The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin

Nine RULE OF TERROR

On November 23, 2006, a man named Alexander Litvinenko died in a London hospital. He was forty-one years old, he was an FSB officer, and his final days had been broadcast virtually live by the British and some of the Russian media. “Just three weeks ago he was a happy, healthy man with a full head of hair who regularly jogged five miles a day,” the Daily Mail reported on November 21. Accompanying the piece was a picture of Litvinenko, gaunt and bald, a hospital gown opened on his chest, which was covered with electrodes. “Mr. Litvinenko can barely lift his head, so weak are his neck muscles. He has difficulty speaking and can only talk in short, painful bursts.” The day after the article was published, Alexander Litvinenko lapsed into a coma. The following day, trace amounts of the poison that was killing him were finally found in his urine: it was polonium, a very rare and highly radioactive substance. A few hours later, Litvinenko’s heart stopped for the second time in two days, and he was dead.

Litvinenko had been a classic whistle-blower. In 1998 he had appeared in a televised press conference with four of his secret police colleagues. They declared they had received illegal assignments from the FSB, including an order to kill Boris Berezovsky. The press conference itself had been organized by Berezovsky, whom Litvinenko had met following an unrelated assassination attempt in 1994, which Litvinenko had investigated. Both men valued being acquainted, and each seemed to place exaggerated hope in the other. Berezovsky believed knowing an honest man in the FSB conferred protection; Litvinenko trusted the influential billionaire to help him change what was wrong with the system. Litvinenko had been in the uniformed services since the age of eighteen. He was one of the youngest lieutenant colonels the Russian secret police had ever had; he was wholly devoted to the system that raised him, but he belonged to that rare breed of people who are incapable of accepting the system’s—any system’s—imperfections, and who are entirely deaf to the arguments of those who accept things as they are.

Vladimir Putin had been appointed head of the FSB in August 1998, amid allegations of corruption leveled against the previous leadership. “When he was appointed, I asked Sasha who he was,” Litvinenko’s widow, Marina, told me years later. “He said some people are saying he was never a street officer. That meant they looked down on him—he hadn’t come up through the ranks.” But Berezovsky arranged for a meeting between his protégé the head of the secret police and his friend the whistle-blower. This was the period when Putin believed his work environment to be so hostile that he held his meetings with Berezovsky in the disused elevator shaft in the FSB headquarters building. Berezovsky wanted the two men to see each other as allies. Litvinenko came bearing charts that he said showed improper connections among FSB departments and the routes that illegal instructions as well as money traveled. He also told Putin about the order to kill Berezovsky, which both the whistle-blower and the oligarch were convinced Putin did not know about. Putin, Litvinenko later told his wife and Berezovsky, was uninterested; the meeting lasted all of ten minutes. He came home dejected and worried about the future—and, as is the way of men like these, resolved to act.

His next step was to hold the press conference on illegal FSB activity. In addition to the order to kill Berezovsky, he claimed to have received instructions to kidnap and beat up prominent businessmen. Putin responded with a televised statement impugning Litvinenko’s character, claiming he was delinquent on alimony payments to his first wife (his second wife insisted she had personally made the payments every month and had the stubs to show for it).

Three months later, Litvinenko was arrested on charges of having used excessive force with a suspect three years earlier. The case fell apart, and in November 1999 a military court acquitted him. He was not allowed to leave the courtroom, however: FSB officers entered and re-arrested him on other charges. That case was dismissed without a trial, but a third case was launched immediately. A military judge let him out on his own recognizance, however, pending a new trial; but when Litvinenko learned that the hearings would be held in a small city about a hundred kilometers from Moscow, where few journalists or outside observers were likely to venture, he decided to flee Russia.

In September 2000, he told Marina he would be going to a southern Russian city to visit his elderly parents. He called her almost a month later and directed her to go on vacation. “I said, ‘It’s not a good time,’” Marina told me. “Tolya, our son, had started his music lessons, why would we go on vacation? He said, ‘But you always wanted to go on vacation. You should go now.’ And I realized—sometimes he just had this voice that I realized I had to turn my mind off and just do it.” She booked a two-week trip to Spain and went there with their six-year-old son. At the end of the two weeks, Litvinenko directed her to get herself to the airport in Málaga at midnight. She arrived, terrified and confused, and was met by an acquaintance who transported her and Tolya to Turkey in a private jet that probably belonged to Berezovsky. Alexander was waiting for her in Antalya, a Turkish resort.

“It was like the movies,” she said. “We couldn’t believe it.” Except no one had scripted their escape. Berezovsky’s employee who had accompanied Marina from Málaga had had to leave. After two days of celebrating their reunion at a resort hotel in Antalya, Alexander and Marina began to realize they were fugitives with no place to go. Berezovsky had promised to support them finanically, but he had little idea of how to help them logistically, so he called his friend Alex Goldfarb in New York and asked him to fly to Turkey to sort things out. Goldfarb agreed, though his involvement in Litvinenko’s escape would cost him his job with George Soros. Goldfarb took Litvinenko to the American embassy in Ankara, where the whistle-blower was interviewed and politely turned down: he had been a secret police agent but not a spy, and the United States had no interest in his information. By going to the embassy, however, Litvinenko had exposed himself to Russian agents who, he knew, kept the embassy under surveillance. Terrified, he needed a solution more urgently than ever.

Goldfarb finally concocted an ingenious plan: the four of them bought tickets with a changeover in London, where the Litvinenkos would surrender to the authorities right in the airport. They did—and wound up in London, their rent and Tolya’s school tuition paid by Berezovsky.

After some months at loose ends, Litvinenko began to write. Together with Russian-American historian Yuri Felshtinsky, whom Litvinenko had met when Felshtinsky briefly worked on Berezovsky’s media team in Moscow, he wrote a book about the 1999 apartment building explosions. Litvinenko used his professional experience to analyze the evidence that had already been reviewed on Russian television, pointing out numerous inconsistencies in the FSB’s official version of the foiled explosion in Ryazan. He and Felshtinsky also reviewed evidence uncovered by reporters for Novaya Gazeta, a Moscow weekly specializing in investigative journalism. These journalists had found two conscripts who had sneaked into an air force warehouse in Ryazan in the fall of 1999 in search of sugar to sweeten their tea. They found what they expected: dozens of fifty-kilo sacks marked SUGAR. But the substance they extracted from the sacks made their tea taste so bizarre that they reported the whole incident, including their own breaking, entering, and stealing, to their superior officer. The officer had the substance analyzed and found it to be hexogen, the explosive. Litvinenko and Felshtinsky also found evidence that the air force warehouse was used by the FSB, which, they believed, had stored the explosives there.

Gradually, other evidence began to emerge. An opposition parliamentary deputy, Yuli Rybakov—one of the two men who refused to stand up when the Soviet-Russian anthem was played—gave Litvinenko the transcript of the September 13 Duma session. The speaker had interrupted the session by saying, “We have just received news that a residential building in Volgodonsk was blown up last night.” In fact, the building in Volgodonsk would not be blown up for three more days: it seems the FSB plant in the speaker’s office—whom Litvinenko was later able to identify—had given the speaker the wrong note at the wrong time, but had known of the planned Volgodonsk explosion in advance.

Another whistle-blower, Mikhail Trepashkin, a former FSB agent who had taken part in Litvinenko’s infamous press conference in 1998, joined the investigation. He was able to trace the connections between the FSB and the apartment buildings in Moscow, identifying a businessman whose name was used to rent space in both buildings, the FSB agent who set up the businessman, and even two of the men who had been hired to organize the actual explosions. Most shockingly, Trepashkin had uncovered evidence that the composite portrait of a suspect had been exchanged for a different one. Two men had been arrested, and Trepashkin, who was a lawyer by training, was planning to represent two survivors at the court hearings, using the forum to present his evidence. But just a week before the hearings, Trepashkin was arrested for illegal possession of a firearm; he would spend five years in prison. The court hearings were declared closed to the public; the two suspects received life sentences, but no story ever emerged of who they were and why they had committed their crimes.

ON THE EVENING of October 23, 2002, a couple of friends stopped by for a drink: I had a three-year-old and a one-year-old and was spending most of my evenings at home. The friends, one of whom was a television producer, suggested we turn on the television to watch a recently launched talk show that I had not yet seen. The show had barely begun when a breaking-news announcement interrupted it. A hostage crisis was under way in a Moscow theater. By this time I was editing a small independent political-analysis website, polit.ru. In the next three days I would get a total of about three hours of sleep: my reporters would take turns keeping vigil at the theater and I would be posting their news to our site.

It was a little after nine in the evening when the siege of the theater began. The musical presented that night included a scene in which a real World War II–era airplane appeared onstage. It was then that masked men with machine guns came onstage and around the perimeter of the hall; for a few moments many in the audience thought it was all part of the show. There were about eight hundred people in the hall that night; with the exception of a few dozen young children and foreign citizens the hostage-takers soon released—and some of the actors, many of them also children, who managed to climb out a dressing room window—they would spend the next fifty-eight hours in the hall, growing exhausted, dehydrated, terrified, and ultimately desperate. Though they were ordered to surrender their cell phones to the terrorists, several of them managed to call the leading news radio station at different points during the crisis, so throughout the siege a city frozen in fear and anxiety around the theater heard voices from within it.

Around seven in the morning on the third day of the siege, several cabinet officials entered the meeting hall at a nearby college where relatives of the hostages had spent most of the last three days. “They were very happy and excited,” one of the relatives later recalled. “They went up to the microphone. The room froze in silence. They said these sweet words: ‘The operation went off without a hitch.’ They said all the terrorists had been killed and there were no casualties among the hostages. The room broke into applause, screaming with joy. Everyone was thanking the authorities for saving their loved ones.” In this triumphant statement, everything was a lie.

The Moscow theater siege is simultaneously one of the most successfully executed and one of the most absurdly botched hostage-rescue operations in history. Throughout the siege, the terrorists, who gave the impression of being disorganized and disoriented, continued negotiations with just about all comers—and kept gradually releasing some of the hostages. A motley crew of doctors, politicians, and journalists were allowed to go in and out of the building to negotiate better conditions for the hostages. Relatives of the hostages, desperately hoping for a peaceful resolution, gathered for a rally on the second day of the siege and produced a petition that they submitted with more than 250 signatures:

A few hours later, one of our reporters called to say that a hospital right near the theater had been evacuated. The military were beginning to storm the building, I concluded, and were readying space for possible casualties.

At 5:30 on Saturday morning, the third day of the siege, two of the hostages called Echo Moskvy, the city’s main news and talk station. “I don’t know what’s going on,” one of them sobbed into the phone. “There is gas. Everyone is sitting in the hall. We ask you, please, we just hope we are not another Kursk.” Unable to speak further, she passed the phone to her friend, who said, “It seems they are beginning to use force. Please don’t abandon us if there is a chance, we beg you.” It is heartbreakingly clear that neither the hostages nor their loved ones outside trusted the Russian armed forces to save them. The reference to the Kursk made it plain: they did not trust the government to have regard for human life.

In fact, the rescue plan was brilliant: special forces used underground passages to fill the theater with gas that would make everyone inside fall asleep, preventing the terrorists from detonating the explosives planted around the hall—women dressed in black and apparently wearing vests packed with explosives were posted throughout. The sleeping terrorists could then be detained and the hostages freed by troops who would emerge from those same underground passages as well as enter the building through the front doors.

None of it worked out as planned. It took several minutes for the terrorists to fall asleep. Why they did not set off the explosives was unclear, and led to speculation that there were no explosives at all. The hostages, sleep-deprived and severely dehydrated—at least in part because the two different special forces units stationed around the theater could not agree on letting pass a shipment of water and juice the terrorists had consented to accept—fell asleep quickly and required medical help to wake up. Instead of being given immediate medical attention, they were carried out of the building and laid on the steps of the theater, many of them on their backs rather than their sides, as they should have been. Many people choked to death on their own vomit, without ever gaining consciousness, right on the steps of the building. Then the dead and the merely unconscious alike were loaded onto buses, where, again, they were placed sitting up; on the buses, many more people choked to death when their heads flipped backward. Instead of being taken to the hospital next door, the hostages were transported, mostly by bus, to hospitals in central Moscow, where the doctors were helpless to aid them because the military and police authorities refused to tell them what kind of chemical had been used in the theater. Several of the hostages fell into a coma and died in the hospital, some as late as a week after the siege was over. In all, 129 people died.

The government declared victory. Pictures of the terrorists, all of whom were summarily executed in their sleep by Russian troops, were repeatedly shown on television: men and women slumped in theater chairs or over tables, with visible gunshot wounds to their heads. When I wrote a piece on the disregard for human life the government had exhibited by declaring victory in the face of 129 unnecessary deaths, I received a series of death threats myself: the triumph over terrorism was not to be questioned. It was months before some human-rights activists dared point out that Russia had violated a series of international conventions and its own laws by using the gas and applying force when the terrorists were still willing to negotiate. Few Russians ever learned that the terrorists, led by a twenty-five-year-old who had never before been outside Chechnya, had advanced demands that would have been almost laughably easy to fulfill, possibly securing the release of all the hostages. They wanted President Putin publicly to declare that he wanted to end the war in Chechnya and to demonstrate his goodwill by ordering troop withdrawal from any one district of the breakaway republic.

But for all the seeming simplicity of their demands, the terrorists were demanding that Putin act in a way that ran counter to his nature. The boy who could never end a fight—the one who would seem to calm down only to flare up and attack again—now the president who had promised to “rub them out in the outhouse,” would certainly rather sacrifice 129 of his own citizens than publicly say that he wanted peace. He did not.

Just two weeks after the theater siege, Putin was in Brussels for a European Union–Russia summit devoted principally to the discussion of the international Islamic terrorist threat. At a press conference after the meetings, a reporter for the French newspaper Le Monde asked a question about the use of heavy artillery against civilians in Chechnya. Putin, looking calm and even smiling slightly with the corners of his mouth, said, “If you are ready to become a radical adherent of Islam and you are ready to be circumcised, I invite you to come to Moscow. We are a country of many faiths. We have specialists in this. I will recommend that the operation be performed in such a way that nothing will ever grow there again.” The interpreter did not dare translate Putin’s response in full, and it did not even make it into the following day’s edition of The New York Times: the paper demurely translated his last sentence as: “You are welcome and everything and everyone is tolerated in Moscow.” But the video of him lashing out at the reporter was still viral on RuTube nine years after Putin made his threat—and demonstrated his utter inability even to pretend to consider a peaceful resolution to the conflict in Chechnya.

ALEXANDER LITVINENKO was now living in a row house in North London, across a narrow street from Ahmed Zakaev, a former actor from the Chechen capital of Grozny, who had, in the late 1990s, become the intelligent, charming face of an independent Chechnya. He had been a key member of the post–cease-fire Chechen government and Chechnya’s representative in the West. In 2000 he was wounded and left Chechnya for medical treatment, and eventually he sought political asylum in Great Britain. Now he was living in North London on a stipend he received from his old negotiating partner, Boris Berezovsky—just like Litvinenko, who had spent much of the second half of the 1990s in Chechnya, on the side of the Russian troops. Zakaev’s surviving comrades considered him to be the prime minister of Chechnya in exile.

Together, Litvinenko and Zakaev pored over documents and video footage of the theater siege and made a startling discovery: one of the terrorists had not been killed; in fact, he seemed to have left the building shortly before Russian troops stormed it. They identified the man as Khanpash Terkibaev, a former journalist who, they believed, had long been working for Russian secret police. On March 31, 2003, Zakaev saw Terkibaev in Strasbourg, where both had traveled for a meeting of the European Parliamentary Assembly as representatives of the Chechen people, Terkibaev sanctioned by Moscow and Zakaev not. In early April, Litvinenko sought out Sergei Yushenkov, the liberal colonel with whom Marina Salye had been co-organizing before she fled Moscow, who was now engaged in a parliamentary investigation of the theater siege, and gave him all the information he had collected on Terkibaev. It was two weeks later that Yushenkov was shot dead in Moscow in broad daylight. Litvinenko was certain this was a direct result of his theater siege investigation.

But Yushenkov had already given the documents he received from Litvinenko to someone else. Anna Politkovskaya was a journalist in her mid-forties who had spent most of her professional life in relative obscurity, writing excessively researched and confusing pieces on all manner of social ills. During the second war in Chechnya she emerged as a recklessly brave reporter who would spend weeks on end in Chechnya, apparently oblivious of the Russian military’s restrictions, documenting allegations of abuse and war crimes. In a couple of years she had become easily the most trusted Russian among Chechens. Gray-haired, bespectacled, the mother of two grown children, she seemed a most unlikely muckraker or war reporter, which probably kept her safe on a number of occasions. During the theater siege, she was allowed to enter the building to attempt to negotiate with the terrorists, and she appears to have been instrumental in getting them to agree to allow water and juice to be delivered.

Politkovskaya found Terkibaev, whom she said she recognized from her time inside the theater, and interviewed him. He turned out to be almost ridiculously vain, and she easily got him to boast of having been inside the theater during the siege, having led the terrorists there, having secured their passage in several vans loaded with arms through checkpoints in Chechnya and police outposts on the approach to Moscow, and of having had in his possession a detailed map of the theater, which both the terrorists and federal troops had lacked. Who was he working for? Moscow, he said.

Politkovskaya drew her conclusions from the interview cautiously. Terkibaev lied a lot, this much was clear. There were also the facts: he had indeed been among the hostage-takers; he was still living; and he moved about freely, including as a member of official delegations abroad. It seemed his claim that he worked for one of the secret services had to be true. And he said one other important thing to Politkovskaya: the reason the terrorists had not set off their explosives, even when they felt the gas filling the hall—an unmistakable prelude to an attack on the building—was that there were no explosives. The women who had been stationed along the theater’s rows of seats, keeping an eye on the hostages and a finger on the button, were wearing dummy dynamite vests. If this was true—and there was every reason to think it was—then everyone who died in the siege died in vain. And, with Khanpash Terkibaev leaving the building before special forces stormed it, the Kremlin probably knew it too.

ON JULY 3, 2003, a second member of the independent committee investigating the 1999 apartment building bombings died. Yuri Shchekochikhin, an outspoken liberal politician and a muckraking journalist—he was deputy editor of Novaya Gazeta and, as head of its investigative team, Politkovskaya’s immediate superior—had been hospitalized two weeks earlier with mysterious symptoms: he had been complaining of a burning sensation all over his body, and he had been vomiting. Within a week he was in a coma, skin all over his body had peeled off, and his hair had fallen out. He died of multiple organ failure caused by an unknown toxin. Doctors at Moscow’s best-equipped hospital, who diagnosed him with “allergic syndrome,” had been unable to slow his decline or significantly lessen his pain.

Shchekochikhin had been working on so many investigations that his friends and colleagues, most if not all of whom believed he was murdered, were at a loss to suggest which of his suicide missions actually led to his death. Zakaev was certain that Shchekochikhin was murdered to prevent him from publishing information he had gathered on the theater siege: namely, evidence that some of the women terrorists were convicted felons who, on paper, were still serving sentences in Russian prisons at the time of the siege. In other words, their release had probably been secured by someone who had extralegal powers—and this, again, pointed to possible secret-police involvement in the organization of this act of terror.

ON SEPTEMBER 1, 2004, as soon as news came of the school siege in Beslan, Politkovskaya, naturally, rushed to the airport to fly to North Ossetia. So did many other journalists, including the other reporter who was well-known in Chechnya, Andrei Babitsky—the man who had been kidnapped by Russian troops at the very beginning of Putin’s reign. Babitsky was detained at the airport in Moscow, ostensibly because he was suspected of carrying explosives; none were found and he was released, but he never made it to Beslan. Politkovskaya registered for three consecutive flights, each of which was canceled before it could board, and finally got a seat on a plane to Rostov, the largest city in southern Russia, about four hundred miles from Beslan; she was planning to cover the rest of the way by hired car. Her plan was to act not only as a reporter but also, as much as she could, as a negotiator, as she had two years earlier, during the theater siege. Before leaving Moscow, she had spoken extensively with Zakaev in London, urging him to mobilize any and all Chechen leaders to attempt to talk to the terrorists and negotiate the release of the children. She suggested that rebel leaders should come out of hiding to take on this job, setting no conditions of their own. Zakaev had agreed.

Ever careful—by this time Politkovskaya was the target of constant death threats, and she had seen her editor, Yuri Shchekochikhin, die of poisoning—Politkovskaya brought her own food onto the airplane and asked only for a cup of tea. Ten minutes later, she lost consciousness. By the time the plane landed, she was in a coma. That she was able to come out of it was, in the opinion of doctors who treated her in Rostov, a miracle. Doctors in Moscow, where she was transported two days later, ultimately concluded she had been poisoned with an undisclosed toxin that did severe damage to her kidneys, liver, and endocrine system.

POLITKOVSKAYA, who took months to recover and never fully regained her health, was effectively prevented from covering and investigating the tragedy in Beslan. Other people took up this challenge. These investigators included Marina Litvinovich, Putin’s former image-maker. She had quit her job at the Kremlin’s pocket political consultancy after the theater siege, not so much because she disagreed with the FSB’s handling of it as because she had been kept off the crisis team. She dabbled in opposition politics just as the opposition effectively ceased to exist, went to work for oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was promptly arrested, and had wandered into Beslan looking for a way to apply her considerable skills and connections.

“I was scared to go,” she told me. “I had never been to the Caucasus.” She was too embarrassed to tell me exactly what she had expected, but it seemed she was very much a product of ten years of wartime propaganda, which she herself had helped to create: the last thing she expected to find so close to Chechnya were people like herself. “We went from family to family, from home to home where people had lost children, and everywhere we went, they poured us a ‘memorial’ shot of vodka. And everyone cried, and I cried, and I cried my eyes out in Beslan. And they just told me their stories and they cried and they asked for help. By that time everyone in Russia seemed to have forgotten about Beslan, so anyone who came, they asked for help. They did not know what kind of help, and at first I did not know, either. I told them banal things, I told them they should organize. It was a strange thing to say to women who had spent their lives making homes—who, if they had a job outside the home, maybe worked at a family store. And gradually I started spending time there, working on a few issues. We created an organization. Then we started collecting eyewitness accounts. And then the trial began.”

As with the theater siege, most of the hostage-takers had been summarily executed by Russian troops. By official count, there was a single survivor, and this time he was put on trial. Hearings would go on for two years, and the man’s testimony and, more important, eyewitness testimony painted another damning picture of the Russian government’s handling of and possible involvement in the hostage crisis. Conducted in tiny Beslan and attended mostly by grief-stricken local residents, the trial would have passed in utter obscurity had Litvinovich not done a simple thing. She made sure every session was audiotaped and the transcript was posted on a website she called The Truth About Beslan.

Using courthouse testimony, Litvinovich succeeded in reconstructing what had happened in the school hour by hour and, on the final day, almost minute by minute. She discovered that there were two rescue efforts working at cross-purposes: a local one directed by North Ossetian governor Alexander Dzasokhov (his official title was president of North Ossetia), and another one directed by the FSB from Moscow. In the early hours of the siege, the hostage-takers had issued a note with their cell phone number and a demand: they named five people, including Dzasokhov, to come in and negotiate with them. Dzasokhov tried to enter the school but was prevented from doing so by troops reporting to the FSB. He did arrange for the former head of neighboring Ingushetia, Ruslan Aushev, to enter the building; Aushev was able to bring out twenty-six hostages, all of them women with infant children. He also brought out a list of demands addressed to Vladimir Putin: they wanted independence for Chechnya, troop withdrawal, and an end to military action. On the second day of the siege, Dzasokhov made contact with Zakaev in London, and Zakaev got the president of the self-proclaimed Chechen republic, Aslan Maskhadov, to agree to come to Beslan and negotiate with the terrorists—an agreement that Politkovskaya had in effect already brokered but that Dzasokhov had had to initiate anew.

There was every indication that the terrorists were willing to negotiate; in most countries, this would have meant the standoff would drag on and on as long as there remained the chance of saving any of the hostages. But as during the theater siege, Moscow did not wait until negotiations were exhausted; in fact, the beginning of military action seems to have been timed specifically to prevent a meeting between the terrorists and Maskhadov, who stood a good chance of brokering a peaceful resolution.

At one in the afternoon on September 3, just minutes after workers from the emergency ministry had come to the building to pick up the bodies of several men killed by the terrorists at the beginning of the siege—this had been negotiated by Aushev—two explosions shook the building. By this time, most of the hostages had been crowded into the school gymnasium for more than two days. They were dehydrated—many of them had begun to drink their own urine—and terrified. They knew the gymnasium was mined—the explosives had been mounted in plain sight—and two of the terrorists were standing guard with their feet on pedals that could set off the explosives.

But the two explosions, coming just seconds apart, originated outside the building. Litvinovich was able to determine that both were the result of Russian troops firing grenade launchers directly at the overcrowded gymnasium. “It was as if something had flown in, a giant ball of fire,” one of the former hostages testified. Like most of the adults in the gymnasium, she was a mother who was there with her child. “I looked over,” another former hostage said, “and saw that where the door to the schoolyard had been, there was a giant hole in the ceiling, and this hole was burning very, very fast.”

“When I came to, there were bodies on top of me,” one of the former hostages testified. “Everything was burning,” said another. “I was lying on top of dead bodies. There were also dead bodies sitting on the benches.” A third testified, “I looked over and saw that my girl was missing her head and her arm and her foot had been crushed completely.”

The hostages had spent two days in hell, and now this hell was turning upside down. The terrorists seemed panicked—now they were trying to save the hostages’ lives. They herded those who could move on their own into the school cafeteria, which was shielded from immediate fire. They urged those who remained in the gymnasium to stand in the windows and show Russian troops that the room was filled with hostages, that they were firing at women and children. Russian troops continued to use tanks, grenade launchers, and fire launchers, aiming first at the gymnasium and then also at the cafeteria at point-blank range. The terrorists repeatedly attempted to move women and children into rooms that were shielded from the fire. Outside, local police tried unsuccessfully to convince the Russian troops to stop firing. In all, 312 people died, including ten non-FSB officers who died in the fire while attempting to save the hostages.

For the second anniversary of the Beslan tragedy in September 2006, Litvinovich put together a brochure with her findings. Politkovskaya, having been incapacitated, wrote little about Beslan, but her contribution was striking: she secured a police document showing that a man detained four hours before the siege had warned the police of the plan. The warning had been ignored: there was not even heightened security at the school that Day of Knowledge.

HOW WAS ONE TO UNDERSTAND THIS? Some were certain that Beslan had been planned and executed by the secret police start to finish, just as the apartment-block explosions had been. The fact that Putin came out with the initiative of canceling gubernatorial elections just ten days after the tragedy, and that he framed it as a response to terrorism, lends credence to this theory. Zakaev, for one, was certain that the FSB had arranged for a rogue group of Chechens to seize the local governor’s office—to provide Putin with an excuse for instituting direct federal control over regional administrations—but something had gone awry and the terrorists ended up at the school.

I believe reality is messier. That the apartment-block explosions were the work of the secret police seems almost beyond doubt— in the absence of an opportunity to examine all of the evidence available and not. The theater siege and Beslan strike me less as well-planned operations than as the results of a series of wrong moves, unholy alliances, and wrecked plans. It appears proven that a number of FSB officers maintained long-running relationships with terrorists or potential terrorists from Chechnya. At least some of these relationships involved the exchange of services for money. It is clear that someone—probably police but likely also secret police—had to aid the terrorists in moving around Russia. Finally, there is every indication that Putin’s government worked neither to prevent terrorist attacks nor to resolve crises peacefully when they occurred; moreover, the president consistently and increasingly staked his reputation not only on his own determination to “rub them out” whatever the circumstances but also on the terrorists’ perceived ruthlessness.

Did this add up to a series of carefully laid plans to strengthen Putin’s position in a country that responded best to the politics of fear? Not necessarily, or not quite. Originally, I think, the organizers of the theater siege and the school siege and their enablers had different motivations: at least some of the Chechen rebels wanted to scare Russians into understanding the nightmare of their war; some of those who helped them execute the attacks on the Russian side were, most likely, motivated purely by profit; others, on both sides, were settling personal scores; still others were indeed engaged in grand political scheming that may or may not have reached to the very top. One thing is certain: Once the hostage-takings occurred, the government task forces acting under Putin’s direct supervision did everything to ensure that the crises ended as horrifyingly as possible—to justify continued warfare in Chechnya and further crackdowns on the media and the opposition in Russia and, finally, to quell any possible criticism from the West, which, after 9/11, was obligated to recognize in Putin a fellow fighter against Islamic terrorism. There is a reason that Russian troops in both Moscow and Beslan acted in ways that maximized bloodshed; they actually aimed to multiply the fear and the horror. This is the classic modus operandi of terrorists, and in this sense it can certainly be said that Putin and the terrorists were acting in concert.

ON MARCH 20, 2006, Marina Litvinovich left work just after nine in the evening. She was now working for Garry Kasparov, the chess champion turned politician. They kept their presence in the center of Moscow quiet, working behind an unmarked door, behind which stood two of Kasparov’s eight permanent bodyguards. In the evenings, Kasparov and his bodyguards would drive off in his SUV and the rest of his small crew dispersed, driving, walking, or taking the subway by themselves. Litvinovich, who lived nearby, usually walked.

About an hour after she left the office, Litvinovich opened her eyes to discover that she was lying on top of a cellar awning and someone was trying to ascertain if she was all right. She was not: she had apparently been knocked unconscious by a blow or several blows to the head. She had been badly beaten, was bruised all over, and was missing two of her front teeth. Her bag was lying next to her; her notebook computer, her cell phone, and her money were still in it.

She spent three or four hours in the emergency room that night, and she spent another three or four at the police station the following day. The police were unusually solicitous in their manner, but kept insisting she had not been beaten. Had the thirty-one-year-old woman perhaps just passed out in the street and fallen in such an unusual way as to be bruised all over? She objected that she had a large bruise on one of her legs that, the doctors had told her, had probably been caused by a blow with a rubber baton. Had she maybe been hit by a car, then? Litvinovich pointed out that her clothes were so clean that she was wearing the same trousers and coat the following day, so she clearly had not been hit by a car. Moreover, this was one of several signs that she had been attacked by professionals: she must have been held while she was beaten, then laid carefully on the awning on which she found herself.

The attack was a message. The pristine execution and the fact that Litvinovich’s valuables were not touched served to underscore this. Another young political consultant, a former colleague of Litvinovich who had made a brilliant career working for the Putin government, spelled out the message in his blog: “Women should not be in this line of work… Marina has joined the war, and no one ever said this war would be conducted according to rules.” In other words, this is what would happen to those who fought the Kremlin.

ON SATURDAY, OCTOBER 7, 2006, Anna Politkovskaya came home to her apartment building in central Moscow and was shot dead in the elevator.

Who could have done it? Anyone. Politkovskaya could be extremely unpleasant: alongside her extraordinarily empathic personality there seemed to exist another, given to lashing out at the slightest provocation. This was a dangerous trait for a journalist whose sources included any number of well-armed men who were used to violence and not at all used to having women talk back to them. She could be unkind to her sources, as she was to Khanpash Terkibaev, whom she made look vain and stupid after he sincerely tried to impress her. She took sides, a dangerous business in times of clan war. But most of all, she was known as a critic of the Putin regime. Alexander Litvinenko was certain that this was what killed her. “Anna Politkovskaya Was Killed by Putin” was how he titled the obituary he posted that day. “We disagreed occasionally, and we would argue,” he wrote of his relationship with Politkovskaya. “But we had complete understanding on one point: we both believed that Putin is a war criminal, that he is guilty of the genocide of the Chechen people, and that he should be tried by an open and independent court. Anya realized that Putin might kill her for her beliefs, and for this she despised him.”

The day Politkovskaya died, Putin turned fifty-four. Journalists immediately termed the murder his birthday present. Putin said nothing about Politkovskaya’s death. The following day he sent birthday wishes to a figure skater who was turning sixty and a popular actor who was turning seventy, but still uttered not a word about a murder that had shaken the capital and the country. Three days after the murder, he was in Dresden, the city he had once called home, meeting with German chancellor Angela Merkel. When he exited his car in Dresden, he encountered a picket line of about thirty people holding signs that said “Killer” and “Killers Not Welcome Here Anymore.” At the press conference following his meeting with Merkel, journalists—and, it seemed, Merkel herself—forced him finally to make a public statement on Politkovskaya’s death. Once again Putin showed that, pressed to speak publicly on a matter of emotional significance, he could not comport himself. He seemed to seethe as he spoke:

“That journalist was indeed a harsh critic of the current Russian government,” he said. “But I think that journalists know—certainly, experts are aware of this—that her political influence in the country was extremely insignificant. She was known in journalist circles and among human-rights activists and in the West, but her influence on politics in Russia was minimal. The murder of such a person—the cold-blooded murder of a woman, a mother—is in itself an attack on our country. This murder does much more harm to Russia and its current government, and to the current government in Chechnya, than any of her articles.”

He was right: Politkovskaya was better known in Western European countries like France and Germany, where her books were translated and promoted widely, than she was in Russia, where she had long since been blacklisted by television (she had once been an articulate talk-show regular), where the newspaper where she worked was perceived as marginal, and where, most important, investigative pieces that would have been bombshells had Russia remained a quasi-functioning democracy were simply ignored. The government never reacted to her interview with Khanpash Terkibaev or her report that the police had ignored Beslan warnings. Not even a low-level police functionary lost his job: nothing happened at all, as though nothing had been said or no one had heard it. And her murder, which put Putin in the position of having to prove his innocence, certainly did more damage to him and to his government than Politkovskaya had in life.

And it was such a terribly crafted statement, and it showed Putin’s view of journalists so clearly, that I am inclined to believe he was being sincere.

ON NOVEMBER 1, 2006, just three weeks after the murder of Politkovskaya, Alexander Litvinenko felt ill. Ever mindful that he might be poisoned, he immediately downed four quarts of water, to try to flush whatever it was out of his system. It did not help: within hours, Litvinenko was vomiting violently. He was also in excruciating pain: it felt as though his throat, his esophagus, and his stomach had been burned; eating or drinking was impossible, and when he threw up, he was in agony. After three days of unremitting symptoms, he was hospitalized.

Litvinenko immediately told doctors he might have been poisoned by agents of the Russian government. In response, he got a psychiatric consultation—and decided to keep his theory to himself. Doctors told his wife, Marina, that they were looking for unusual bacteria they believed had caused Litvinenko’s severe symptoms. For a while she believed them and patiently waited for her husband to get better. But about ten days into the ordeal, she noticed that Alexander had taken a marked turn for the worse. She also saw that his hospital gown was covered with hair. “I stroked his head,” she told me later. “I had a rubber glove on, and his hair stayed on my glove. I said, ‘Sasha, what is this?’ He said, ‘I don’t know, my hair seems to be falling out.’ And this was when I just stood up right there, where his bed was, and started screaming, ‘Have you no shame?’ Until then I’d tried to be patient, but this was when I realized I couldn’t take it anymore. His attending physician came right away, and I said, ‘Do you see what’s going on, can you explain to me what’s going on?’ So they called someone from Oncology and some other specialist and started to consult. And the oncologist said, ‘I’m going to take him up to my ward because he looks like someone who has had radiation therapy.’ And he took him up to his ward, and still they found nothing.”

It was another week before Litvinenko’s doctors, the British press corps, and the London police came to believe he had been poisoned. Trace amounts of thallium, a heavy metal historically used in rat poison but long since outlawed in Western countries, had been found in his urine. The discovery gave Litvinenko, his wife, and his friends hope: he would start receiving an antidote and recover. “I thought he might be disabled—I was prepared for that,” Marina told me, “but I did not think he would die. I was thinking about treatments we would have to be getting.” The discovery also gave the British media a reason to write the story of the “Russian spy,” as they insisted on calling him, dying in a London hospital, and Scotland Yard reason to begin interrogating Litvinenko. The former whistle-blower, weak, unable to swallow—during his entire hospital stay he received all his sustenance via an IV line—and overcoming extreme pain to speak, gave about twenty hours of testimony in his final days. But the diagnosis also gave pause to a star toxicologist whom Goldfarb had called in: Litvinenko’s symptoms did not really look to him like symptoms of thallium poisoning.

A day or two before he slipped into a coma, Litvinenko dictated a statement that he asked to be released in the event of his death. Alex Goldfarb took it down. It began with three paragraphs expressing gratitude to doctors, Great Britain, and Marina, and continued:

Doctors finally identified the cause of Litvinenko’s poisoning a few hours before he died. It was polonium, a highly radioactive substance that occurs in only minuscule amounts in nature but can be manufactured. Relatives and loved ones learned the cause from police shortly after Alexander Litvinenko died.

FIVE YEARS AFTER MEETING LITVINENKO and helping him escape, Goldfarb sat down to write a book about the man, coauthored with his widow, Marina. Less than a year later it would be published in several languages; its English title was Death of a Dissident: The Poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko and the Return of the KGB. A scientist, a longtime political activist, and a natural skeptic, Goldfarb was able to reconstruct the story of Litvinenko’s murder all the more convincingly because he had never really believed what he called Litvinenko’s and Politkovskaya’s conspiracy theories. But his own theory would have put some of theirs to shame.

At the time of the two murders, Russia’s policy in Chechnya was undergoing a transformation. Without admitting defeat or even openly negotiating—for Putin would have found either humiliating—Russia was pulling its troops out of Chechnya and giving free rein and extraordinary monetary subsidies to a handpicked young Chechen leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, in exchange for loyalty and the illusion of peace and victory. For Chechnya’s other warlords, big and small, this meant the end of the road: Kadyrov was ruthless with enemies and rivals alike. On the basis of extensive circumstantial evidence and some significant off-the-record interviews, Goldfarb concluded that one of these warlords had Politkovskaya killed in the hopes of making it look like Kadyrov had done it—and discrediting Kadyrov in the eyes of the Russian government. Politkovskaya had been highly and vocally critical of and even insulting to Kadyrov, but Goldfarb believed that the people actually responsible for the murder were Chechens from a rival clan.

Then, Goldfarb suggested, Putin found himself in the position of trying to prove he had not done it—and feeling like he had been framed. Except, thanks in part to his advisers, he did not think he was being framed by Kadyrov: he thought he was being set up by Berezovsky’s camp in London. The loudest person by far in that camp was the traitorous FSB agent Litvinenko, who was indeed accusing Putin of the murder. For this, Putin had him killed.

Goldfarb’s theory is logically impeccable; everyone in it has motive and means. But I find it too complicated, or, perhaps, too specific. The murder of Alexander Litvinenko is indisputably the work of the Russian government authorized at the very top: polonium-210, which killed him, is manufactured exclusively in Russia. Its production and export are tightly controlled by federal nuclear authorities, and the extraction of the needed dose from the manufacturing chain required top-level intervention in an early stage of the manufacturing process. The authorization for such an intervention had to have come from the president’s office. In other words, Vladimir Putin ordered Alexander Litvinenko dead.

Once the poison was identified, British police were easily able to identify their suspects in the murder: polonium, while harmless unless ingested, leaves radioactive traces everyplace it touches. This allowed the police to pinpoint the people who transported polonium to London and the exact place and time at which the poisoning occurred. The two men they identified were Andrei Lugovoy, the former head of security for Berezovsky’s business partner, who had gone on to build a lucrative private-security firm in Moscow, and his business partner, Dmitry Kovtun. For reasons the British police will not disclose, they have identified Lugovoy as the murder suspect and Kovtun as a witness. Russia has refused extradition requests for Lugovoy; moreover, he has been made a member of parliament, giving him immunity from prosecution, including extradition requests. Britain, for its part, has treated the case as a purely criminal matter and has not made political demands for Lugovoy’s extradition.

No other killing in the long line of murders of journalists and politicians has quite so clear-cut and obvious a story. It is indeed possible that Anna Politkovskaya fell victim to the power struggle in Chechnya. It is possible that Yuri Shchekochikhin was killed by some businessman or politician whose dirty laundry he had aired. It is possible that Sergei Yushenkov was, as the police later claimed, killed by a political rival. It is possible that Anatoly Sobchak died of a heart attack. But all of these possibilities, taken separately, seem unlikely, and taken together seem almost absurd. The simple and evident truth is that Putin’s Russia is a country where political rivals and vocal critics are often killed, and at least sometimes the order comes directly from the president’s office.