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

by Masha Gessen

  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 busin
ess 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:

  As I lie here, I sense the distinct presence of the angel of death. It is still possible I’ll be able to evade him, but I fear my feet are no longer as fast as they used to be. I think the time has come to say a few words to the man responsible for my current condition.

  You may be able to force me to stay quiet, but this silence will come at a price to you. You have now proved that you are exactly the ruthless barbarian your harshest critics made you out to be.

  You have demonstrated that you have no respect for human life, liberty, or other values of civilization.

  You have shown that you do not deserve to hold your post, and you do not deserve the trust of civilized people.

  You may be able to shut one man up, but the noise of protest all over the world will reverberate in your ears,

  Mr. Putin, to the end of your life. May God forgive you for what you have done, not only to me but to my beloved Russia and her people.

  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 the
irs 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.