Putin's Labyrinth

^{(Courtesy of Irina Fadeeva)}

^{Elena Baranovskaya with her husband, former military intelligence officer Sergei Baranovsky, and her twenty-year-old son, Andrei Nikishin. Both the men died at Nord-Ost.}

^{(Courtesy of Elena Baranovskaya)}

^{Ilya Lysak, a bass player in the Nord-Ost orchestra and an old family friend of Anna Politkovskaya’s. He survived the hostage-taking.}

^{(Courtesy of Vera Politkovskaya)}

^{New York native Paul Klebnikov, editor of Forbes Russia. He was murdered in Moscow in 2004.}

^{(Courtesy of Forbes)}

^{Anna Politkovskaya. She became one of Putin’s harshest critics in her writings in Novaya Gazeta and in books published in English in the West.}

^{(Colleen Piano/REX USA LTD.)}

^{Anna Politkovskaya and her daughter, Vera. In the hours before her murder, Anna was helping the pregnant Vera to shop for a basin for her apartment. When the baby was born a few months later, Vera named her Anna.}

^{(Courtesy of Politkovskaya Family Archive)}

^{From left to right, Alexander Litvinenko, Boris Berezovsky, Akhmed Zakayev, and Yuri Felshtinsky at Berezovsky’s sixtieth birthday party in January 2006.}

^{(Courtesy of Yuri Felshtinsky)}

^{Alexander Litvinenko and his seven-year-old son, Anatoly, at the Queens Leisure Centre in Blackpool, England, in 2001.}

^{(Courtesy of Marina Litvinenko)}

^{Marina Litvinenko.}

^{(Courtesy of Marina Litvinenko)}

^{Alexander Litvinenko and Anna Politkovskaya in London, in or around 2003. Litvinenko regarded Anna as a close friend and was broken up over her assassination. According to her family, she looked at Litvinenko as a source and no more.}

^{(Courtesy of Marina Litvinenko)}

^{Andrei Lugovoi at a news conference on November 1, 2007—the one-year anniversary of the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko. Great Britain had charged Lugovoi with Litvinenko’s murder. Lugovoi accused Britain of covering up its own involvement in the death and ran successfully for a seat in the Russian parliament.}

^{(Sergey Ponomarev/AP)}

^{Dmitri Medvedev, a long-time Putin subordinate from St. Petersburg and Putin’s chosen successor, as Putin walks to the stage to accept the leadership of the ruling United Russia political party on April 15, 2008. This post gave Putin an additional platform, on top of the prime ministership, with which to continue to wield power in Russia.}

^{(Dmitry Lovetsky/AP)}

In a 2001 story, she berated the wife of a Canadian diplomat who, driving a big Ford Explorer, crashed into the car of a Russian woman. The victim suffered a concussion and broken bones, but because of diplomatic immunity, the Canadian didn’t have to reimburse the Russian’s medical bills. Anna unearthed international conventions that she said should force the Canadians to pay up and told Russian authorities that if they did not believe her, they should come to her office and she would show them.

Nina Lavurda’s story was especially sad. She was desperate to retrieve the remains of her son, Paul, whose body had been abandoned on the battlefield after he was killed in action in Chechnya. The military was unresponsive to her pleas until Anna stepped in. Finally, the mother was presented with his skull for burial; no other body parts could be found.

“Paul Lavurda had been deserted on the battlefield and then forgotten,” Anna wrote. “Nobody cared that his body was lying there, or that he had a family awaiting his return. What happened after his death is typical of the army, a disgraceful episode that stands for an ethos in which a human is nothing, in which no one watches over the troops, and there is no sense of responsibility toward the families.”

Anna was born in 1958 in New York, where her father was an interpreter for diplomats at the United Nations. Four years later, the family returned to Russia. Anna grew up as a member of the privileged nomenklatura, the Communist Party equivalent of the West’s upper middle class, with access to hard-to-obtain Western goods and education at select schools.

Her readiness to challenge authority was apparent at an early age. In class, Anna’s best friends cringed each time she shot up to correct something the teacher had said. But she was the top student at School 33, and in her final year she was elected chapter head of the elite Club for International Friendship, part of the Communist Party youth group Komsomol.

She was a journalism student at Moscow State University, the Harvard of the Soviet Union, when she began dating her future husband, Alexander Politkovsky. Their relationship puzzled her friends. He was five years older, prematurely gray, and from a wholly different world: While Anna and her friends were society girls, Alexander was the son of artists and a habitue of Moscow’s dissident crowd. She was a serious thinker; he was a charming rogue with the gift of gab and a taste for drink. Over beers after Anna’s death, he described to me an ideal day: fly-fishing at a brook (the sound of the line hitting the water—“tuk, tuk, tuk”), a flask of whiskey in his breast pocket, a nap on the grass. That was the good-time Alexander.

To Anna, he was a beguiling exotic. One friend recalled her behaving like a schoolgirl around him, asking Alexander to hold her hand and to embrace her. On summer vacation at a Black Sea resort, she could be found each morning in her hotel room with wads of paper strewn across the floor. They were false starts on another daily letter to Alexander.

The two married after twenty-year-old Anna discovered she was pregnant. Her upper-crust parents were so incensed at her choice of a husband (who showed up for the wedding toting a half-finished bottle of vodka inside a bag) that they cut Anna off financially. At first, the newlyweds and their infant son, Ilya, survived on Alexander’s slim earnings as a novice journalist and Anna’s pay for scrubbing floors at a tailor shop. (She lost the job after the tailor tired of her “telling them how to work, how to treat people, how to treat her, a university [student],” said a friend, Elena Morozova.)

As graduation neared, Anna chose a literary outcast as the subject for her senior thesis. Marina Tsvetayeva was a great Soviet poet whose work ranged over the human cost of the Bolshevik revolution, her crushing loneliness, and her sexuality, including hints at lesbianism. Her life was tragic: Her poems were suppressed by Stalin’s government, her White Russian husband was arrested and executed, and Tsvetayeva hanged herself at the age of forty-eight, in 1941. The poet was a controversial choice for a thesis at a Russian university. But Anna was mesmerized and would not be deterred.

At home, life was tense. Anna and Alexander argued constantly. Before long, a second child was born—a girl, Vera. Alexander had earned a toehold in television, but his wages were modest and the couple was just scraping by. Then everything changed. It was the mid-1980s, and Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost, or openness, unshackled the Russian press. Alexander became a roving correspondent for a TV news show called Vsglyad, or “Outlook”—a loose version of America’s 60 Minutes.