Orders to Kill
Page 7
Putin, Cherkesov, and their allies from the security services cannot have been happy about Starovoitova’s efforts to make corruption an issue in the upcoming St. Petersburg municipal elections. Indeed, even though Putin was no longer living and working in that city, his past connections with the mafia were sure to come out at some point if Starovoitova and her democratic allies persisted in their efforts to expose financial malfeasance on the part of the St. Petersburg government. Of course, it was not just Putin and his allies who worried about exposure. Starovoitova’s sister Olga, who worked as her personal assistant in St. Petersburg, observed: “Galina Vasil’evna was one of the most prominent campaigners against corruption of the times. She was always submitting deputy’s inquiries, for example about the stealing of books from the Academy of Sciences or fraud in distributing housing to soldiers. She was hated by almost half of the Duma.”14 But it was the men in the security services who had the power to destroy her and get away with it.
The Prelude: Killings in St. Petersburg
During 1997 and 1998, a series of violent murders took place in St. Petersburg, forming the backdrop for Starovoitova’s killing. On August 18, 1997, Mikhail Manevich, a deputy governor of St. Petersburg who had run the city’s privatization program, was gunned down as he drove to work on Nevsky Prospect. On February 27, 1998, Igor Dubovik was fatally shot outside his home and died on the spot, with his money and documents intact. Dubovik was a lawyer for the governor of St. Petersburg, Vladimir Iakovlev, and a member of his advisory council. On September 28, 1998, Evgenii Agarev, a St. Petersburg City Hall official, was killed when a bomb exploded in the stairwell of his apartment building. Then on October 10, 1998, Dmitrii Filippov, chairman of the board of directors of Bank Menetap in St. Petersburg, was struck by a radio-controlled bomb blast as he entered his apartment. He died three days later. Five days after this, Mikhail Osherov, an aide to the vice-speaker of the Duma, Gennadii Seleznev, was shot as he was leaving his apartment. He survived following a long operation, but became an invalid.15
Osherov had run Seleznev’s Duma election campaign and was first vice-president of the Academy of National Security (ANB), an ad hoc group of former KGB officers and Communists that Seleznev had created in St. Petersburg. The ANB was rumored to have secret aims of a right-wing takeover of the Russian government, similar to the attempt that occurred in the autumn of 1993, when Yeltsin resorted to bloodshed to defeat his opponents in the Russian parliament.16
Iurii Shutov, a businessman and deputy in the St. Petersburg legislature with ties to the criminal underworld, would be arrested in 1999 and accused of organizing several of the above-mentioned killings. Shutov had briefly, in 1990, worked as an adviser to Sobchak, but they had had a falling-out and Shutov had become a bitter enemy of both Sobchak and Putin, collecting and publishing evidence of their corruption and, at one point, accusing Putin of collaborating with enemy intelligence services when he served in the KGB in East Germany. In 1999, Shutov would claim that he had tapes of telephone conversations that showed FSB involvement in the Starovoitova murder at the highest levels. Clearly, Putin needed to have Shutov out of the way, and arresting him was a good solution. Shutov spent several years in pre-trial detention before being finally convicted, in 2006, of a number of contract killings. He died in a labor camp in Perm, Siberia, where he was serving a life sentence, in December 2014.17
Although it was convenient to attribute those contract killings to Shutov, he had actually had little motive. The men targeted were all foes of former St. Petersburg mayor Sobchak and had plenty of information on his past corrupt activities in the city. Also, in two of the murders, bombs containing hexogen were used. These are complicated devices, and hexogen is not easily available, which suggested FSB complicity. Shutov’s name had been on the official list of possible killers of Starovoitova, but was later dropped from it.18
Starovoitova’s Assassination
Starovoitova flew from Moscow to St. Petersburg early in the evening of November 20, 1998. According to testimony by an assistant who accompanied her on the trip, it was only at the very last minute that she decided to leave Moscow that night. Thus her killers would have had very short notice of her plans. She was met at the airport by her press secretary, twenty-eight-year-old Ruslan Linkov, who came with a car and driver. On the way to Starovoitova’s apartment, they stopped by at her parents’ home so she could take them some caviar and smoked eel as a gift from Moscow. She and her parents talked about her son, who was living in London, and her beloved grandson, on whom she doted.19
Linkov and Starovoitova then left for the center of the city, to Starovoitova’s apartment on the Griboyedov Canal. They entered the building and started up the stairs, which were difficult to see because all the lights had been turned off except for one in the immediate entrance. As they approached the second-floor landing, where Starovoitova’s apartment was, shots broke out and Starovoitova fell to the ground, fatally wounded. Linkov later recalled, during the trial of the accused killers, seeing both shooters: a man (who he eventually identified in court), and a woman standing behind the man. (As it turned out, the latter was a man dressed in women’s clothing and wearing a wig.) But defense lawyers for those accused in the shootings pointed to contradictions in Linkov’s testimony with earlier statements to investigators. Because there was no light on the second floor, where Starovoitova was shot, even the flash from a gun being fired would not have enabled Linkov to get more than a vague outline of the killers.20
Linkov was at some point also shot, but what actually happened remains unclear because it was reported in court documents and in the press that, strangely, there was an interval of several minutes between the two shootings. And despite being supposedly gravely wounded, and in and out of consciousness, Linkov managed to make a call on his mobile phone to the police to report the crime, then knocked on the door of the couple across the hall, Vladimir and Galina Andreev, and made another call to a friend at the media outlet Interfax.21 In their later testimony, the Andreevs recalled hearing a conversation in the hallway before they opened the door to Linkov. (The guns had had silencers, so they heard no shots.) Both were doctors, and Vladimir Andreev bandaged a laceration that was near Linkov’s ear.
Within a short time, Galina’s sister, Olga, arrived, followed by several FSB officials, including Cherkesov, who clearly wanted to be on top of the investigation and would doubtless report directly back to his FSB boss, Putin. Linkov had already been taken away by ambulance. The killers left behind the two guns that were used to kill Starovoitova, but the gun that fired at Linkov disappeared and was reportedly found much later on a former police officer living in Latvia.22 A key question is why the assassins did not finish Linkov off, as they did Starovoitova. They were hired professionals, and they could see that he was alive as they hastened away.
Ruslan Linkov
Olga Starovoitova has steadfastly discounted rumors that Ruslan Linkov was not badly hurt in the attack and that he may have been complicit in the killing of her sister. In a 2013 interview with Ekho Moskvy, she recounted how after the murder she went to the White Knights Military Academy Hospital, where Linkov was being treated. She was not able to see him, but the doctor in charge showed her the x-rays, which he said revealed that Linkov had been shot in the shoulder and neck.23
Olga apparently did not know that the doctor at the Military Academy Hospital, Iurii Shevchenko, was very close to Putin. He had treated Putin’s wife, Lyudmila, when she was badly hurt in a 1993 car accident, and he had attended Anatoly Sobchak in 1997 when he had supposedly suffered a heart attack just as he was about to be arrested for corruption (and was then spirited out of the country from his hospital bed by a team organized by Putin).24
According to Olga, representatives from the FSB wanted to see Linkov right away, but Linkov told them he would not talk to them because of how badly they had treated dissidents. He demanded to see only the chief of the FSB, Putin. (So much for Linkov being unconscious for days as the pres
s was initially told.) Olga said in her interview that Putin then paid a visit to Linkov, who discussed with him all the details of the murder.25
The visit from Putin to Linkov was confirmed by American journalist Andrew Meier, who interviewed Linkov extensively two years later. Meier noted that since the time of the murder, Linkov had been “an object of ridicule and suspicion” in St. Petersburg because of his strange, theatrical appearance and his soft, high-pitched voice. Linkov told him that it was a miracle that he had survived the shooting, and that he had been in the hospital for two months, guarded around the clock by the FSB. Interestingly, he confided to Meier that he had been close to Putin for several years before Starovoitova’s murder. They had first met in 1990, when Linkov was twenty years old. According to Meier: “Linkov and Putin had enjoyed a long-running conversation. Linkov did not consider it protection, or providence, but the president had for years tendered a strange affection toward him. Whenever Linkov called, Putin agreed to meet.”26
Linkov told Meier that he had been one of Putin’s first visitors at his office when Putin became head of the FSB in the summer of 1998. In Linkov’s words: “I don’t know why, but Putin likes to think he’s one of us. He’s always telling me how he supported Galina Vasil’evna and our cause—from the very beginning.” Later, on a visit by Putin to St. Petersburg, the two went to Starovoitova’s grave together. Linkov confided in Meier that he had told Putin that he strongly suspected that St. Petersburg governor Vladimir Iakovlev and Duma deputy Gennadii Seleznev had ordered the murder of Starovoitova and that Putin promised him: “I’ll look into it. I’ll ask them [the FSB] to dig harder.”27
Linkov’s account to Meier appears to be either a deliberate deception or a result of brainwashing by Putin. It is hard to believe that in 1990 Putin, an aspiring member of Sobchak’s entourage, would have been interested in spending time with a young man who was just twenty. (Unless Putin, as some critics claim, really is gay or a pedophile.) More to the point, why would Linkov have reason to believe that Putin was a supporter of Starovoitova’s democratic causes? After all, Putin had brought Cherkesov, notorious throughout St. Petersburg as a persecutor of dissidents in the KGB days, to Moscow as his first deputy in the FSB. Starovoitova, before she died, had come to the defense of Russian naval officer Aleksandr Nikitin, who had been charged with treason by Cherkesov’s St. Petersburg FSB investigators for blowing the whistle about leaky submarines. And of course another question is why Cherkesov, as head of the FSB in St. Petersburg until August 1998, was not able to solve any of the contract killings that had taken place up until his departure for Moscow. As for the Starovoitova case, despite his ubiquitous presence on the night of the murder, which in itself arouses suspicion, Cherkesov was apparently at a loss to get to the bottom of the crime.
Investigation and Trial
Immediately after the Starovoitova murder, an operative-investigative group was formed to handle the case, with representatives from the FSB, MVD, and Procuracy. President Yeltsin said he would lead the investigation, although there is little evidence that he actually did. Yeltsin was preoccupied by the financial crisis that Russia was experiencing, and his own political future was in grave doubt. A year after the killing, the deputy chief of the St. Petersburg FSB told a reporter that authorities knew who had killed the politician, but that they had to keep quiet so as not to hamper the criminal case.28
In the next three years, the investigative group questioned more than a thousand witnesses, conducted searches, hauled in suspects, and examined forensic evidence. Finally, in November 2002, the FSB announced that its officials had arrested six men, all employees of a St. Petersburg-based guard service, for the crime and that it was seeking two others, Mikhail Glushchenko and Viacheslav Shevchenko, both former deputies to the Russian Duma representing the LDPR (the right-wing Liberal Democratic Party of Russia) and both connected to the Tambov gang.29
The trial began in late December 2003 and continued, with several breaks, until June 2005. Two of the six suspects were acquitted of charges and released; another, accused of a peripheral role, was freed because he had already served the required term; and three were found guilty: Iurii Kolchin, an employee of the GRU (military intelligence) at the time of the killing, was sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment for organizing the murder and driving the get-away car, while Vitalii Akishin received twenty-three years for shooting Starovoitova, and Viacheslav Leliavin was sentenced in a separate trial the next year to eleven years as an accomplice. Oleg Fedosov, the other shooter who had dressed in women’s clothes, disappeared. All the men were connected to the Tambov criminal gang. The motive was said to be that Starovoitova opposed candidates that the gang wanted to place in the city Duma. Although Akishin confessed to the shooting, Kolchin insisted on his innocence and produced several witnesses who testified that he had been home on the night of the murder.30
Kolchin and the others could not have acted on their own, and even Glushchenko and Shevchenko, if indeed they were involved, had no convincing motives for the murder. The question on everyone’s minds was who had ordered the killing. Linkov, encouraged by Putin, continued to insist that leaders of the far right were the ultimate culprits, and that included Seleznev and Vladimir Zhirinovsky, head of the LDPR. All were well suited as villains for the purposes of Putin, who was portraying himself as a democrat in opposition to the right wing of Russian politics. The real threat, Starovoitova, was gone, and her murder could be passed off on those who seemed her most obvious opponents.
Pursuing this theory, the prosecution called Lyudmila Narusova, the widow of Sobchak—who was deeply indebted to Putin for protecting her husband—as a witness in September 2004. She told the court that Starovoitova was an archenemy of Zhirinovsky, the LDRP, and Glushchenko, and that Zhirinovsky had threatened Starovoitova with reprisals before her death. Zhirinovsky fought back, appearing at his own initiative in St. Petersburg in November to testify that, although he and Starovoitova were at odds on many issues—enemies, in fact—he had no involvement in her murder. He repeated earlier unsubstantiated claims that Starovoitova had had large sums of money with her when she returned to her home and suggested that Linkov had robbed her and had her killed. Linkov was, Zhirinovsky pointed out, the only one who knew that Starovoitova was arriving by plane to St. Petersburg on the night of her murder.31
The effort to connect Zhirinovsky and his allies with Starovoitova’s murder did not bear fruit, but prosecutors nonetheless continued to focus on Glushchenko (alias Misha Khokhol), a key player in the entourage of criminals and politicians that dominated St. Petersburg in the nineties. When his name came up in the investigation of the Starovoitova murder in 2002 as a possible organizer of the crime, he quickly fled to Spain and laid low. Later, assured by Russian law-enforcement authorities that he could safely return to Russia, Glushchenko appeared in St. Petersburg in 2009 to renew his passport. He was promptly arrested on charges of extortion and the possible murders of three people in 2004 in Cyprus, including the above-mentioned Duma deputy Shevchenko. Shevchenko, a St. Petersburg businessman with ties to the Tambov gang, supposedly wrote a letter—“discovered” by chance on the Internet by none other than Ruslan Linkov—in which he described how Glushchenko had been enlisted to carry out Starovoitova’s killing by LDPR leaders in exchange for getting on a list of deputies for the upcoming 1999 Duma elections.32
After several years in a Siberian labor camp, Kolchin, who had been convicted of organizing the crime, broke down and confessed his guilt in 2011, telling investigators that none other than Glushchenko had ordered him to murder Starovoitova in May 1998 during a meeting at Glushchenko’s dacha. Glushchenko, already serving time in a Siberian labor camp, for other murders, admitted to the killing in April 2014 and named the notorius mafia figure Kumarin as the mastermind (zakazchik). The motive was said to be Starovoitova’s campaign to uncover the activities of criminal gangs in St. Petersburg, including those of the Tambov group, which Kumarin headed. Glushchenko apparently
saw his confession as a kind of plea bargain. It is standard FSB practice to get people who are already convicted of offenses to confess to additional crimes when they are incarcerated. But his plan backfired, and in August 2015, Glushchenko was sentenced by a St. Petersburg City Court to seventeen additional years in prison.
Kumarin, meanwhile, had been persuaded by his and Putin’s friend Vladimir Smirnov to return home to St. Petersburg from Germany, where he had been living in exile, in 2007. He was arrested in September of that year on charges of extortion and convicted, with a sentence of fourteen years in prison. According to a WikiLeaks document, based on a conversation between Russian Procurator-General Chaika and an informant for Stratfor, the global intelligence service, Putin himself gave the go-ahead for Kumarin’s arrest.33
In a lengthy interview—answering written questions by Russian journalist Zoia Svetova from his prison cell in Moscow in late March 2016, Kumarin was, not surprisingly, bitter.34 He noted that “now Chaika himself is being called a criminal, just as he labeled me.” (This was in reference to the serious corruption allegations against Chaika that had recently been made by Aleksei Navalny.) Kumarin complained that, although he had already had two heart attacks and was officially classified as an invalid, the prison he was in, the notorious Matrosskaia tishina, had no doctors and predicted that he would probably die there. (He is now charged with the 2006 murder of a St. Petersburg businessman and his bodyguard, but not with Starovoitova’s killing.)