Putin's Labyrinth

Bush then turned his dual defeats into something resembling obsequiousness by flying to Putin’s vacation home in Sochi. He went there without any sign of a face-saving concession from Russia on any issue, and in violation of his own definition of when a U.S. president should put his prestige on the line by deigning to visit another country. He said only that he wanted to pave the way to a more cooperative relationship between the two countries. One would be foolish to carry this too far, but it did not seem excessive to say that, as far as Bush was concerned, Russia had finally earned equal ranking with the world’s most powerful nations; its wishes had to be respected. It was quite a turnaround for both leaders—a shot of hard-fought-for respect for Putin, and a step down for the customarily uncompromising Bush.

Some observers in the West searched for signs that Medvedev would be his own man, and his soft speaking style—along with an open fondness for the 1970s band Deep Purple—fed optimism that he would be more conciliatory toward the outside world. But Putin remarked publicly that if the West thought that Medvedev would be easier than he to deal with on foreign policy issues, it was wrong. And Medvedev agreed.

Indeed, the signs were that the long Russian continuum stretching from the time of the czars to the present would go on. There was no indication that Medvedev would inherit Putin’s influence over the siloviki, nor that, even if Putin did relegate true control over the military and spy agencies to his successor, Medvedev would change their operating style. Medvedev expressed no misgivings about unsolved murders, the indifference of the system, or the impunity enjoyed by killers. In Medvedev’s public appearances, it was difficult to find any opinions distinguishing him from Putin. Asked by Financial Times reporters what he had learned from Putin, Medvedev replied, among other things, that “Russia needs the maximum consolidation of power, consolidation of the Russian elite and consolidation of society. Only in this case we can attain the goals we have set in front of us.”

Marina Litvinenko Carries On

Late in 2007, I dined in London with Mariane Pearl, the French widow of Danny Pearl, my Wall Street Journal colleague who was gruesomely murdered in Pakistan five years earlier. Mariane was writing a popular series of articles for Glamour magazine on women leaders around the world, and told me that she was coincidentally in town to see Marina Litvinenko. Mariane—not an easy person to impress—was obviously taken with Marina, and pushed me hard not to judge her and those close to her too harshly. I had been dismayed by some of the self-promoters who had attached themselves to Marina Litvinenko after the assassination of her husband, but I said I would take a second look.

The next day, I met with Marina for lunch. Mariane’s sentiments were obviously mutual. Marina had seen photographs of Mariane with the actress Angelina Jolie and had wondered how she managed to handle Danny’s murder. “It was completely incredible,” Marina said. “We discovered we had very much in common. Not only in what happened to us, but in our lives in general. That we gave birth at the same age. That she used to love dancing, and that I do, too. Some of the complexities in our families. Incredible. I hope it will lay the foundation for a long-term friendship. I just hope.” Who could genuinely understand what Marina Litvinenko was feeling? Perhaps only another widow, such as Mariane.

After her husband’s murder, tension remained between Marina and Alexander’s children from his first marriage, to Natalia. The son, Sasha, was bitter because he believed his father had died for nothing, and the daughter, Sonya, felt that she and her brother were afterthoughts in their father’s second family. Alexander and Marina had hosted Sonya in England three times in the six years they were there, and Marina had thought that she and the young girl had established a rapport. But that did not seem to be the case after Alexander’s murder. “Marina is making money from my father’s death,” Sonya said. Marina said such comments from her stepdaughter made it difficult “to speak with her right now. I’m offended.”

By March 2008, Marina had given up hope that Andrei Lugovoi would be extradited to Britain to face trial. So she asked her lawyer to petition the country’s coroner to hold a public inquest and reveal publicly the evidence that led it to charge Lugovoi with murdering her husband fifteen months earlier. In a first-person article in The Times of London, Marina said that Scotland Yard and David Miliband, Britain’s foreign secretary, had advised against the petition because such a hearing could prejudice any future trial. Marina said she proceeded anyway because “I cannot wait for another ten years for a slim chance that their approach would bear fruit.”

Marina was right—there seemed to be no chance that the British case against Lugovoi would advance any time soon. In the same vein, Alex Goldfarb, who had helped the Litvinenkos flee Russia, filed a freedom of information request with the U.S. Department of Energy seeking a trace on the origin of the polonium-210 used in the murder. Notwithstanding the confidence of British investigators, the Kremlin claimed that there was no hard evidence that the isotope came from Russia. But Goldfarb cited sources who had told him that the U.S. government’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory had examined a sample of the poison, at the request of British investigators. “We hope to show the polonium originated in Russia,” Goldfarb said.

The Continuing Fear

Ivan Safronov, a fifty-one-year-old retired lieutenant colonel in Russia’s Space Forces, which control the country’s military satellites and missile defense strategy, was one of the country’s leading military analysts. By most accounts, Safronov, a military affairs reporter for Kommersant, Russia’s leading business paper, was a happy man on March 2, 2007. He had rung up his editors to say he had a scoop on a backdoor government scheme to sell sophisticated fighter jets and missiles to Syria and Iran. The Russian officials behind the deal planned to use Belarus as the middleman state, to avoid being challenged by the West for arming nations that were under United Nations sanctions, Safronov said. A little before four p.m., Safronov arrived home after shopping for oranges, went up to the fifth floor of his apartment building, and, according to the official story, jumped to his death. Police ruled it a suicide.

Most of Safronov’s colleagues were skeptical of the police account. Safronov’s son, Ivan, was about to enter college, and his daughter, Irina, was pregnant with his first grandchild. As for his health, he had just had a checkup and, though his doctor warned him of an ulcer, he was told he was otherwise fine. “He had no reason to do it,” said one of his editors, Ilya Bulavinov.

A few people said that in fact Safronov’s mood had appeared a bit dark of late. And there was always the possibility that it was neither suicide nor foul play—that Safronov for some reason had gone out onto the ledge of the fifth-floor window for one reason or another, and fell. Yet, it was precisely his accomplishments as a reporter— revealing illegal and quasi-legal business deals involving huge sums of money—that could get a journalist into deep personal trouble. When one got in the way of a business deal, one could be in peril. In addition, Safronov was at an especially dangerous point in his reporting. He had the arms sale story already in his notebook but had yet to publish it. If those who would be damaged by the story knew that it was in hand, they might have decided to attack in hopes it would never be published.

As of the publication of this book, authorities still regarded Safronov’s death as a suicide.

Unlike in past years, the Safronov case was not accompanied by a spate of other sensational deaths. After Litvinenko, there seemed to be a sort of moratorium on lurid murder in Russia. But that had not eased the apprehension of some Russian journalists. In April 2008, a former Kremlin correspondent named Yelena Tregubova obtained political asylum in Great Britain. Tregubova had gained notoriety for her 2003 book, Tales of a Kremlin Digger. The combination of saucy insider detail and the thirty-year-old Kommersant reporter’s blond good looks made the book a Russian bestseller. One of her stories described a 1998 dinner with Vladimir Putin while he was FSB chief. Putin commandeered an entire sushi restaurant for the evening. Such an occurrence would normally be of no consequence, given the natural order in the Kremlin, but it attracted attention as the only thing approaching an indiscretion on Putin’s public record. “I couldn’t decide if he was trying to recruit me—or pick me up!” Tregubova wrote.

After the book’s publication, Tregubova said she received a few verbal death threats. In February 2004, a