Putin's Labyrinth

personal effects, said there was no evidence of such a story. But it is an angle worth further consideration.

It is not possible to know, of course, but I think it likely that Klebnikov would have disapproved of this book, especially my critical view of Putin and the “new Russian state” that he fathered. Klebnikov was a tough reporter in pursuit of elements he felt were sullying the state he loved, but toward the end of his life he thought it was time to write more positively about the country itself. Klebnikov’s wife, Musa, and his brother Peter declined to cooperate while I was doing my research. They specifically objected to his murder being lumped in with the deaths of Litvinenko and others who had defected from Russia or were enemies of Putin, or both. Klebnikov’s story was fundamentally different—he was not one of them—and he did not deserve to be in their company.

But here is the trouble with that reasoning: Klebnikov’s murder repudiated his own message about Russia— that Putin was taking it toward deserved greatness and that it was on the cusp of achieving equal footing with the West. In my opinion, his death sent the opposite message: that Russia was more prosperous but ultimately the same dangerous place it had always been. Putin was following the path dictated by his autocratic predecessors for centuries, glorifying the state over the individual. He was presiding over a system that continued to protect those who killed to further its interests.

It makes no sense to pretend that Klebnikov does not belong in the company of these victims of the Putin era. He crossed the same invisible line as the rest, and it became acceptable for someone to murder him.

In the end, he became the victim of a Russia whose nature he never fully grasped.

CHAPTER 8 Murder on an Elevator Anna Politkovskaya and the Voiceless of Russia

I NEVER MET THE JOURNALIST ANNA POLITKOVSKAYA. WHEN I covered the First Chechen War, she was in Moscow toiling for a small-time newspaper. By the time the second war rolled around, I had left for Afghanistan and environs. That is when Anna began reporting on the horrors of Chechnya, a career-changing experience that turned her against Vladimir Putin. She soon became the most angry and acid public critic of Putin in all of Russia.

“Putin has, by chance, gotten hold of enormous power and has used it to catastrophic effect,” she once wrote. “I dislike him because he does not like people. He despises us. He sees us as a means to his ends, a means for the achievement and retention of personal power, no more than that. Accordingly, he believes he can do anything he likes with us, play with us as he sees fit, destroy us if he wishes. We are nobody, while he whom chance has enabled to clamber to the top is today czar and God. In Russia we have had leaders with this outlook before. It led to tragedy, to bloodshed on a vast scale, to civil wars.”

My introduction to Anna was Putin’s Russia, her gritty 2004 account of life under the Russian leader. It is a defense of the defenseless, and its powerful language is rich in detail and often moving. She was blessed with unerring intuition and stuck to writing about what she actually saw. Anna was self-possessed, but not self-impressed.

That was all the more remarkable in view of her celebrity abroad and the admiration showered upon her by some of the most hard-bitten Western correspondents in Moscow. Time magazine’s talented war correspondent Yuri Zarakhovich in 2003 wrote that Anna “made her name by writing detailed, accurate and vivid reports on the plight of the civilian population in Chechnya…. She tells stories of people who are taken from their homes at night and never come back; about extra-judicial executions; about the hungry refugees in cold and damp camps.”

A year later, James Meek, a talented reporter with the British newspaper Guardian, described her as “one of the bravest of Russia’s many brave journalists.”

“Her seriousness is not just her frown, her severe glasses and full head of gray hair,” he wrote. “It’s the tension, anger and impatience in her whole body, making clear that her sense of the continual injustice being perpetrated in her homeland never leaves her, that she can’t shut it out in a way almost all British journalists, even the campaigning, radical kind, can.”

In her coda to Putin’s Russia, Anna made this plea: “We cannot just sit back and watch a political winter close in on Russia for several more decades. We want to go on living in freedom. We want our children to be free and our grandchildren to be born free. That is why we long for a thaw in the immediate future, but we alone can change Russia’s political climate.”

The West wasn’t going to help, she continued: “All we hear from the outside world is ‘al-Qaeda, al-Qaeda,’ a wretched mantra for shuffling off responsibility for all the bloody tragedies yet to come, a primitive chant with which to lull a society desiring nothing more than to be lulled back to sleep.”

Anna pushed journalistic boundaries in a way that would be frowned upon in the West: She repeatedly crossed the line between journalist and active participant in events she covered. Trying to resolve the Nord-Ost hostage standoff was an example of that. She thought that playing dual roles was a shrewd strategy.

It was not something I could see myself doing—negotiating with terrorists—but Anna’s style did lead her to a more profound understanding of the play of events and personalities than virtually anyone else I read in Russia.

It also earned her a following among the multitude of Russia’s downtrodden and powerless, who saw in Anna someone who would listen and, more important, write something. When she arrived in the office each morning, she often was greeted by a pile of mail and a line of people out the door, all hopeful that she could help them obtain justice.

Photo Insert

^{The aftermath of an explosion in a nine-story apartment building on Guryanova Street in southeast Moscow on September 9, 1999. In a two-week period in August and September, explosions killed nearly three hundred people in four Russian apartment buildings, leading Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to blame Chechen terrorists and order an all-out war in Chechnya. Putin’s popularity rating soared.}

^{(Tatiana Makeyeva/AP)}

^{Nikolai Khokhlov in South Korea in 1964, while serving as an anti-insurgency adviser to the Seoul government. Khokhlov defected from the KGB in 1954 rather than carry out the assassination of an anti-Soviet leader in Frankfurt. Three years later, the Soviets attempted to murder him with a nuclear-activated form of thallium. He went on to become a professor of psychology at California State University, San Bernardino.}

^{(Courtesy of Tatjana Khokhlov)}

^{Vladimir Putin during a March 2008 meeting of his security council. After his rise from nowhere to be named by Boris Yeltsin as his successor, Putin won election as president in 2000, largely based on his hard-line stand in Chechnya.}

^{(Vladimir Rodionov/AP/RIA Novosti, Presidential Press Service)}

^{In October 2002, terrorists took over a Moscow theater that was staging the musical Nord-Ost. To end the three-day siege, Russian security forces used a mysterious opiate gas that was intended to—and, together with a subsequent shootout, did—kill all the terrorists, but also took the lives of 129 of the 800 or so hostages. Here, a security officer carries a body out of the theater, with the bodies of other hostages in the foreground.}

^{(Dmitry Lovetsky/AP)}

^{Irina Fadeeva and her fifteen-year-old son, Yaroslav. Yaroslav died at Nord- Ost.}