Ten minutes later, her brother called back.
“They killed Mama,” he said.
A man in a baseball cap had secreted himself inside Anna’s apartment building. When she stepped out of the elevator on her floor, he was waiting. He stood before her and fired four shots point-blank. Three bullets tore into her chest and the fourth penetrated her head. The force of the shots slammed her back into the elevator car, where a neighbor found her body. The murder weapon, a 9-millimeter Makarov semi-automatic pistol with its serial number scratched out, was left at the scene.
Vera didn’t believe it, couldn’t believe it.
Anna’s friend from childhood Elena Morozova was in her car when an acquaintance called and told her to turn on the radio. “We’ve got this bit of tragic news,” the announcer said. “Anna Politkovskaya was killed near the entrance to her house.”
Elena telephoned Masha Khaykina, another of Anna’s close friends from school days. “They’ve killed Anka,” she said.
Masha screamed.
In London, Alexander Litvinenko’s wife told him, “Oi, Alexander, I have terrible news for you. They shot Anya.” He began pacing “like a wounded animal.”
Vladimir Putin was at a party in honor of his fifty-fourth birthday. A guest conveyed the news of Anna’s assassination. He issued no immediate statement.
Asked about her death three days later, in Germany, Putin famously replied that it was a pity but that her “influence on the country’s political life…was minimal.”
By one expert’s measure, Anna’s killing was out of the ordinary. Oleg Panfilov, with whom I worked in Tajikistan in 1992, directs a Moscow center that defends press rights in the former Soviet states. He said twenty-six reporters were killed in the former Soviet Union in 2006, the last year for which he had complete statistics. But he believed that only one—Anna—probably died for what she wrote. The other deaths likely could be attributed to personal disputes or business disagreements, he said.
Anna had a long list of enemies. Almost every time she wrote a story, she was protesting an injustice that someone had suffered. That also meant she was attacking someone—the person or persons at fault. And Anna named names. So the number of characters who might have wanted her dead is large. Ramzan Kadyrov, the Chechen leader she repeatedly berated, is thought by many to be a prime suspect. He had publicly threatened her. The murder happened two days after his birthday, giving rise to speculation that it was a present from thuggish admirers. Three Chechens were among the ten men arrested in the case, perhaps an additional reason to focus attention on him.
My hunch is that this was not a murder that required approval at the top. But it is reasonable to suspect that the FSB was complicit in Anna’s death, at least at some level. Those who engineered her killing almost certainly assumed they would get away with it. They knew it would be seen as a political killing and that there would be repercussions. But they must have had reason to believe that they could weather the repercussions with relatively little effort. It is a level of confidence that one would expect to find within the FSB, or among those close to the organization. (One of the first suspects to be arrested was an FSB officer, who was accused of providing Anna’s address to the triggerman. Will it be shown that he was ordered by someone higher up to provide this assistance? Perhaps, but that’s not a requirement. He could have been operating under the usual understanding that certain people are fair game. The wisdom of former prosecutor Sergei Lapin may have application here.)
What about Putin? Did he order Anna’s murder? I have not heard anyone present a credible case against the Russian president. I don’t believe it happened at his explicit direction, or even his vague suggestion. Some have suggested a theory like the one linking Anna’s killing to Kadyrov—that it was a gangland-style present to Putin. She was slain on the exact date of the president’s birthday. In the end, though, such speculation is an almost pointless exercise. Putin is responsible because, as with
Anna’s legacy is that she made a difference, no matter Putin’s cold dismissal of her worth. She did what she did because she saw no one else doing it. She refused to be intimidated, and she made people’s lives better.
But I suspect that she didn’t care much about a legacy. For Anna, it added up to this: She did her best, she lived her life, and that was about it. Yes, it would have been pleasing to think that people would remember her. But would that have changed how Anna answered her calling? I think not.
Irina Fadeeva, one of the Nord-Ostsi women, who lost her teenage son, Yaroslav, in the theater tragedy, related the following to me:
A while after Anna’s death, Irina dreamed that the two of them were out walking. They came to a glass house, and Anna headed toward it.
“I’ll walk with you,” Irina said.
“No, you can’t come with me,” Anna replied. “With me it’s very dangerous. They could kill me.”
Anna pulled her hat tight over her eyes, and disappeared inside.
CHAPTER 9
The Traitor
SIX DAYS AFTER THE OCTOBER 7, 2006, SLAYING OF ANNA Politkovskaya, actress Vanessa Redgrave led mourners in a flower-laying ceremony at Westminster Abbey. A tribute to Anna followed at the House of Lords. Days later, a somber panel discussion was held at the Frontline Club, a popular West London inn and saloon run by former war correspondents.
A scruffy-faced blond man in the Frontline audience rose to his feet. “My name is Alexander Litvinenko,” he said in a mixture of English and Russian. “I’m a former KGB and FSB officer. Because I’m here, [I feel] I should speak up.”
The killing of the crusading journalist had unsettled the Russian defector, a fixture in London’s emigre community for nearly six years. He had known Anna during the last few years of her life and had admired her tough reporting on many of the same matters that occupied his interest.
Litvinenko quickly unloaded on Russia’s leader: “Someone has asked who killed Anna Politkovskaya. I’ll give you a direct answer—Mr. Putin, the president of the Russian Federation, killed Anna.”
Toward the end of his remarks, he rephrased the statement, but its essence was unchanged. “Without the sanction of Putin, no one would touch someone of Anna’s stature,” he insisted. “She was their political enemy, and that’s why they killed her.”
As far as I could tell, it was the first time that Litvinenko had publicly blamed Vladimir Putin for Anna’s death. His blunt accusations caused a stir in the room. Afterward, some in the audience invited him to speak elsewhere, and journalists who were present pressed him to elaborate. A five-minute videotape of his impromptu speech eventually found a global audience in the tens of thousands, through the magic of YouTube. Valid or not, Litvinenko’s remarks helped to bolster a growing suspicion abroad: The Kremlin was killing its enemies.
The onetime Russian agent had been tossing rhetorical hand grenades in the direction of the Kremlin ever since he and his wife, Marina, and their six-year-old son, Anatoly, arrived in Great Britain on November 1, 2000. After his nerve-racking escape from Russia and failure to obtain political asylum in the United States, Litvinenko settled into the life of an exile in London. He was a health fanatic who neither smoked nor drank, and ran alone up to twelve kilometers a day through north London. His wife adjusted well, taking English lessons and finding work as a dance instructor at a health club. The jowly, balding Berezovsky, also living in exile in London, made sure they were financially comfortable.
Well before fleeing Russia, the forty-three-year-old Litvinenko had experienced a kind of personal conversion.
