2000, days after he received his first call from Litvinenko, Trepashkin’s Moscow apartment was raided by a squad of FSB agents.
Realizing the danger he was in, Trepashkin would only agree to pursue an investigation if he could do so in an official capacity. That opportunity came when Tania Morozova hired him as her lawyer.
The risks faced by anyone looking too closely into the apartment bombings quickly became deathly clear.
On April 17th, 2003, Sergei Yushenkov, who had co-founded the Commission investigating the bombings, was shot four times in the chest as he walked from his car towards his apartment building.
Yushenkov was killed on the very day his party Liberal Russia had registered for the upcoming Duma elections.
Based on the contradictory testimony of one man, Kremlin officials fantastically laid the blame of Yushenkov’s assassination at the feet of Liberal Russia’s co-founder, Mikhail Kodanev. Kodanev was swiftly found guilty and sentenced to 20-years in prison.
A month later, yet another member of the Commission died of a mysterious illness that exhibited the signs of poisoning.
Yuri Shchekochikhin, a Duma deputy from the liberal Yabloko Party and a journalist working at Novaya Gazeta, had been behind the serialized publication of Blowing Up Russia at the paper and was also attempting to launch an official Duma investigation into the bombings.
Shchekochikhin fell ill in mid-June and was admitted to the hospital on June 21st. Shchekochikhin’s strange condition rapidly worsened until he experienced an excruciating death on July 3rd. Over the course of his illness, Shchekochikhin’s hair fell out, skin peeled from his body and finally he experienced massive organ failure.
“[H]e was only fifty-three,” his wife Nadezda said, “and he looked like a man in his eighties.”
Officials listed the cause of his death as toxic epidermal necrolysis, an exceedingly rare, fatal condition usually caused by an allergic reaction to drugs, but Shchekochikhin was on no medications at the time.
When his family requested his medical records, they were told that the information was a “medical secret.” After the family persisted in requesting the documentation, they were finally told that the records had been accidentally thrown out by a charwoman.
No criminal investigation was initiated as authorities claimed that he had died of natural causes.
At his funeral, no one was allowed to approach his body.
In addition to his pursuit of the truth regarding the apartment bombings, Shchekochikhin was pursuing another investigation that implicated the highest levels of the FSB in money laundering, weapons-smuggling, tax evasion and bribing public officials.
In October 2000, an investigator named Pavel Zaitsev at the Moscow Criminal Ministry filed charges against Three Whales (Tri Kita), a large Moscow furniture store, which had evaded millions of dollars worth of customs duties.
It was discovered that the Three Whales store was controlled by FSB Deputy Director Colonel Yuri Zaostrovtsev and his father Yevgeny, a retired FSB Major General. Zaostrovtsev had been a former chief to Nikolai Patrushev, then head of the FSB.
The investigator Zaitsev came to believe that corrupt Russian officials were using Three Whales to launder hundreds of millions of dollars through the Bank of New York.
After writing his first story on the Three Whales scandal for Novaya Gazeta, Shchekochikhin was physically assaulted outside his home and began receiving death threats.
Undaunted, he continued probing. Eventually, he passed information related to Three Whales over to the FBI, who were conducting their own investigation into the Bank of New York money laundering scandal, which they believed to be partially the work of the mobster Semyon Mogilevich.
Prior to his death, Shchekochikhin was planning to travel to the United States to testify about corruption among Russian government officials. He died before he could do so.
“By comparison with what’s happening today in our security services, in our prosecutor’s office, all bandits are simply boy scouts,” Shchekochikhin said in a final interview before his death.
“Today, it is precisely the people who are needed to fight crime and corruption that have raised the flag of corruption and crime. This had not bypassed the FSB; what has never happened before happens constantly now — the protection they provide, the enormous amounts of money they receive, and the control over ports and banks that they exercise.”
Following the gruesome deaths of Yushenkov and Shchekochikhin, two leading lights of the Commission had been snuffed out, leaving Trepashkin largely alone in Russia to conduct his investigation at his own peril.
Even before Yushenkov’s death, anti-Putin activists in London had grown so frightened for his well being that Alex Goldfarb, a friend and collaborator of Litvinenko’s, asked Trepashkin to meet with him in Kyiv, Ukraine.
“He was one of the stranger people I’ve ever met,” Goldfarb recounted of the meeting. “He had no interest in the philosophical or political implications of what he was doing. To him, this was all just a criminal case.”
“In the back of my mind, I was thinking, ‘Is this guy crazy? Doesn’t he appreciate what he’s up against?’ but I finally concluded he was this kind of supercop — you know, a Serpico figure. He was determined to do the right thing because it was the right thing to do; it was just that simple.”
Trepashkin had already made progress on the case. In a notorious incident that took place at the height of the bombing spree, the Speaker of the Duma, Gennady Seleznyov, announced publicly that he had received a report claiming an apartment building in Volgodonsk had just been blown up. He was wrong, the explosion had occured in Moscow. However, three days later a bomb did in fact go off at an apartment building in Volgodonsk.
Trepashkin claimed to have found evidence that Seleznyov’s report had been provided by an FSB officer, indicating that the erroneous report may have been due to a mistake by someone in the FSB related to the order in which bombings were to take place where.
In his biography of Putin, British journalist Philip Short claims that Seleznyov’s mistaken volgodonsk bomb claim was actually in reference to smaller, unrelated explosive device that killed one person.
In yet another suspicious incident, hours after the the bombings at Guryanova Street in Moscow, Russian authorities issued a composite sketch of a suspect based upon the description of a building manager.
Shortly thereafter the initial sketch was inexplicably switched with a sketch of Achemez Gochiyaev, the man who had insisted upon his innocence to Litvinenko and Felshtinsky.
Trepashkin became curious about the identity of the man in the first sketch. In his capacity as Morozova’s lawyer, he was allowed to sift through the FSB’s file on the Guryanova Street bombings but the first sketch was nowhere to be found. Trepashkin then began searching newspaper archives on the off chance that the picture had been published at the time.
A contemporary newspaper had published a picture of the first sketch, and to Trepashkin’s amazement he was convinced that he recognized the man as someone he had arrested eight years earlier during the Soldi Bank sting.
Trepashkin identified the person in the original sketch as Vladimir Romanovich, an FSB agent who had manned the surveillance van for the Raduyev gang.
Romanovich was unfortunately unavailable for comment, he had been killed in a hit-and-run accident in Cyprus a few months after the bombings. Trepashkin, however, was able to chase down the building manager who was the original source of the sketch.
“I showed him the sketch of Romanovich,” Trepashkin told journalist Scott Anderson. “And he told me that was the accurate one, the one he had given to the police. But then they had taken him to Lubyanka [FSB headquarters], where they showed him the Gochiyaev sketch and insisted that was the man he saw.”
Trepashkin’s stunning discovery had the potential to blow a hole in the FSB’s case. Russian security officials had released the names of nine individuals who they maintained were part of the Gochiyaev bombing unit. Five were dead, two at large, and another two were about to undergo trial.
In his capacity as Morozova’s lawyer, Trepashkin planned to attend the trial and introduce his findings into evidence for the defense.
Aware of his precarious position, prior to the trial Trepashkin took the precaution of describing his bombshell findings related to Romanovich to Igor Korolkov, a journalist at Moskovskiye Novosti.
It was a prudent decision, following his meeting with Korolkov, Trepashkin was seized by the authorities and arrested for the unlicensed possession of a firearm. A busload of FSB agents raided his apartment, terrifying his wife and two daughters.
During his detention, Trepashkin was kept in appalling conditions. According to Trepashkin’s handwritten notes obtained by The Chicago Tribune, his cell was swarming “with chinch bugs and lice.”
The notes continued, “There was no mattress, no stool or bunk. One could only stand or lie on a wooden floor soiled with excrement. At night I could feel bugs crawling in my clothes and on my body.”
Though the firearm charge was thrown out, Trepashkin was convicted of the improper handling of classified information and sentenced to four years of hard labor at a prison camp in the Ural Mountains. His wife, Tatiana Semeyutina faced the wall and wept after the sentence was read.
With Yushenkov and Shchechochikhin dead, and Trepashkin languishing in prison, the investigation in Russia ground to halt.
Korolkov published Trepashkin’s findings in the independent magazine for which he wrote, but by that time Putin’s media crackdown was in full swing and the vast majority of publications ignored them entirely.
An unmistakable message had been sent and most were too intimidated to discuss the bombings at all much less mount an investigation.
One brave reporter refused to be silenced.
Terror in Russia and the Murder of Anna Politskovskaya
“The investigation hasn’t answered the main question: Who ordered the apartment blasts in Moscow?” said Anna Politkovskaya, referring to the official Kremlin inquiry into the matter.
“The accusations raised by some politicians that the FSB may be behind some of the explosions have never been seriously considered by this investigation and have never been investigated at all. And it is quite clear that it will never happen.”
In late 2006, Politkovskaya approached the elevator in her building carrying groceries when a man raised an Izh pistol and shot her in the temple, chest, cheek, and thigh, killing her instantly.
Security cameras in the grocery store where she was shopping for herself and for her pregnant daughter Vera, who lived with Anna and was expecting her first child, revealed that Politkovskaya was being followed by a man and a woman.
Politkovskaya’s killers had been following her for days, and she herself had mentioned to her son that she had noticed strange people loitering in the stairwell of her apartment building.
The date on which she was slain, October 7th, is Vladimir Putin’s birthday.
Politkovskaya’s fierce brand of independent journalism won her both admirers and enemies. As mentioned earlier, she provided unflinching reporting on the suffering of both Chechen civilians and regular Russian soldiers during the Second Chechen War.
While reporting in Chechnya, Politkovskaya was at one point seized by the FSB and subject to days of interrogation which included repeatedly threatening her with rape and murder. She was only released after her plight was publicized by the Russian independent press.
Politkovskaya’s reporting earned her an immense amount of credibility among Chechen’s and led to her involvement in attempting to mediate two horrific terrorist hostage crisis.
Shortly after 9pm on October 23rd, 2002, 40–50 Chechen terrorists who referred to themselves as a suicide squad from the from the 29th division seized control of the Dubrovka Theater in Moscow during a performance of the Russian musical Nord-Ost and took between 850–900 hostages who endured a horrifying 58-hour ordeal.
The Chechens demanded the removal of all Russian military forces from Chechnya and requested Politkovskaya as a mediator.
“I am Politkovskaya! I am Politkovskaya,” she shouted as she entered the Dubrovka Theater on October 25th, the third day of the siege.
“I had no expertise under my belt,” Politskovskaya later wrote, “absolutely no experience of negotiating with terrorists. If I did have something, it was my desire to help the people who were in trouble through no fault of their own. And also, as the terrorists had chosen me as a person they wanted to talk to, I couldn’t refuse.”
Though Politkovskaya attempted to negotiate the release of some hostages, she was unable to secure any as the Chechens continued to demand the full withdrawal of Russian forces from Chechnya, something the Kremlin rejected outright. She did manage to convince the hostage takers to allow water and juice to be delivered to the theater.
At 5am the next morning the spotlights illuminating the theater from the outside went out. The Russian security services began pumping an aerosol anesthetic based on the opiate fentanyl into the theater and both hostages and hostage takers began to fall unconscious.
Spetsnaz, Russian special forces, stormed the theater and executed every unconscious terrorist they found.
In the resulting chaos, unconscious hostages were carried out of the building and laid on the steps of the theater. Many were laid on their back and subsequently choked to death on their own vomit. Most of the unconscious hostages were then piled onto buses and driven to hospitals in central Moscow.
As military and police authorities were not authorized to say what chemical they had used in the theater, doctors were unsure how to treat the patients. By the end of the tragedy, 129 people had died.
Much like the 1999 bombings, there is been much speculation as to who was really behind the Dubrovka Theater siege.
A Kremlin insider told Catherine Belton that the siege had been a provocation that was meant to be quickly and successfully solved by Putin, thus improving his standing and improving support of the war in Chechnya. It had been planned, the insider told Belton, by FSB head and Putin ally Nikolay Patrushev, who has also been linked to the 1999 apartment bombings. Everything went horribly wrong from the outset and the deaths of so many of the theater goers had never been intended.
In the aftermath of the attack, Alexander Litvinenko enlisted the help of his friend and neighbor Ahmed Zakaev to look more closely into the theater siege.
Zakaev had represented Chechnya to the West after the First Chechen War. After being wounded in 2000, Zakaev sought political asylum in the United Kingdom where he, like Litvinenko, received financial support from Berezovsky. Litvinenko and Zakaev read through the names of the terrorists and one stood out to Zakaev, Khanpash Terkibaev.
Terkibaev was an infamous figure in Chechnya who had made contact with so many separatist cells that many in the region thought he was an agent provocateur working for the FSB.
Zakaev began reaching out to contacts in Chechnya and soon discovered that Terkibaev was back in the region and was attempting to join another seperatist group by bragging of his participation and escape from the theater siege.
Litvinenko passed Zakaev’s findings on Turkibaev to Sergei Yushenkov two weeks before his assassination. Before he was killed, Yushenkov passed the information along to Politkovskaya.
When Politkovskaya managed to track Terkibaev down, she recognized him from when she was inside the theater and proceeded to interview him. Arrogant and boastful, Terkibaev somewhat inexplicably openly admitted that he had been inside the theater and that he was an agent with the FSB.
He further stated that he had led the terrorists to the theater through checkpoints in Chechnya and on the road to Moscow and that he had in his possession a detailed map of the theater. Terkibaev claimed that he led that terrorist to the theater then ducked out before the attack.
Lastly, he explained that the reason why none of the terrorists had set off any explosives was that there were no explosives in the first place.
Though Politkovskaya knew that Terkibaev was a liar, the fact that he had been in the theater and was still alive to talk about it led her to believe that he was in fact linked to a security agency. Politkovskaya decided to publish the interview.
Eight months later Terkibaev died in a car accident.
If true, the information Terkibaev provided Politkovskaya would indicate FSB involvement in yet another horrific terrorist attack. However, Terkibaev’s predilection to lie and the lack of any reasonable explanation as to why he would blow his cover to a reporter offer powerful reasons to doubt the veracity of his claims.
John Dunlop has written that he believes Litvinenko and Politkovskaya fell into an elaborate FSB trap designed to mislead them. According to this scenario, it is possible that the FSB hoped to discredit them by leading them towards a faulty conclusion regarding state involvement in another devastating act of terror. The ultimate answer remains elusive.
On September 1st, 2004, Russia was rocked by another gut wrenching terrorist hostage stand-off when armed Ingush and Chechen Islamist militants took over 1,100 hostages, including 777 children, at a school in Beslan, North Ossettia.
The hostage takers, sent by the Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev, demanded the recognition of an independent Chechnya and the full withdrawal of Russian forces. Politkovskaya attempted to travel to Beslan both in the capacity as a journalist as, if necessary, as a negotiator.
By this point the constant recipient of death threats, Politkovskaya brought her own meal on the flight to Rostov. After watching her Novaya Gazeta colleague Shchekochinkhin die an agonizing death after being poisoned, she took additional precautions.
Politkovskaya did drink a cup of tea. Minutes later she fell into a coma. After being hospitalized in Rostov, she was transported back to Moscow where doctors determined that an unidentified toxin had badly damaged her kidneys, liver, and endocrine system. Doctors considered it a miracle that she survived the poisoning, though she never returned to full health.
After three days, Russian forces stormed the school using tanks, incendiary rockets and heavy weaponry, 334 hostages were killed, including 186 children.
Though Politkovskaya narrowly escaped assassination by poison, her killers caught up with her. The official Russian inquiry into her murder dragged on for years and Politkovskaya’s suriving family members were constantly frustrated by what they saw as the incompetence of the investigators.
A group of Chechens were convicted of the killing, but the question of who hired them remained unsolved. Many, including Alexander Litvinenko, were convinced the orders had come straight from Putin.
Others point the finger toward another: Ramzan Kadyrov.
“Why has Ramzan vowed to kill me?” Politkovskaya asked in a haunting essay written shortly before her death.
“I once interviewed him, and printed the interview just as he gave it, complete with all his characteristic moronic stupidity, ignorance and satanic inclinations. Ramzan was sure I would completely rewrite the interview, and present him as intelligent and honorable. That is, after all, how the majority of journalists behave now.”
Ramzan Kadyrov, Head of the Chechen Republic, is one of the few heads of state who has been described as a violent, unpredictable psychopath.
His father, Akhmed Kadyrov, had switched sides during the Second Chechen War and was eventually installed as the leader of Chechnya by Putin in July of 2000.
Four years later, Akhmed was killed when an explosion tore through the VIP section at a football stadium where he sat watching a Soviet Victory Day parade. His 27-year old son Ramzan, who had served as the head his father’s 1,000 man strong security force, had to wait until he turned 30 before he could become President of Chechnya.
In early 2007, Putin appointed Kadyrov as the new leader of Chechnya. Ever since then, Kadyrov has displayed an almost fanatical devotion to the Russian leader.
“I am Putin’s man,” said Kadyrov, who enjoys unlimited authority in Chechnya. “His word is law for me. How can one not worship him? Putin is a gift from God.”
Putin, for his part, had said that Kadyrov is like a son to him.
“Those who criticize Putin are not human, they are my personal enemies,” Kadyrov told Anna Nemtsova in 2010.
“As long as Putin backs me up,” Kadyrov claims, “I can do everything — Allahu akbar!”
The Kremlin funnels a billion dollars a year to Chechnya, much of which is pocketed by Kadyrov and his cronies. Ordinary Chechens are required to pay monthly fees into the Akhmat Kadyrov Foundation, which ostensibly exists to provide assistance to the poor in what is an impoverished region of Russia in parts still devastated by two wars.
Instead the money is used to fund Kadyrov’s obscenely lavish lifestyle. Kadyrov lives in a 260,000-square-meter palace, home to a fleet of the world’s finest sports cars and zoo containing pumas, tigers and panthers.
When a local villager, Ramzan Dzhalaidinov, dared suggest on a nationally televised program that money from federal funds meant to pay teachers and restore housing destroyed by the war was instead being pocketed by local officials, he was hounded by so many death threats that he had to flee the country. Security forces kidnapped his wife and children and burn down his house.
Dzhalaidinov, in a form of ritualized public humiliation common under the Kadyrov regime, was made go on local television. “I am very ashamed of myself, and I apologize to Ramzan Kadyrov for the unfounded accusations.”
The security force Kadyrov led during his father’s reign formed the basis of the death squads he has employed while in power to wipe out his enemies.
Starting with the murder of Movladi Baisarov in Moscow on November 18th, 2006, numerous of his political foes have been gunned down across Russia.
Kadyrov’s enemies are not safe abroad either, with assassinations linked to Kadyrov taking place as far afield as Vienna and Dubai.
As recently as August, 2019, Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, a Chechen separatist who fell afoul of Kadyrov and fled to Europe, was shot twice in the head while walking through Berlin’s Kleiner Tiergarten.
It takes no stretch of the imagination to see how Anna Politkovskaya could have been yet another victim of Kadyrov’s international campaign of murder. He had, after all, referred to her as “an enemy of the Chechen people,” who “should have to answer for this.”
One must ask whether Kadyrov would have ever dared to murder such a prominent person in Moscow without Putin’s tacit permission. Or perhaps, given the date she was killed, Kadyrov wanted his birthday gift to his idol to be a surprise.
Anna Politkovskaya isn’t the only strong, independent woman Kadryov has been accused of ordering to have murdered.
In 2009, after investigating abuses by Chechen security forces, Natalia Estemirova, the head of Grozny’s municipal human-rights council, was kidnapped outside her apartment. Her body was found in a field off a highway with gunshot wounds to the head and chest.
Violence against women runs in the Kadyrov family. Islam Kadyrov, the former mayor of Grozny, has been accused of striking a woman with an electric shocker and torturing female detainees with a taser.
The Gruesome Death of Alexander Litvinenko
“Alexander, I’m very afraid,” Politkovskaya told Litvinenko a few months before her death in the spring of 2006.
They were sitting at a Caffè Nero in London. Politkovskaya told Litvinenko that every time she said goodbye to her son and daughter, it felt like she were doing so “for the last time.”
Litvinenko, who cared deeply for Politkovskaya, implored her to leave Russia. She said she couldn’t, mentioning her elderly parents and two children. It was the last time Litvinenko saw her alive.
Upon receiving the news of her death, Litvinenko was crushed.
“My name is Alexander Litvinenko, and I am a former KGB and FSB officer,” Litvinenko said in broken English, addressing a gathering at the Frontline Club in London that had come together to honor Politkovskaya. “Who is guilty of Anna’s death? I’ll give you the straight answer: it is Mr. Putin, the president of the Russian Federation.”
Despite a litany of setbacks, Litvinenko never let up in his campaign against Putin.
Starting in mid-2003, Litvinenko began working as a consultant for MI6 on the linkages between the Kremlin and organized crime. Litvinenko, who was paid £2000 a month for the work and provided an encrypted phone, met with an MI6 contact codenamed “Martin” at the basement café at Waterstones bookstore in Piccadilly.
British intelligence put Litvinenko in touch with their Spanish counterparts, who were investigating the infiltration of the Russian mafia in Spain. Litvinenko briefed Spanish intelligence officers and prosecutors on Putin’s history with the Tambovskaya Bratva in St. Petersburg, a branch of which had settled in Spain, and had even agreed to testify in court.
Litvinenko was also serving as an advisor to the Mitrokhin Commission, a controversial Italian investigation that lasted from 2002–2006 that investigated KGB ties to Italian politicians in the wake of the information learned after the defection of Vasili Mitrokhin in 1992, a senior KGB archives.
Litvinenko’s intermediary was a man named Mario Scaramella, who served as a security advisor to the Commission.
Much of the information Litvinenko provided to Scaramella was related to Semyon Mogilevich.
Litvinenko described Mogilevich as “one of Russia’s most notorious [Organized Crime Group] leaders… It is said that he is responsible for contract killings and smuggling weapons.”
Litvinenko further maintained that Mogilevich, “a well known criminal-terrorist,” was “in a good relationship with Russian President Putin and most senior officials of the Russian Federation.”
Litvinenko said the Mogilevich and Putin had, “a common cause, in my understanding a criminal cause.”
Litvinenko told Scaramella that Mogilevich had sold weapons to al-Qaeda, and that he knew “beyond a doubt that Mogilevich is FSB’s long-standing agent and all his actions including the contacts with Al-Qaeda are controlled by FSB… For this very reason the FSB is hiding Mogilevich from FBI.”
“[T]he Mitrokhin Commission was and remains highly controversial, both in Italy and beyond,” Sir Robert Owens wrote in The Litvinenko Inquiry. “It seems that there are many who have questions both the legitimacy of its work and the value of its findings.”
In December of 2006, Mario Scaramella was arrested in Italy on charges of libel and weapons smuggling.
Scaramella faced accusations that he was using attempting to discredit Italian center left politicians with spurious claims of links to the KGB.
Romano Prodi, former Italian Prime Minister and President of the European Union, was accused by the Commission of being the “KGB’s man in Italy,” partially due to the testimony of Litvinenko. Prodi sued the Commission.
Read my article on Prodi’s involvement in the “Hapsburg Group,” established by future Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, here.
Oleg Gordievsky, a famous KGB defector and friend of Litvinenko’s who had initially cooperated with the Commission, later denounced Scaramella as “a filthy liar who wanted to ruin Prodi.”
Regarding Litvinenko’s claims related to Prodi, Gordievsky has said that Litvinenko, “…in the end decided to tell Scaramella what Scaramella wanted to hear.”
Whether Gordievsky is correct on this point, and what bearing this has on everything else Litvinenko testified to, remains unclear.
At 3pm on November 1st, 2006, Scaramella met with Litvinenko at a sushi restaurant in Piccadilly Circus. Scaramella shared with him an email he received from Evgeny Limarav, a former Russian intelligence officer, claiming that Litvinenko, Zakaev and Berezovsky were going to be the next victims of a Kremlin assassination campaign.
The email, which had been sent a few days before her death, also listed Anna Polikovskaya.
Litvinenko went next to the Pine Bar at the Millenium hotel to meet two former-KGB officers he believed he could trust, Dmitri Kovtun and Andrei Lugovoy.
It was a fatal error. During their meeting, Litvinenko drank a cup of green tea that had been laced with the radioactive isotope Polonium-210.
That evening Litvinenko grew violently ill, vomiting blood and foam throughout the night. Litvinenko’s condition steadily worsened and on November 3rd he was admitted to Barnet General Hospital in London.
With fatal amounts of alpha radiation coursing through his body, Litvinenko’s hair fell out and he took on the appearance of a patient undergoing chemotherapy.
Samples were sent to the British government’s Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston and it was determined that Litvinenko had been poisoned by a rare nuclear isotope that could only have come from a Russian government nuclear facility located in the Ural Mountains.
Prior to his death on November 23rd, Litvinenko consented to having a photo taken of him which caused a sensation across global media.
He also released a final statement: “You may succeed in silencing me but that silence comes at a price. You have shown yourself to be as barbaric and ruthless as your most hostile critics have claimed. You have shown yourself to have no respect for life, liberty or any civilized value. You have shown yourself to be unworthy of your office, to be unworthy of the trust of civilized men and women.”
It concludes, “You may succeed in silencing one man but the howl of protest from around the world will reverberate, Mr. Putin, in your ears for the rest of your life. May God forgive you for what you have done, not only to me but to beloved Russia and its people.”
“There can be no doubt,” Sir Robert Owen began his oral summary of the conclusions of the official British government inquest into Litvinenko’s death, “that Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned by Mr. Lugovoy and Mr. Kovtun.”
He continued, “I have concluded that there is a strong probability that when Mr. Lugovoy poisoned Mr. Litvinenko, he did so under the direction of the FSB… I have further concluded that Mr. Kovtun was also acting under FSB direction…. I have further concluded that the FSB operation to kill Mr. Litvinenko was probably approved by Mr. Patrushev, then the head of the FSB… And, also by President Putin.”
The next article will focus on how Putin consolidated power around himself and his authoritarian regime early in his reign.