AS HE LAY DYING
Marina Litvinenko, the murdered man's widow, sheds tears as if her eyes are gently bleeding. She cries the way her husband died, slowly melting from within. Marina has the cheekbones of a Madonna, and a statue's marble skin. She says Alexander Litvinenko - "Sasha" - was a hero. He was not a spy, he was only a policeman, and a laughing policeman at that.
It is important for her that he be remembered the way she thought of him. If Litvinenko was a saint, his death is a martyrdom and her stigmata are real. "He was my husband," she says haltingly, "and, for me, he was the best person I met in my life. I thought I'd found my other half."
Marina sits with Alexander Goldfarb - Litvinenko's spokesperson during his final, poisoned weeks - in a publisher's office in London. She is talking and crying, talking and crying. Goldfarb, who has co-written with Marina a book called Death of a Dissident, says Litvinenko's killing was the world's "first instance of nuclear terrorism".
"It was essentially a terrorist attack in the middle of a Western city," he says, "which harmed hundreds of people. There are probably 30 to 40 people who will have long-term health consequences."
One of them is Marina Litvinenko.
Alexander litvinenko died on november 23, 2006. photographs of the man in his hospital bed were shown around the world. He died bald, in a pale green hospital gown, his chest a collage of tubes and sensors. Litvinenko had the misfortune to live at the centre of his times, when by rights he should have remained at the fringe.
"Originally, on one side, the life of my husband was quite an ordinary life," says Marina. "On the other side, he went to work with people who are at the top of history now in Russia."
Litvinenko was born the son of a doctor, in Voronezh, Russia, in 1962, and went to school in Nalchik, in the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains, in a region close to Chechnya. He joined the internal troops of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and stayed on in the army until he transferred to the KGB in 1988. He worked in counter-terrorism and against organised crime, says Marina.
"He never was a security person against dissidents in Russia," she insists. "He never worked in this way, like normal KGB people."
Marina met him on her 31st birthday, when he visited her with her best friend, whom Litvinenko was helping with a criminal investigation.
"The first time I saw him, he was absolutely not a person you'd think of as KGB," she says. "He wasn't very tall, he wasn't muscular, he wasn't serious. He was cool, funny even, and very young-looking. Nobody could tell his age. When we met, he was 31, but he was like an 18-year-old guy."
Marina was a professional ballroom dancer, teacher and choreographer, and she still has a dancer's disciplined poise, but she speaks with a wistful, bewildered sadness that belies her bearing.
"I could never have predicted my life after this first meeting," she says, "but in a few months it started, and it completely changed my life: in a good way, and maybe in a bad way as well."
Marina's Alexander Litvinenko was an honest cop - perhaps not a picture Litvinenko himself would recognise. Before he died, he told journalists he was involved in what were essentially death squads, recruiting killers to assassinate individuals who posed "problems" for the government.
When Litvinenko joined the KGB, Russia was in the hands of Mikhail Gorbachev, and glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) were transforming the Soviet economy. In 1991, the courageous, visionary buffoon Boris Yeltsin became the first popularly elected president in Russian history. In the same year, Yeltsin faced down a coup sponsored by KGB elements, and replaced that discredited organisation with the FSB, the Federal Security Service. Yeltsin's market reforms at first led the economy towards the edge of collapse, and a new super-rich class, widely known as the oligarchy, emerged as the major beneficiary of his privatisations of state-held resources such as oil and gas.
The Soviet Union dissolved. Russia quickly shed its Baltic fringe, and Belarus, Georgia, Armenia et al, all of which were Soviet additions to the Russian state. But Yeltsin was unwilling to let go of Chechnya - a largely Muslim republic in the northern Caucasus that declared its independence in 1993 - because it was historically part of Russia. From 1994 to 1996, Russia fought a savage war with Chechnya's separatist government, which ended with the Russian armed forces defeated and shamed, and the breakaway republic winning a kind of de facto autonomy.
Both the oligarchs and the secret services had seats in Yeltsin's court and, in the last shaky years of his presidency, the two groups began to fight each other. The oligarchs were, at best, accidental democrats, Western-oriented by default because their markets lay in the West. The ultra-nationalist remnants of the KGB, which had lost everything - power, influence and even a war - looked backwards and inwards, dreaming of a reinvention of the Russian Empire.
Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer who was appointed by Yeltsin to head the FSB in 1998, was the oligarchy's choice as Yeltsin's successor. Putin worked closely with Boris Berezovsky, the most overtly political of the oligarchs, to ensure he sidelined Yevgeny Primakov, who was seen as the secret services' official candidate.
Litvinenko had met Berezovsky in 1994 while investigating an attempt on the businessman's life. In 1998, under Putin's watch at the FSB, Litvinenko and a group of his fellow FSB officers held a press conference to reveal an FSB plot to assassinate Berezovsky and murder or intimidate other businesspeople.
After he spoke out about the alleged conspiracy, Litvinenko was regularly arrested on accusations that he had abused suspects. He was twice jailed awaiting trial, and twice the charges were dismissed. The third time he was arrested, he was allowed to remain free but had to surrender his passport.
"I had a meeting with him every month and I had a letter from him every day [while he was in jail]," says Marina. "I kept every letter." As long as she still has the letters, says Marina, "It means I still have him."
And she cries.
Then came september 1999, "the month of terror", when a series of bombings killed hundreds of people in apartment blocks in Moscow and Volgodonsk. Yeltsin said "terrorists" had declared war on the Russian people, and was quick to blame the Chechens. Putin, who had become prime minister only a month before, responded with a violent determination that endeared him to a frightened people: he invaded Chechnya eight days after the final bombing, and his decisive actions sealed his future as president.
"There is a school of thought," says Alexander Goldfarb, "to which Sasha belonged, which holds that Vladimir Putin came to power as the result of a massive crime."
Litvinenko believed the "terrorist" bombers were FSB agents, that the mass murder of Russian civilians was perpetrated by the secret service as a pretext to avenge the first military defeat in Chechnya and ease Putin into power. Good Weekend contacted several Australian academic experts in Russian studies to discuss their views on Litvinenko's conspiracy theory. None was willing to be quoted - two of them citing fears for their own safety or that of family members in Russia - but none was prepared to discount the Litvinenko thesis. They criticised Litvinenko for drawing broad conclusions from insufficient evidence, but pointed back to the so-called "Ryazan incident".
On September 22, 1999, six days after the Volgodonsk bombing (which killed 17 people), FSB agents were spotted in the town of Ryazan moving explosives into an apartment-block basement from their car. The authorities described it as a training exercise and, with almost artless imagination, "a test of citizens' vigilance".
A public-inquiry committee set up to investigate the affair has yet to report, and at least two of its most effective members have been killed. All documents relating to the Ryazan incident have been sealed for 75 years by the Russian Parliament, the Duma.
Sasha started out as a loyal officer of the russian secret police," says Goldfarb, "with all this code of loyalty and belonging to the agency of which Putin became the head. When Marina appeared, he realised that being a loyal officer and an unquestioning member of this clique is not the main thing in life. There are other things. Then he started thinking, and he kind of revolted against corruption."
Goldfarb is the chairman of Boris Berezovsky's International Foundation for Civil Liberties. A retired academic (he was once associate professor of microbiology at Columbia University in the US), he left Russia in 1974. His history as a campaigner for human rights in Russia dates back to the glory days of Andrei Sakharov in the early '70s, and he is now a kind of professional dissident, salaried by Berezovsky.
He takes a view of Litvinenko that is as romantic as Marina's: he was a good man challenged by corruption and transformed by love. Others have hinted that he was simply a gun for hire who switched paymasters. Once Litvinenko defected, he admitted Berezovsky helped fund his life in London, but nobody except Berezovsky can say for certain when their financial relationship began.
"Boris Berezovsky was protecting him for most of the time [in Russia]," says Goldfarb, "so when Boris Berezovsky quarrelled with Putin and was put under investigation himself, Sasha decided to get out of Russia, and he managed to get out and go to [Georgia], where you could go without a foreign passport. There he obtained false papers, and with those false papers he went to Turkey."
Marina and the Litvinenkos' son, six-year-old Anatoly, meanwhile travelled to Spain using their legitimate passports. "It was not only frightening," says Marina, "I couldn't understand what was going to become of us, where we were going, what was happening. Because when I was in Spain, and Sasha called me to say, 'Marina, you will probably not be able to go back home,' I couldn't believe him."
She and Anatoly then had to travel to Turkey. "Berezovsky called me and asked could I bring them to the American embassy in Ankara," says Goldfarb, "because I have an American passport. So I went and collected them. Sasha was interviewed by the CIA and the CIA essentially said they weren't interested, and we were stuck in Turkey with false papers. It was kind of scary."
A vulnerable Marina concentrated her thoughts on her son.
"When I saw he was okay, I was okay," she says. "If he wasn't okay, it was a more difficult time for me. We had to travel from Ankara to Istanbul by car. It was a long journey, and we saw somebody following us, but for Anatoly it was a kind of game, always checking if there was a car behind us."
"In the end, we bought tickets to Moscow from Istanbul," says Goldfarb, "with a changeover in Heathrow. When you change over, you don't need a visa. So we came to Heathrow and tore up the boarding documents for the Moscow leg and went to the police and claimed asylum. I was blacklisted by the British for a year. They wouldn't let me into the country for smuggling asylum seekers."
The Litvinenkos were eventually granted asylum and made their home in north London, among a ragtag community of dissident émigrés temporarily united by their opposition to Putin. Their close neighbour was the exiled one-time Chechen deputy prime minister Akhmed Zakayev, and he and Litvinenko became close friends. "After meeting Akhmed, Sasha completely changed," says Marina.
When the conflict in Chechnya began, Litvinenko at first thought it might be a just war. "All Russian people thought this," Marina insists. "First of all, it was said, 'After two or three days it will be finished.' But when it continued on, and we could see how many people died, Sasha understood there was something not right.
"After what he heard from Akhmed and his relatives, he was very sad ... he tried to say all the time he was very sorry to the Chechen people and to Akhmed Zakayev for what had been done to Chechnya by Russia. Akhmed was like an older brother to him."
In London, Litvinenko became an ever-more strident critic of Putin. He accused him not only of ordering mass murder and political assassinations, but also of pedophilia.
In July 2006, the Duma passed a law allowing the security services to track down and destroy Russia's "terrorist enemies" anywhere in the world.
"Sasha said, 'They will do it,' " says Marina. " 'You should be ready.' But, because we received British citizenship, it gave Sasha more confidence. 'They can't do it against me,' he said, 'because I'm here.' He was more concerned about other people, like Akhmed Zakayev and Boris Berezovsky. But after Anna Politkovskaya, the famous Russian journalist, was killed in Moscow on October 7, Sasha was destroyed. He said, 'They've started. There's a list of people they're going to kill.' He wasn't afraid it would happen to him, but all the time he would say, 'The Russian Government can go for their target and they don't think how many people they'll kill, or will die, for them to get this target.' "
Marina starts crying again.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the life expectancy of the average Russian has plummeted, but a foe of Putin would seem to have even fewer years ahead of them. Since Putin took power, 13 Russian journalists - including Politkovskaya, the country's best-known investigative reporter and a fervent opponent of the war in Chechnya - have been murdered, with poisoning a possibility in two cases. Two opposition parliamentarians from the "Ryazan incident" inquiry were shot dead in the street. An anti-Putin presidential candidate in the Ukraine, Victor Yuschenko, was disfigured by dioxin poisoning in 2004, but survived.
On november 1, 2006, alexander litvinenko had lunch with a dubious Italian lawyer, Mario Scaramella (who Litvinenko believed had evidence relating to the murder of Politkovskaya), and met former KGB agents, including a man named Andrei Lugovoi, at the Millennium Hotel in Mayfair. Later that day, he fell ill, and was taken to Barnet Hospital in north London. At first, doctors believed he had ingested rat poison, then that he was probably affected by radioactive thallium. On November 23, a few hours before he died in University College Hospital, it was announced that the poison was polonium-210, a radioactive isotope that was once employed as a trigger in nuclear bombs, but is now produced in Russia in tiny amounts as an anti-static device for use in large-scale printing.
The day after Litvinenko's death, Goldfarb released a statement that he said had been dictated to him by his friend before he died. It was addressed to Vladimir Putin. "You may succeed in silencing me but that silence comes at a price," it read. "You have shown yourself to be as barbaric and ruthless as your most hostile critics have claimed [with] no respect for life, liberty or any civilised value ... unworthy of your office [and] unworthy of the trust of civilised men and women. 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."
Marina says she and Goldfarb wrote their book, "first, in memory of my husband and the father of my son, and second, that something like this must never happen again."
"During his last two weeks, he was absolutely adamant to have this story told," says Goldfarb. "Over Marina's objections, he insisted on having his photograph taken and released to the press. He wanted it to be as public as possible, because he was absolutely sure where it all came from. Even though he didn't know about the polonium, he had the inner conviction that it was the Russian Government that got him."
"When Sasha stayed in Barnet Hospital, and there was the first idea to take a picture of him, he said, 'No,' " says Marina. "Because he believed one day he would be again like normal, and he would walk again like a normal person. He said, 'I may be not able to look at this picture.' He spoke to Akhmed Zakayev, and he said, 'Akhmed, can you imagine one day we will sit together - I, a Russian, and you, a Chechen leader - and we will speak about the relationship between Russia and Chechnya, and somebody will show a picture of me in a hospital, and your picture as a Chechen rebel, with a bandana like a bandit? We should be respectable, like normal people.'
"But he became worse and worse - and one day he started to change every day, dramatically," says Marina. "You could see how he just became older and older, every day, and when he was very weak, and he couldn't even stand up to walk, there was an offer to take pictures of him. Again, I was not happy to have these pictures taken, but Sasha said, 'No, we have to do it, because people have to see what he did to me.' ¿"
"He was changing," says Goldfarb, "not only physically - he was ageing because of the poison - but also he was transforming into a very
wise person. His boyishness disappeared, and he became very serious."
Just before he died, Litvinenko converted to Islam. Marina believes his gesture was a further expression of friendship for Zakayev, and solidarity with the Chechen people. "He asked me, Akhmed Zakayev and his son to be with him in his room," Marina says. "He said, 'I'm not going to die, but if I do, you will bury me in Chechnya, close to Akhmed.' Akhmed said, 'But I'm not going to die. I feel very good', trying to make a joke of it, but Sasha was very serious. Maybe in the last he wanted to show what he felt for the Chechen people as well."
Despite his conversion, Alexander Litvinenko was buried in Highgate Cemetery, London, after a secular service.
According to alexander goldfarb, the blame for litvinenko's death was supposed to be attached to Boris Berezovsky. "Polonium as a murder weapon was discovered [by British investigators] by accident," he says. "It doesn't emanate radioactive rays which can be picked up by normal Geiger counters. Had it not been discovered, then the propaganda machine of the Kremlin would have lashed out, saying Berezovsky killed one of his lieutenants; they're doing it now, but not very successfully. The reason they used this exotic poison, which unequivocally shows that this is a government-sponsored job, was for it not to be discovered."
Investigators traced the radiation trail to a teapot in the Millennium Hotel - where seven bar staff tested positive for polonium and hundreds of passing customers may have been affected - across London to Heathrow Airport and onto a British Airways plane that flew between London and Moscow.
A tiny quantity of polonium is produced annually in a single facility in Russia. Goldfarb has no doubt that when polonium appears, "it comes from the source ... It is impossible to extract. You'd have to buy hundreds of these anti-static devices and develop an industrial process of extraction to get it."
Goldfarb believes that the Russian Government was entirely responsible for his friend's death. "If they weren't," he says, "in a way it's more scary. If it's a government job, everybody could rest assured that Putin would not go and use it every day. But if it's not, it means that the production and handling of this stuff is open to rogue elements.
"The Russians produce 85 grams a year for industrial purposes, which is enough to kill 85 million people. It is hundreds of thousands of times more toxic than anthrax, and much more dangerous than plutonium. Injected into the Tube or the water supply, it would be much more harmful than anthrax. If I were Osama bin Laden, I would go after polonium."
On May 22, 2007, the British director of public prosecutions recommended that Andrei Lugovoi, one of the former KGB men who met Litvinenko in the Millennium Hotel, should be charged with the "grave crime" of Litvinenko's murder. The Kremlin indicated that it would refuse any extradition request.
We seem to be living in james bond times, when a super villain hides out in remote caves and plans to bring down the governments of the entire Western world, and Russia is governed by a quietly patient ex-KGB man with icy pogrom eyes. Even polonium, the weapon that killed Litvinenko, has the ring of a thriller writer's invention. Litvinenko's accusations sound impossible - that the Russian Government murdered hundreds of its own civilians as a pretext for invading Chechnya - but someone murdered him to silence him, and they did not care how many other bodies they poisoned in the process.
"His death shows again that, for them, it doesn't matter," says Marina, who herself has tested positive for polonium. "They killed him, but [also] how many people in the bar, and all around London? It hasn't finished for many people. It's not the simple murder of one person."
Various theories have emerged out of Moscow: that Litvinenko committed suicide to discredit Putin; Boris Berezovsky for similar reasons; that he was killed as a result of a business deal; or that he was assassinated by Islamists or - that old Russian favourite - the Jews.
Litvinenko was a confused and contradictory figure in life, and history may only remember him for his death: not the fact that he was killed, but the way in which he died. "The whole of our generation was tormented by atomic death," says Goldfarb. "There is a generation of neurotics, because everybody was afraid the bomb would come and everybody would be incinerated. It never happened. But this is medically what happened to Sasha. He died of radiation exposure. Not from the outside, from the inside."
For Goldfarb, watching the death of his friend, "This came back as a fear after 30 years," he says, "and it was horrible to see. I still cannot shed these images." On the other side of the table in the publishers' office in London, Marina listens to Goldfarb's energetic speech, and slowly, motionlessly, silently, she cries.