Andrei said that Kara-Murza was fine but that he’d mentioned Kara-Murza’s name because he wanted to ask Lebedev about his friend’s son, Vladimir Kara-Murza Jr., the close associate of Boris Nemtsov who had been poisoned in Moscow twice and barely survived. The opposition suspected it was the Kremlin that had ordered the attacks. What did he think about the poisoning?
“By what, by Novichok?” Lebedev’s intention in mentioning the nerve agent used to poison another Russian, Skripal in the United Kingdom, was meant to convey incredulity, that the implication the Kremlin was involved was simply absurd. But it didn’t really work. It betrayed that the Skripal incident was something that jumped immediately to mind. It seemed like every Global Russian we spoke with while researching this book, from pro-Kremlin priest/financier Peter Holodny to the oligarch-turned-dissident Khodorkovsky, and now Lebedev, was thinking about Skripal’s poisoning these days.
“Well, I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not a supporter of these conspiracy theories.” He struggled to figure out a way to answer. “And, look, first, who needs to get him poisoned? There is no such practice, poisoning the opposition. There are other methods. And what do you mean, ‘the opposition’? Well, as it happens, there is none. I mean real opposition. Among 145 million people, there are a few dissidents, but that’s all.”
It was a classic denial of a reality Lebedev didn’t want to accept. There was no poisoning because such methods were not used against the opposition, because there was no real opposition. The logic was not very convincing. Surely it failed to convince Lebedev himself.
He thought for a moment and then began talking about himself and his relationship with the Kremlin.
“Look, I limited myself to a sort of reservation. I used to play on many chess squares. And later I got it, that the system had changed in such a way that you should sit in one chess square, not more. They explained to me, ‘You have a billion, why don’t you go buy a castle in the south of France, a yacht, and a plane?’” It was clear that Lebedev referred to Roman Abramovich, a fabulously rich Russian with a truly oligarchic way of life who always played by the Kremlin rules and, as a result, was allowed to sell his assets in Russia at a very high price and set free. “Instead you participate in elections, you print a newspaper,” Lebedev continued. “‘OK, so you, bitch, are suspect.’ So they began ‘educating’ me. OK, now I know my square—small business, my family.” Lebedev sighed. “And there is no way to jump from a square to a square.”
And what about the British newspapers? Is the Kremlin not concerned?
“Well, I think they accepted it. And what do I write in my papers? Where it’s needed they criticize Russia, and where it’s needed, say, on Syria, we support the Russian position.… And besides, now it’s calming down—maybe because they closed all my businesses. To put it bluntly—I don’t have a billion dollars anymore, thus I’m harmless. They took away my airline, and all the money was removed from my bank, so they made my bank business into zero, and then I got condemned. But I was sentenced not to prison but to labor, so I understand we came to terms. Sit still and we leave you in peace. And I do.”
Four years after Putin had resumed the presidency, things looked very different for men like Lebedev and Kaspersky. Once high rollers, they were brought to heel, and the hierarchy was firmly reestablished. Successful and wealthy for so many years, both had made traveling to exotic locations their passion. But it seemed that in all their travels, the two former KGB officers couldn’t get rid of a tiny but insistent voice in their heads, the one telling them: wherever you are, you cannot hide from us.
EPILOGUE
On May 5, 2018, on our subway journey to Brighton Beach to explore the story of the Tatiana restaurant, we spotted three tired-looking middle-aged women sitting at one end of the car. Their chests were decorated in orange-and-black ribbons. In Russia, this decoration is known as George’s ribbon, an insignia of the Russian Imperial military (orange and black, symbolizing fire and gunpowder, respectively). It had long been used at official Soviet celebrations of Victory Day, a Fourth of July–like national holiday commemorating Russia’s vanquishing of the Nazis in World War II.
One of the women held a placard with a red star and a Russian man’s name. We realized that the three had just taken part in the march in Manhattan. Early that day more than two thousand Russian Americans had marched along the Hudson River down to Battery Park while an aircraft sporting a giant orange-and-black ribbon flew over the Statue of Liberty. Most marchers carried placards featuring portraits of their ancestors who had fought in World War II. The marchers were partaking in a widespread initiative known as the Immortal Regiment, which began in Russia after Putin reassumed the presidency in 2012. The idea behind it was that the deceased veterans would be forever part of the victorious Russian army if their descendants would remember them. In Moscow, the Immortal Regiment, promoted by the Kremlin, gathered millions of participants on Victory Day every year, and Putin made it a rule to walk at the front of the march holding a portrait of his father. The Kremlin made sure a march was held in every big city in Russia.
And then in 2015, pro-Kremlin activists introduced the initiative in the United States with the support of St. Nicholas Church, the headquarters of the Russian Orthodox Church in New York. The Russian Youth of America, an obscure pro-Kremlin group led by a recent emigrant who was also a head of the youth department at St. Nicholas, took over organization of the Immortal Regiment marches in the United States. In May 2018, the marches and placards hit Washington, Boston, Denver, San Francisco, Seattle, Philadelphia, San Diego, Chicago, Detroit, Tallahassee (Florida), Orlando, Miami, Los Angeles, Houston, Portland (Oregon), Phoenix (Arizona), Raleigh (North Carolina), and Kansas City (Missouri).1 The biggest action took place in New York, while a World War II costume party was held on the premises of an Orthodox church in New Jersey.
New Yorkers probably felt fine about this new march. The city was used to massive marches by Italians on Columbus Day and by the Irish on Saint Patrick’s Day, and then there was the Puerto Rican Day Parade, the Caribbean Day Parade, and the Greek Independence Day parade. This new Victory Day initiative was small and quiet by comparison. But for the Kremlin, it represented a significant projection of its power to America.
Since 2014, the orange-and-black ribbon had become an ominous and aggressive political symbol. After the annexation of Crimea, Putin’s propagandists adopted the ribbon as a symbol of an anti-Western, pro-Kremlin agenda. On the streets of Moscow, it became common to see cars with that ribbon attached to the antenna, sometimes in combination with a sticker saying, in effect, “1945—We Can Repeat,” meaning that we, the Russian army, can get to Berlin again, and by extension to the West, if we feel like doing so.
The Kremlin had clearly found a way to use pro-Kremlin civic movements run by Russian emigrants, including the church organizations, to bring Putin’s ribbon to the United States.
But was he ready to use those movements for bigger things?
The presidential election in the United States in 2016 was, no doubt, a crucial moment for the Kremlin. Putin hated Hillary Clinton and believed he read Donald Trump. Surely it was a good moment to use everything at his disposal to make life difficult for Clinton, so the Kremlin began by sponsoring a massive cyberoperation that resulted in the largest active measure ever seen.
But the Kremlin acted with restraint. After all, generations of Russian foreign intelligence officers, including Putin, were trained to treat the United States, no matter what president was in office, as the main adversary, which meant carefully. The extensive network of organizations of pro-Kremlin compatriots on American soil was, it seems, not activated. Instead, the Kremlin used hacking teams based in Russia and channeled the data they obtained to websites located beyond US borders. As we described in the 2017 revised paperback edition of The Red Web, many in Moscow believed that the political hacking campaign was a low-risk operation—and that the Kremlin’s denial tactics would work forever.
They got caught red-handed almost immediately. CrowdStrike, the private information security company hired to handle the Democratic National Committee breach, published its report exposing Russian hackers in June 2016, before the first dump of stolen information came out. CrowdStrike’s report was authored, ironically, by another Russian émigré, Dmitri Alperovitch.
Could the exposure, and the ensuing scandal over Russia’s meddling, have had a deterrent effect on the Kremlin in using its networks of pro-Kremlin compatriots in the United States in the ensuing months? We don’t know, though it seems probable.
But Putin’s regiment is there and could be activated anytime.
Almost two decades after Putin began pushing his opponents out of the country, reintroducing political emigration, the new émigrés were grabbing every chance to strike back.
An opportunity presented itself with the Russian oligarchs, those super-rich who entertained the idea of being international tycoons, just like their Western counterparts. They were an essential part of Putin’s regime but were caught in the crossfire of Western sanctions imposed after Russia’s annexation of Crimea. The United States, the United Kingdom, and the European countries started looking into their assets. Russian and Western journalists began investigating their offshore accounts and exposing money-laundering schemes. And the new Russian exiles and political activists turned up to campaign against the dirty money in the West.
When the poisoning of a Russian former spy, Sergei Skripal, in Salisbury in March 2018 caused the British Parliament to look into Russian oligarchs’ money laundering in London, the new émigrés readily provided testimony. Garry Kasparov was among those who were only too happy to speak up.2
The new political émigrés saw this as their contribution to the fight against Putin’s regime. If one couldn’t get to Putin, one could reach his cronies—that was the logic.
Ilya Zaslavskiy, the former manager of TNK-BP who was collateral damage in the fight between British and Russian shareholders of the oil corporation, was one of those who readily joined the fight. He believed the Russian oligarchs abroad to be Kremlin enablers. If some oligarchs had treated him as a small fish, they greatly miscalculated. He started several campaigns exposing the oligarchs’ sponsorship of the most respected Western universities. He campaigned against Soviet-born oligarchs giving money to Oxford and Harvard in an effort to whitewash their reputation.3
In January 2019, Viktor Vekselberg, the Russian tycoon who two years before had attended President Trump’s inauguration ceremony in Washington, DC, was removed from MIT’s board of trustees. Zaslavskiy was proud that his incessant campaigning had contributed to the removal.4 It had some personal element, too: Vekselberg used to be one of the main Russian shareholders of TNK-BP.
Being a diligent man, Zaslavskiy institutionalized his efforts. In 2016 he joined the Free Russia Foundation as head of research, meaning investigations of Russian oligarchs.5 The foundation’s name resembled that of the institute Fischer and Kennan had launched in the 1950s to help the Russian political émigré cause. This time it was launched by the Russian emigrants, not the Americans. This time the Russians were campaigning on their own.
The new émigrés also joined Kara-Murza Jr. in his frantic activities in the corridors of the State Department and Congress in Washington, lobbying for more sanctions against Putin’s people. And they kept flying people from Russia—opposition politicians, writers, activists, journalists—straight to Washington to talk to policy makers.
In Russia, the Kremlin kept fighting the books.
In November 2018 Russian customs seized a copy of Masha Gessen’s book The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia that someone had ordered on Amazon. Customs claimed the book had “signs of propagandizing certain views and ideologies.”6 The book was finally returned to the customer, but it was clear that Russian customs had started checking books.
The Kremlin’s wise men knew that if a certain book reached a Russian audience, it could have a devastating effect on the country’s political regime, whether it was Karl Marx’s Das Kapital or Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago.
Putin knew it too. He well remembered how, back in his days in the KGB, thousands of Soviet citizens managed to read Solzhenitsyn’s book despite all efforts by the omnipresent secret police to eliminate every copy.
And people kept leaving the country.
In summer 2017 Olga Romanova learned that the FSB was after her. Her contacts warned her that Russian authorities had started investigating her organization Russia Behind Bars and were trying to send her to jail. The police raided the organization’s offices, and her husband, Kozlov, got scared. He saw a story developing along the lines of his own, of how a criminal case had been built against him ten years back that resulted in his arrest. Romanova was tough, but he didn’t want that to happen to her.
In November 2017 Romanova and Kozlov left the country and moved to Berlin, Germany. There Romanova went to work for a local Russian-speaking TV channel. She joined the growing community of Russian journalists who had moved out of Russia and landed jobs elsewhere—in Kiev, Riga, Prague. Their voices were still heard at home; the borders remained porous.
Romanova and Kozlov also chose to do something more challenging: to run Russia Behind Bars from abroad. Romanova supervised things through Facebook and Skype. Kozlov took over management by making trips from Berlin to Moscow almost every month.
That couldn’t last for long—and it didn’t.
In September 2018 Kozlov and Romanova took a vacation in New York—Romanova wanted to visit the city where she had lived in the early 1990s. There, Kozlov broke the news: he was involved with another woman. Romanova and Kozlov split. Kozlov went back to business, but he didn’t give up his civic activity altogether. He didn’t completely turn the page.
In the fall of 2018, Kozlov told us that his mother had published Nahum Eitingon’s letters from prison, with the introduction largely praising their famous ancestor.7 On the last page of the book there was a photograph of Kozlov’s son, now a teenager, in the uniform of a military cadet. One wonders what Nahum Eitingon, Stalin’s top assassin, would think if he knew that his descendant was wearing the uniform of White émigré Alexei Jordan’s Cadet Corps. We bet he would be surprised.
Romanova was hit hard by her split with Kozlov. But she still had one thing that was important to her: Russia Behind Bars. It was her organization, and she wanted to run it. In November 2018 Romanova returned to Russia. Her friends told her it was too dangerous, but she made her choice, now shuttling between Moscow and Berlin.
Vladimir Kara-Murza Jr., after his miraculous survival from the second poisoning, started visiting Russia once again. In October 2018 he flew to Moscow, surprising everyone—only two people knew of his visit in advance. He told us it’s impossible for him, as a Russian politician, to stay away from the country.
For decades, if not centuries, the Kremlin’s main ideological line in justifying the country’s autocracy was to insist that Russia was unique.
It was its own Russian microcosm, totally incomprehensible from outside, driven by rules and laws designed specifically for its vast territory. The norm was not applicable there. All kinds of evidence were presented, drawn from the wisdom of politicians and historians and great Russian writers. As a Russian poet famously put it:
No, Russia can’t be understood
With mind or held to common standard:
Her stature is unique for good—
Just faith in her is all we’re granted.8
Thus the logic goes, in lines that have been cited over and over again, that the country simply could not be turned into any semblance of a normal country, like, say, a Western democracy. Only autocrats could govern it efficiently, and only they could push the country forward. The legacy was obvious: Peter the Great, Lenin and Stalin, Putin.
The same logic explains the famous Russian nostalgia experienced by émigrés. The country has suffered the hemorrhage of its b
est and brightest for more than a century, and the tsars and Soviet dictators never let political emigrants return. But that tradition now seems at an end. People do come back, thanks to porous borders.
Prison and exile have been always intertwined in Russia. In 1922, Vladimir Lenin, seeking a way to rid himself of “undesirable” Russian philosophers, poets, and journalists with the semblance of legality, adopted the tsarist practice of administrative exile. Whereas the tsars sent their troublemakers by train to Siberia, Lenin sent his by steamship, and out of Russia for good.9
But in Putin’s time, Olga Romanova has lifted the stigma from Russian prisoners and helped to bring about the end of the time-honored tradition of locking people up in some distant part of Siberia, to remain unseen and unheard, and throwing away the key.
That it is now possible for the regime’s opponents to return to Russia, and very difficult if not impossible to keep them out, may eventually remove another stigma and end another time-honored tradition. And this, one hopes, could put the country on a path toward normalcy.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Researching this book was a particular challenge for us. Our story embraces a hundred years, and as journalists, we are not used to working with such a long time frame. What became clear quite early is that in Russia, the history is less about archives, still jealously guarded, than it is about people.
When Irina went to the State Archive of Sociopolitical History, the former Communist Party Archive, the first person she met was an archivist, a charming lady in her seventies who turned out to be a niece of Stalin’s successful spy Anatoly Gorsky, the chief of station in the United States who replaced Zarubin after Zarubin was recalled to Moscow. Such fortuitous encounters happened more than once and defined our approach. Everywhere we went, we tried to find and talk to people whose ancestors, relatives, friends, and colleagues were part of the story.
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