at the last minute he had canceled. Now Anna’s prestige was on the line.
Elena called Yuri, her strapping twenty-one-year-old boyfriend. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll be the foreigner.”
The following day, Anna stood before the assembly. We have a Canadian guest, she told the students. Yuri stood. He was wearing a borrowed denim jacket and T-shirt, with a pack of Philip Morris cigarettes stuffed in the front pocket—his best effort to look like a Westerner. Using what he later called “bad Russian” (he didn’t think his English would pass muster), he proceeded to describe life in Canada. He talked about Canadian literature and politics, and handed out cigarettes to some of the boys. He was an absolute hit, and Anna was showered with praise. Her English teacher was the only skeptic, suggesting that next time it would be more “ideologically correct” to invite a Communist brother from Poland or Czechoslovakia.
Some time later, a fellow student visited Anna at home. There was Yuri, sitting in the kitchen with Elena. “What is the Canadian doing here?” the bewildered schoolmate asked. No one had yet caught on to the ruse. Indeed, an amusing rumor quickly reached Yuri’s ear—his girlfriend Elena was defying custom by dating a Westerner.
Anna and Elena traveled different paths as young women. While Anna chose to marry the freewheeling Alexander who shocked her parents, Elena chose Yuri, by all accounts a decent if straightlaced fellow who appeared to be going places. The two young men, both army veterans, were already friends when they began courting the sisters. But when KGB agents separately approached them after graduation and offered attractive pay and benefits to enlist, Yuri signed up and Alexander said no. The couples very soon ran in separate circles, though they never lost touch with each other.
When I met Elena at a chic Japanese cafe in Moscow, I had to remind myself that she was Anna’s sister, so pronounced was the contrast in their appearances. Anna was bookishly attractive and a conservative dresser. Elena was glamorous, statuesque in a skintight black top and pants, easy to imagine as the jet-setting wife of a secret agent.
After Anna was poisoned on her way to the schoolhouse in Beslan, it was Yuri’s money that paid for a charter plane to whisk her back to Moscow. A cynic could attribute that and other deeds—such as arranging for a U.S. passport—to Yuri’s understandable desire to please his wife by helping his sister-in-law. Yet I sensed a genuine bond between Anna and Yuri that had survived for years. Perhaps their relationship is best understood as one more piece of evidence that Russia is full of contradictions.
Despite her newspaper’s limited audience, Anna’s reporting had an impact within Russia. Her exposes of official malfeasance sometimes generated enough public outrage to force a response by the government. She caused prosecutions to be launched and participated in some of the trials that followed. Anna’s readiness to be a peacemaker in moments of crisis, typified by her attempt to negotiate the release of the
The Kremlin did its best to get in her way. Except for news events such as
Yet Putin did not respond publicly to her slashing attacks on him and his policies. Nor were there punitive actions directed at Anna personally. She traveled unhindered in and out of Chechnya. Her Russian passport was never seized, even as she went abroad to excoriate Putin and meet with his critics in London—Oleg Gordievsky, the 1980s KGB defector; Akhmed Zakayev, the Chechen opposition representative abroad; and Litvinenko. Fabricated criminal charges were a favored tactic to punish “enemies” of the Russian state, but none were ever lodged against Anna. Indeed, she said that she could meet and interview almost any top official, as long as the encounter was kept secret.
Putin’s public silence was attributable to his media savvy. He knew that television and radio were what really mattered inside Russia; he had been elected twice largely due to the heavy propaganda hand that the state wielded over the airwaves. Relatively few Russians read newspapers, and most of those who did bought the major dailies. Anna’s employer,
None of this is to suggest that the threats against Anna’s life ever lessened. After her poisoning, she wrote: “If you want to go on working as a journalist, it’s total servility to Putin. Otherwise, it can be death, the bullet, poison or trial—whatever our special services, Putin’s guard dogs, see fit.”
“I know this is all going to end badly,” she told one friend. To another, she said, “I know I am not going to die in my bed.” While handing Anna a journalistic award for courage, Mariane Pearl, the widow of slain
Anna began telling her daughter, Vera, where she kept important personal papers, such as financial records. “I’m putting this document here,” Anna said. “If I’m not here, remember it is here.”
She almost certainly realized that she had crossed an invisible line, the boundary in Russia beyond which it is acceptable to murder someone. Sergei Lapin (no relation to “Cadet,” the police lieutenant in Chechnya who threatened Anna) was deputy chief prosecutor of Moscow until 2006. He knows about the boundary and how murder happens in the segment of Russian society Anna reported on.
No smart political leader or businessman outright orders a killing. He doesn’t have to. When a threat of any kind appears on the horizon, his organization understands that it must be dealt with. The responsibility to do so falls to underlings “whose job, to say it softly, is to make sure the business develops smoothly,” said Lapin.
“Everyone does his job. They understand they want to do a certain deal. Then they see that it isn’t working. They say, ‘We tried to negotiate, it didn’t work. So that’s it.’ Rarely the head of the organization will say explicitly that he wants someone killed. But [his deputies know] the deal needs to get done. The head finds out ex post facto.”
Vera tried to shrug off what her mother was saying. “One could hardly believe this would really happen,” she said. Still, Vera and her brother and their father, Alexander, tried to think of ways to persuade Anna to take fewer risks. It seemed an impossible task.
Then, in early 2006, the daughter discovered she was pregnant. The father was a young man she was dating. Vera would not marry him, but she would have the child, she announced. That gave Anna pause. She was going to be a grandmother. Her two children recalled a pledge Anna made that she would lead a quieter life if one of them produced a grandchild. “She never simply promised,” Vera said. “It meant she really would.”
Later in the year, there was reason to think Vera’s optimism was well placed. Anna told a friend that she was thinking of quitting journalism altogether and becoming a stay-in-Moscow grandmother. At an August 30 dinner celebrating her forty-eighth birthday, Anna expressed delight about the impending birth. The hostess sensed that her friend wanted to “return to a normal life,” meaning no more trips to Chechnya.
On October 5, Radio Liberty asked Anna to comment on the thirtieth birthday of Ramzan Kadyrov, now the prime minister of Chechnya. Anna savaged him as usual, calling the pro-Putin ruler the “Stalin of our times” who tortured and murdered fellow Chechens to stay in power. He was a likely candidate for a revenge killing, she warned, adding: “I don’t wish death on anyone, but as far as this particular person is concerned, I think he should take serious care of his security.”
Early on the afternoon of October 7, mother and daughter separately left Anna’s house to shop. Both were on the lookout for a bathroom basin large enough to bathe the baby. Each time Vera came across a basin that might work, she used her cell phone to alert her mother, and Anna did the same. Their hunt for the right basin bordered on the comic: They soon realized they were crossing each other’s tracks, sometimes visiting the same shops only minutes apart.
Later in the day, Vera told her mother to go home and rest. Despite her public persona of invincibility, Anna had not fully recovered from the effects of the poisoning two years earlier en route to Beslan. More than once, the children had had to summon an ambulance when her symptoms worsened.
Around four-thirty p.m., Vera called Anna at home, but there was no answer. Then her cell phone rang. It was Ilya. He also had telephoned their mother’s apartment and got no answer. Thoughts of the poisoning arose.
“You are close. Why don’t you go check?” Vera suggested.
