The Compatriots

by Andrei Soldatov

Always composed, with a manner of speech reminiscent of a machine gun and a battle plan at the ready, Prokhorov was numb and speechless for several minutes. Then he stood up, ran out of the New Times offices, got in his Audi A4, and raced to the bridge.

  He arrived at the bridge at half past midnight, and Nemtsov’s body was still lying where it had fallen. In the darkness, police were rolling out white-and-red crime scene tape. Vadim Prokhorov then spotted Vladimir Kara-Murza Jr. running toward the body.3 Prokhorov at once switched into work mode. He had spent more than fifteen years of his life fighting for Nemtsov—defending him in court against trumped-up political charges, getting him out of detention centers after protest rallies, pushing a reluctant police force to investigate the leaks of Nemtsov’s private phone calls. Prokhorov took a deep breath of the icy winter air and steeled himself. He glanced at the cold stone walls of the Kremlin rising up beyond the bridge. The people in there would be glad their enemy was gone. But he could not be distracted. He knew what his job was now: he would have to fight to get law enforcement to investigate his friend’s assassination.

  Prokhorov stayed with the police for hours, watching them to make sure they didn’t tamper with or compromise any evidence. Then he went to Kara-Murza’s apartment on Ovchinnikovskaya Embankment. He got only three hours of sleep. In the early morning, he rushed back to the police station.

  For three months, Prokhorov watched as Nemtsov’s friends—a close circle of people, all political opponents of Putin—fell into deep depression. They were devastated. Nemtsov was a larger-than-life personality, always in an optimistic mood—someone who could always cheer up his comrades, even in the darkest times. Kara-Murza Jr. kept working for Khodorkovsky’s organization, shuttling between Moscow and Washington, but he was slow to recover. He and Nemtsov had known each other for seventeen years, and Nemtsov was the godfather of one of Kara-Murza’s daughters—that meant a lot to Kara-Murza.

  Prokhorov saved himself by burying himself in his work. As a lawyer now representing Nemtsov’s family, he was pushing the investigators to be more active. Russia in the 2000s saw a series of assassinations of high-profile journalists and human rights activists. The murders were rarely properly investigated. In most cases, the Kremlin’s tactic was to attack the victim by downplaying his or her role in the society and then to claim to have uncovered the perpetrators—inevitably some small fish, hired hands—but never the motive or the masterminds. Two brutal wars in Chechnya had produced plenty of battle-hardened fighters ready to do a hit job, and they offered a priceless asset: they never spilled the beans about who hired them. This was part of their code of honor; besides, they had families to protect.

  That was how the murder of the famous journalist Anna Politkovskaya, Putin’s outspoken critic, was investigated. The Kremlin sent several Chechens to jail but never provided an explanation of why they had decided to kill her.

  At first it looked like the investigators assigned to Nemtsov’s case were doing their job. In March, three suspects were arrested, and a fourth blew himself up by grenade in his apartment in Chechnya when the police tried to arrest him. But by the end of April, the investigation had stalled. A virtual wall seemed to be preventing the investigators from getting any further on the road leading to the masterminds. On April 30, the chief of the investigation was replaced. Prokhorov had a very bad feeling about it.

  On May 26, 2015, just months after Nemtsov’s murder, one of Kara-Murza Jr.’s assistants called Vadim Prokhorov: “Something happened. Kara-Murza is unwell.” He explained that Kara-Murza was having a meeting with him and the editor of a legal news website at the website’s offices when all of a sudden Kara-Murza became sick; he vomited and then collapsed on the floor, unconscious. “Maybe it’s poisoning?” Prokhorov asked. He was not particularly worried, thinking of food poisoning, mostly. “No, it looks more like a heart attack,” said the associate.

  Kara-Murza Jr., unconscious, was rushed to the emergency room. The next day didn’t bring any improvement, and the doctors decided in favor of an operation on his heart. Kara-Murza’s blood pressure levels were incredibly low: 40 over 20. The Moscow physicians thought that his heart valves must be malfunctioning and that there was an urgent need for intervention.

  Kara-Murza’s father had turned to radio after his expulsion from TV. He called his friend, a prominent heart surgeon. This friend hurried to the emergency room, checked the data, and put a stop to the operation: “What are you doing? He has the heart of an astronaut! Put down the scalpels; it looks like a poisoning.”

  The family friend saved Kara-Murza Jr.’s life. If the on-call doctors had operated, Kara-Murza likely would have died. And that would have been it—death during a heart operation, a sad thing but a thing that happens. No one would have thought twice about it.

  In the hospital corridor, Vadim Prokhorov heard the news and began pacing. Was it yet another attack on the opposition, targeting Nemtsov’s circle? Who else could be in danger? And why was poison chosen this time?

  He tried to think about when and how the poisoning could have taken place.

  He knew that two days earlier, Kara-Murza Jr. had flown to Moscow from Kazan.4 He also knew that Kara-Murza had eaten lunch onboard—and it was common knowledge that if someone wanted to put something in your food, there was no better place than on a plane. As a rule, you eat what you are given, and you don’t exchange your meal with your neighbor. Besides, there was precedent. The journalist Anna Politkovskaya had been poisoned on a plane in 2004. She barely survived, only to be shot two years later on her doorstep.

  There were other options too. A day before he collapsed, Kara-Murza had had several meetings in town, including lunch at a restaurant in the city center and a dinner with his father at the usually crowded two-story Bar BQ on Pyatnitskaya Street.

  For now, Vadim Prokhorov needed to stay focused on Kara-Murza Jr.’s survival. After the operation was halted, an unconscious Kara-Murza was transferred to another clinic—the First City Hospital, in a classic-looking yellow-and-white nineteenth-century building with a cupola and a portico.

  Kara-Murza Sr. was of little help. The calamity had completely unnerved him, and now he was posting desperate messages on Facebook. One day he would say that his son was the victim of an intentional poisoning and then another day that he had just eaten a bad snack. The strong man who had bravely stood his ground in the face of the state seizure of his TV company, Kara-Murza Sr. was collapsing, crushed by the sight of his son in a coma.

  On Friday, three days after Kara-Murza Jr. was poisoned, his wife, Zhenya, flew from Washington to Moscow while her mother flew from Moscow to Washington to look after their kids. Prokhorov met Zhenya at the airport, and they hastened to the hospital. Kara-Murza was still in the intensive care unit. “He looked like an octopus, there were so many tubes out of him,” Zhenya said.

  His heart had stopped, and he was given norepinephrine. His kidneys failed, and he was put on hemodialysis. Then his lungs failed, and he was given a tracheostomy and put on a ventilator. Then his liver failed, too. Now, Kara-Murza was lying there, entangled in numerous tubes with a hole in his trachea. He was still unconscious, and the medical staff looked confused. Vadim Prokhorov was trying to locate someone in the hospital who had some authority.

  He learned that because it was Friday night, nobody was there—no head of the hospital, no chief of the intensive care unit. Desperate, Prokhorov phoned the New Times’s editor Yevgenia Albats: “Yevgenia, the man is dying, and nobody is here!”

  Yevgenia Albats, a political journalist and the author of the first post-Soviet book about the KGB, KGB: State within a State,5 was known as a fierce critic of the Kremlin. But in Moscow she was also a real personality with a commanding manner and a loud voice. Albats was known for her ability to get things done—she knew a lot of people in town and seldom took no for an answer. In fact, her nickname among Moscow’s journalists was WMD (“weapon of mass destruction”).

  Forty minutes after Prokhorov had called
Albats, a car pulled up in front of the hospital, and the head of the hospital stepped out. With him was Denis Protsenko, the chief of the intensive care unit. The two rushed to Denis’s office. In a few minutes, they told Prokhorov and Zhenya to come in.

  The head of the hospital, a corpulent man in his early forties, was obviously displeased by the interruption of his Friday night. He started by saying that he didn’t believe there had actually been a poisoning. “Who would need to poison you? You’re just the opposition.”

  Prokhorov was taken aback. “Well, Nemtsov was just killed.”

  “Ah, it’s a different thing,” the head of the hospital said.

  He turned to Zhenya. “And who are you?”

  “I’m the wife,” she said. “I want to get his samples to check them independently.”

  The head of the hospital became impatient. “Look, why do you need it? It’s like a train hit a man, and he is lying dying, while the train is long gone. Why care about the train when you need to think about the man?”

  But Zhenya insisted.

  “You don’t have a right to request that,” the head of the hospital snapped. “You need a signed power of attorney.” It was very clear he wanted to find an excuse to get rid of them. She did not have the document.

  Fortunately, as a lawyer, Prokhorov did. He presented his document. The head of the hospital checked it and shrugged. “OK, that’ll do.”

  Now he turned to Prokhorov. “Look, why did you do that?”

  “Do what?” asked the lawyer.

  “Why did you phone Albats? Anything else would have been better—the prosecutor’s office, the FSB, everything, but why Albats?” He was obviously unhappy to have gotten ensnared in something so politically sensitive by someone to whom he couldn’t say no.

  Kara-Murza Jr. was still in intensive care, and Denis, a large, bald man with a beard and smiling eyes, was fighting to save his life. Finally, hemodialysis started to have some positive effect. Kara-Murza was no longer dying, although he was still in a coma.

  On Sunday, Prokhorov and Zhenya once again asked the head of the hospital for permission to take samples of Kara-Murza’s hair, nails, and blood, which experts could use to try to identify the poison. That request was finally granted, although the hospital tried to downplay the situation. A theory was developed—that Kara-Murza was indeed poisoned, not by someone else but by himself. Kara-Murza had been taking a light sedative since 2014, and he also occasionally used nasal drops. These substances, combined with alcohol, could be toxic.

  Essentially, the head of the hospital blamed the victim. “In general, this story is explained by the combination of some medicines with a certain type of drink that was consumed uncontrollably,” he explained later to the media, hinting that Kara-Murza Jr. had been drunk.6

  Vadim Prokhorov was in touch with people at the newspaper Novaya Gazeta, where two reporters had been poisoned. The editor in chief suggested three laboratories to test the samples—one in Israel, one in France, and one in the United Kingdom. Zhenya called the British embassy, asking for help in transferring the samples to the UK laboratory—Kara-Murza held a British passport. But the clerk at the embassy told her that would be impossible and offered only moral support. The embassy also made a public statement that according to the Vienna Convention, biomaterials could not be sent via diplomatic mail.7

  Kara-Murza spent the next three weeks in a coma.

  The exiled Khodorkovsky flew an Israeli toxicology expert to Moscow. The Israeli expert said that Kara-Murza had a 5 percent chance of survival, but he said nothing about the substance of the poison.8

  Kara-Murza Jr. made it into this 5 percent, thanks to the efforts of Denis and his team. In July he regained consciousness. Very thin, with his muscles largely atrophied, he was transferred to a hospital in Washington. He flew there on a private medical jet that had been rented by Khodorkovsky.

  Kara-Murza’s full recovery took a year and a half. It was a slow and painful process. He had no memory of the past month and a half, and his muscles regained strength slowly. He was embarrassed when he tried to pour his wife some tea but was too weak to raise the teapot. He spent weeks in the hospital in Washington, DC. That was when a tall man in his early forties first approached Zhenya in the hospital corridor. He introduced himself as an FBI agent assigned to deal with the Kara-Murza case.

  Kara-Murza Jr. flew back to Moscow in December 2015—six months after the poisoning—still leaning on a cane. He believed that a true Russian politician needed to be in Russia, and he wanted to make a point of coming back. He had another reason to make the trip: together, he and Prokhorov went to the police to request that law enforcement open a criminal investigation into his attempted murder.

  They brought with them the results of tests done by Paskal Kintz, the head of a laboratory in the suburbs of Strasbourg, France. Dr. Kintz was known around the world as an authority on poison. His report said that four elements—heavy metals—in Kara-Murza’s samples were at higher dosages than were normally found in the human body: manganese, zinc, copper, and mercury. To Vadim Prokhorov, it was crystal clear that Kara-Murza Jr. had indeed been poisoned. But the police said no. The investigation in Russia was effectively sabotaged.

  Meanwhile, Kara-Murza was shuttling between Moscow and Washington, continuing his work for Khodorkovsky’s Open Russia. Kara-Murza was intent on remaining active in his country, no matter what.

  He spent the night of February 2, 2017, at Zhenya’s parents’ apartment in Moscow before an early Lufthansa flight to Washington, DC, the next morning. At 5:00 a.m. he collapsed on the floor. He managed to make a call to his wife: “Zhenya, it’s a double.” Zhenya got it immediately—it was happening again.

  Her parents called an ambulance.

  Zhenya was friends on Facebook with Denis, the chief of intensive care at the First City Hospital who had supervised Kara-Murza’s recovery the first time. The previous fall, Denis had taken a new job as chief doctor of Moscow’s Municipal Hospital No. 7, and Zhenya had congratulated him on Facebook. At 5:00 a.m. she messaged him on Facebook Messenger: “Denis, Kara-Murza is very sick.” Denis responded at once. He agreed to take him to his clinic.9 Kara-Murza lost consciousness soon after he was taken to Denis’s hospital.

  Zhenya telephoned Prokhorov, who rushed to the hospital at once. Denis remembered him and said openly, “Guys, it’s the same thing.” The official diagnosis this time was “acute intoxication by an unidentified substance.”

  The doctors put Kara-Murza on hemodialysis again, but it didn’t really help. Then they replaced all his plasma. That did make a difference, and Kara-Murza started to recover. To the physicians, this was a clear sign that a poison had been used—something protein related, something strong, and something that probably consisted of more than one toxic substance.

  It was clearly sophisticated, and Prokhorov believed that meant it was something only a government organization could develop.

  CHAPTER 32

  CHASING A POISON

  Kara-Murza Jr. healed more quickly the second time, and a new struggle began: the hunt to identify the poison. With the hospital cooperating this time, samples had been taken on the second day, not the third, as had been the case in 2015. In 2017, Vadim Prokhorov was given three test tubes—blood, nails, and hair. Then he phoned Khodorkovsky’s lawyer in London: “A toxicology team in Israel has agreed to look into the case. But who could take the samples to Israel?”

  Khodorkovsky’s lawyer called him back in a minute. “You should take them to Israel,” he said. Prokhorov, surprised, expressed some hesitancy.

  “Tomorrow is Saturday, so there’s no court for you to attend,” Khodorkovsky’s lawyer insisted. So Prokhorov went home, picked up his passport, and packed a small rucksack with the insulated medical cooler the hospital had given him.1

  He flew to Ben Gurion Airport and drove straight to the Ichilov Hospital, just ten miles from Tel Aviv. But the clinic told him that they could check Kara-Murza’s samples for only three
elements. That clearly would not be sufficient for identifying the poison. He called Paskal Kintz’s clinic in Strasbourg—the same one that had checked Kara-Murza’s samples in 2015. They promised to check the new samples for fifteen elements instead of three. Prokhorov went back to Ben Gurion Airport and boarded a plane to Frankfurt, his small rucksack with the medical kit on his back.

  He was stopped at border control in the Frankfurt airport. Three German women in their late fifties told him he needed special documentation to carry biomaterials over the border. Prokhorov knew they were right, but he decided to take his chances.

  “I flew from Israel, and it was fine to transfer the medical kit from Moscow to Israel yesterday,” he said.

  “We are not in Israel,” one of the women grandly responded.

  Prokhorov saw an opportunity. “Yes, exactly, and Israel exists only because of the activities of your grandfathers and grandmothers!” He went on and on, displaying a calculated rage. “My client is a political opponent of Vladimir Putin, he is dying in Moscow, and if he dies, it will be a holocaust of the twenty-first century.”

  They listened to him silently and then waved him in.

  The Kara-Murza samples finally found their way into the hands of experts in the two-story mansion that housed Kintz’s laboratory in the small French city of Oberhausbergen, seven miles from Strasbourg. But when Prokhorov got the results, they were disappointing. The report stated that there was an elevated concentration of manganese in both the blood and the hair and that “this was also observed in 2015.”2 But the report didn’t answer the question of what kind of poison had been used. Once again, it only named the element levels that were higher in Kara-Murza’s body than they normally were in the general population.

  As a former student of history, Vadim Prokhorov was particularly interested in the history of the Soviet secret police. He knew that it had created special laboratories dedicated to developing poisons and that the poisons were intended as tools for eliminating the regime’s enemies. The Soviet secret service had had a poison laboratory at its disposal since as early as 1926. From the beginning, its task was to develop poisons for use abroad.