Orders to Kill

by Amy Knight

  In response to the murder, Putin created a committee under the Procurator-General’s Office to fight economic crime and appointed former Labor Minister Gennadii Melikian to take Kozlov’s place as bank regulator. But these were half-hearted measures. Indeed, as Swedish economist Anders Aslund observed, these moves actually suggested that Putin intended to dismantle the stringent inspection system that Kozlov had introduced: “[Putin] says that we need to strengthen bank inspection, after which he demolishes bank inspection, both institutionally, by setting up this committee, giving the Prosecutor-General’s Office the main responsibility for fighting money laundering—that is, taking away responsibility from the very decent Central Bank—and secondly, by appointing the weakest person [Melikian] going in the Central Bank to run the bank inspection responsibilities that remain.”14

  Scandalous Revelations

  As it turned out, Putin had good reason for rolling back Kozlov’s ambitious reforms of the banking system and, more importantly, for wanting Kozlov out of the picture. A huge financial scandal, involving several of his cronies, including Bortnikov, had been about to erupt at the very time of Kozlov’s murder. This was revealed much later, when, in May 2007, Moldovan investigative journalist Natalia Morar broke a sensational story in New Times magazine, a publication noted for courageous and accurate reporting. Morar reported, from sources in the MVD, that Austrian police authorities had linked Kozlov’s murder to a multi-million-dollar money laundering scheme in Russia. At the time of his death, Kozlov had been assisting the MVD’s Department of Economic Security in an investigation of the scheme, whereby high-level Kremlin officials had funneled large sums through Diskont Bank and the Austrian Bank Raiffeisen. Just five days before Kozlov was killed, a criminal case against certain individuals at Diskont Bank, which had already had its license revoked, was initiated by the MVD.15

  Bank Raiffeisen was the conduit for the money laundering because it received deposits from the Russian government for the construction of the North European gas pipeline. According to an MVD source: “Under the cover of this money, a parallel flow of money from a number of high-level Russian officials and commercial enterprises controlled by the FSB Department of Economic Security went [into Bank Raiffeisen].” Among these officials were Bortnikov and Rosneft’s Igor Sechin, one of Putin’s closest allies.16 Kozlov had been playing with fire.

  Not surprisingly, the Procuracy’s office, which had the ultimate authority, closed the MVD’s case against Diskont Bank shortly after Kozlov was murdered on the grounds that the case was “insignificant.” Austrian authorities sent the Russian Procuracy all the documentation they had on the money laundering case and never received an answer. Morar’s article in New Times created a stir in the independent media when it appeared months later, but by this time public interest in the Kozlov murder, such as it was, had subsided. And Morar, following an article she wrote in December 2007 about illegal Kremlin funding of pro-Kremlin parties in the 2007 legislative elections, was banned from re-entering Russia. She was lucky, in that she escaped the Kremlin’s retribution with her life. After her piece on money laundering appeared, Morar had been warned indirectly by the FSB: “There is no need to end your life with an article—someone might simply wait for you at the entrance to your apartment building, and they will not find a killer afterward.”17

  Aleksei Frenkel

  As for the Kozlov murder investigation, law-enforcement authorities quickly arrested three hapless Ukrainian men in their mid-thirties—taxi drivers living on the outskirts of Moscow—who had allegedly carried out the crime. By early January 2007, the Procuracy announced the arrest of the presumed zakazchik, a young banker named Aleksei Frenkel, former chairman of VIP-Bank, which had been denied access to the deposit insurance system in 2005. After Frenkel appealed the denial in a court of arbitration and the court decided in his favor, the Central Bank revoked VIP-Bank’s license because of money laundering. These events, according to the Procuracy, propelled Frenkel to have Kozlov killed.18

  But many observers, particularly those close to Kozlov who understood the banking system, thought it unlikely that Frenkel was behind the murder. Between the beginning of 2006 and the time of Kozlov’s murder, a total of forty-one banks had lost their licenses, so Frenkel was hardly the only banker who suffered the ill effects of Kozlov’s policies. All who knew Frenkel—and he had many friends—said that he was completely incapable of ordering a murder. Also, Frenkel was highly competent, and whoever was behind the killing displayed recklessness, hiring not professionals, but thugs, to do the job. Finally, the media for weeks before Frenkel’s detention had been reporting that investigators had determined who had murdered Kozlov and had made arrests. Yet Frenkel, by all accounts, showed no signs of concern and went about his business. If he really was the culprit, why would he not have simply fled Russia, taking with him considerable sums of money?19

  During the trial of Frenkel and the others accused, which began in March 2008, Frenkel’s lawyer produced testimony that Kozlov’s widow, Ekaterina Kozlova, had given investigators shortly after his death. Kozlova said that two weeks before his murder, her husband had told her about Diskont Bank losing its license and mentioned that large sums of money had been transferred out of the bank. But at the trial, Kozlova for some reason backed off from her earlier statements and said that her husband had only mentioned vaguely that Diskont Bank was having troubles. She did, however, tell the court that Kozlov had a premonition that he would be killed shortly before the murder, asking her “how will you live without me?” Although he mentioned “big crooks and thieves” in banks more than once, he never spoke about Frenkel and his bank.20

  Kozlov’s former colleague, Deputy Chairman of the Central Bank Viktor Mel’nikov, also testified that Kozlov had expressed concern about repercussions from his removal of licenses from certain banks and had mentioned that FSB generals might be after him.21 But the defense evidence for the most part had little effect, because the court, on technical grounds, did not allow defense witnesses to testify in front of the jury. Indeed, the trial, which lasted eight months, with interruptions, was a deeply flawed process. After three initial sessions, the judge declared that the proceedings would henceforth be held in secret because Kozlov’s widow had been threatened and there were concerns for her security. The jury found seven defendants, all of whom denied the charges against them, guilty. In November 2008, Frenkel was sentenced to nineteen years in prison, while his alleged accomplices received prison terms ranging from six years to life.22 Frenkel’s defense lawyer appealed the decision, but the Supreme Court dismissed the appeal in November 2009.

  Anna Politkovskaya

  With Kozlov gone, the way was clear for those high up in the Kremlin to pursue their corrupt financial dealings unimpeded. The Procuracy and the FSB had also silenced those few investigators in the MVD who were inclined to reveal the massive financial fraud carried out by those close to the Kremlin. But there was still the irksome problem of independent journalists who wrote about other transgressions of the Putin regime. First and foremost was Anna Politkovskaya, the crusading, world-renowned Russian reporter for Novaia gazeta.

  Politkovskaya, also the author of several books on Putin’s Russia and Chechnya, was born in 1958 in New York City, the child of Soviet diplomats assigned to the UN. (She obtained American citizenship in the 1990s, on the basis of her birth, but continued throughout her life to live in Moscow.) Politkovskaya graduated in 1980 from the department of journalism at Moscow State University, where she met her future husband, Aleksandr Politkovskii, who was five years her senior. They stayed together for over twenty years and had two children, Ilya and Vera, but they were opposites in many ways and finally split up in 2001.

  Although Aleksandr was a successful television journalist in the years of Gorbachev’s perestroika, his career faded in the nineties, just as Anna’s was taking off. He later spoke about their different approaches to their profession. He was a straightforward reporter. What Politkovskaya wrot
e, he said, “was not really journalism, it was part literature and part something else … she was a complicated person and this was reflected in her writing.”23

  In a documentary film about Politkovskaya produced after her death by Swiss film maker Eric Bergkraut, Aleksandr explained his views on his wife more clearly: “Her sense of justice was the focal point of her life. Lying was forbidden. One must always tell the truth. This was the principle she always lived by. And it was precisely what took her to Chechnya.”24

  What Aleksandr understood was that Politkovskaya could not suppress her feelings of indignation when she witnessed what was happening in Russia after Putin came to power. Indeed, she became the most vocal critic of President Putin, writing justifiably disparaging comments about both his policies and him personally. For example: “I often think: is Putin a person at all? Or a frozen iron statue? I think and the answer is not that he is a person.” And: “Why do I dislike Putin? This is precisely why. I dislike him for a matter-of-factness worse than thievery, for his cynicism, for his racism, for his lies, for the gas he used in the Nord-Ost [Dubrovka theater] siege, for the massacre of innocents that went on throughout his first term.”25

  Defending the Chechen Cause

  As mentioned, Politkovskaya was one of the few journalists to cover the conflict in Chechnya. She believed her mission was to report on what she called the “dirty war” that Putin had started as prime minister in 1999. By the time of her murder in October 2006, Politkovskaya had made at least fifty trips to Chechnya, despite the danger she continually faced in what was, after all, a war zone. At one point in 2001, she was arrested there by the FSB and accused of spying for Chechen rebels. The FSB kept her for several days, interrogating her repeatedly and threatening her with rape and murder. It was only because of the publicity about her plight in the Russian independent press that she was finally released. She later said that the ordeal was worth it because it enabled her to better understand what Chechen prisoners of the FSB were forced to endure.26

  Politkovskaya wrote in unsparing detail about the pain and suffering of Chechens and the terrible human-rights abuses visited upon them by Russian forces. As a result of her reporting from Chechnya, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg condemned the Russian government. (The Kremlin paid no mind.) Although she was careful not to romanticize Chechen rebels, who could be equally brutal, she was highly respected in Chechnya. When Chechen separatists took over 900 hostages at Moscow’s Dubrovka Theater in October 2002, they requested that Politkovskaya be a mediator between them and Russian authorities. Her efforts were unsuccessful because the rebels were demanding that Russian forces pull out of Chechnya, which the Kremlin of course would not consider. What followed, as noted earlier, was carnage.27

  Politkovskaya was outraged by this, raising in Novaia gazeta a number of questions about how the FSB had handled the crisis. First and foremost was why the FSB did not have medical help on hand to treat the victims immediately after they had funneled toxic gas into the theater to subdue the terrorists. And secondly, why did the FSB then kill the terrorists instead of keeping them alive to find out who was behind their venture? Thanks to information passed to her by Sergei Iushenkov, Politkovskaya managed to track down the one terrorist who escaped, Khanpash Terkibaev, and interview him. He told her that he had special connections with the FSB, which led Politkovskaya to conclude that the FSB had known about the terrorists’ plans and that this was part of the Kremlin’s strategy to demonize Chechens. Terkibaev was later killed in an automobile crash in Baku, Azerbaijan.28

  A similar situation played out in September 2004 when Chechen rebels took more than 1,000 hostages at a school in Beslan. Again, Politkovskaya had been asked by the hostage-takers to mediate. But on the plane flight to Beslan, she fell violently ill. Here is what she later recalled: “I succeeded in getting a seat on a plane, ordered a cup of tea, and a certain time later lost consciousness. Already in the hospital [in Rostov], a doctor informed me that I had been poisoned with a powerful unidentified toxic substance. I suspect three FSB officers who were flying in business class.… One of them addressed the stewardess with a question and the other put a tablet in my cup. I survived by a miracle.… Honestly speaking, I never thought that they [the special services] would go so far.”29 This episode, as it turned out, was a harbinger of what was to come.

  As with the theater-hostage crisis, authorities could not explain how a group of heavily armed terrorists had managed to enter Beslan unnoticed and again why all the terrorists except one, who escaped, were reported to have been killed. (In April 2017, the European Court for Human Rights, in a case filed by the victims’ families, ruled that Russian authorities were negligent in their obligation to protect human life.)30

  According to later accounts from Politkovskaya’s friends and co-workers, her reporting had started to take a toll on her. She never fully recovered from the poisoning, and the situation in Chechnya affected her deeply. The editor-in-chief of Novaia gazeta had this to say: “Not that she was any less beautiful. But … the naïveté and cheerfulness disappeared.… She used to be full of laughter and good humor. But the laughter diminished with every passing year.”31

  The Contract Killing of Politkovskaya

  On the afternoon of October 7, 2006, Politkovskaya stopped at the Ramstor Shopping Center in Moscow to buy groceries, including some special items for her daughter, Vera, who was expecting her first child, a girl, in a few months. Politkovskaya was excited about the upcoming birth of her granddaughter and wanted to make sure that Vera, who lived with her, was eating well. Surveillance cameras at the store later revealed that she was being followed by a man and a woman there. Politkovskaya drove home and entered her apartment building on Lesnaia Street shortly after 4 P.M. Just as she was going into the elevator with her groceries, a man wearing a baseball cap shot her in the temple, chest, cheek, and thigh, threw the Izh pistol—which had a silencer—down, and left in a green Lada, visible on CCTV. Politkovskaya died immediately.32

  Politkovskaya had a premonition that she might be killed. She had told her son Ilya two or three days before the murder that she had encountered strange people in the stairwell of her apartment. (Her killers had been following her for several days.) But, according to her colleague at Novaia gazeta Sergei Sokolov, she had been preoccupied with personal concerns: “Anna was a very careful person. She always was acutely aware of any danger. She was not suicidal, but loved life, her family, her children and future grandchildren, who she did not live to see. But at the same time, when this terrible thing happened in October 2006, everything had come over her—her mother’s illness, her father’s [recent] death, and her daughter’s pregnancy.… Anna lost vigilance and they caught her when she was defenseless.”33

  Months passed, until finally, in August 2007, Procurator-General Chaika announced that ten persons had been arrested in connection with the Politkovskaya case and that they included a former employee of the MVD and a former FSB officer. The organizers of the crime, Chaika said, were part of a criminal group from Chechnya, and the person who had ordered the crime was living abroad. The zakazchik’s motive was to “destabilize the political situation in Russia” and “discredit the leadership of the country.” Clearly, Chaika was pointing the finger at Berezovsky in London, although he did not mention him by name and only said that Russia was seeking extradition of the individual. Shortly thereafter, the case was removed from the Procurator’s office and handed over to the newly formed Investigative Committee under Bastrykin.34 This change was apparently the result of the above-mentioned power struggle among the siloviki that had erupted in 2006.

  Trials and More Trials

  By the time the case went to trial in October 2008, there were only three defendants: two Chechen brothers, Dzhabrail and Ibragim Makhmudov, who were accused of driving the getaway car, and former MVD officer Sergei Khadzhikurbanov, said to have organized the murder. As previously mentioned, Khadzhikurbanov had also been implicated in the murder of Klebn
ikov. The alleged triggerman was the third brother of the Chechens, Rustam Makhmudov, who was reported by Bastrykin to have escaped abroad—a familiar story.

  As for the former FSB officer whose name had come up repeatedly in the case, Pavel Riaguzov, he was reported by the prosecutor’s office as having passed on information about Politkovskaya, including her home address, to a third person in the criminal world. He also met with Khadzhikurbanov and spoke several times on the telephone with one of the Makhmudov brothers before the murder. Riaguzov was arrested, released, and re-arrested several times and eventually cleared of charges in the Politkovskaya murder, but he was accused of abuse of office and extortion. Clearly, there was confusion among prosecutors as to what to do with Riaguzov, whose appearance with the others as a defendant in the murder case would have pointed to FSB involvement.35

  The trial, as usual, was held in secret, in a Moscow military court; but there was a jury, which found all three defendants innocent. According to a Russian human-rights activist: “Because evidence had been handled so carelessly, the [defense] lawyer Murad Musaev was able to convince the jury that the whole indictment was unjustified.”36 After an appeal by prosecutors to the Russian Supreme Court, the case was referred in September 2009 back to the Procuracy, where it lingered for another year and a half with little happening.

  Vera Politkovskaya voiced her exasperation with the incompetence of the investigators in an October 2009 interview: