IN MOSCOW, I STARTED ASKING AROUND ABOUT AN AMERICAN named Paul Klebnikov. The Forbes reporter’s investigative stories, especially on billionaire Boris Berezovsky, had attracted wide attention there. I had run across his work while writing a book on oil and been struck by his obvious confidence when describing Russia’s elites. Much of the nation’s super-rich—guys I couldn’t get to—granted him access, and the insights that he gained led to a number of exclusive reports on corruption. The detail that filled his stories made them especially enjoyable to read.
I was surprised to discover that Klebnikov seemed a kindred spirit of Vladimir Putin. That set him apart from his more skeptical—in some cases, downright hostile—journalistic colleagues. But then Klebnikov wasn’t an orthodox reporter. He was an unabashed crusader on a shared mission with the Russian president. Both saw themselves duty bound to assist in the restoration of a great Russia—prosperous, powerful, and respected by the world. Both attacked anyone who appeared to be impeding that goal. Neither seemed to pause to consider that his vision of historic Russia might have been more romantic than real.
Klebnikov’s leanings were more understandable when one considered his origins. Unlike Putin, who was most strongly influenced by his sentimental loyalty to Russia’s security services, Klebnikov was driven by blood. A descendant of czarist-era aristocrats, he quoted Pushkin with regularity and spoke fluent Russian with what some acquaintances presumed was the accent of a nineteenth-century nobleman. (New York magazine reported that he and two friends ran the city’s marathon in T-shirts bearing the double-headed Russian eagle, and that Klebnikov led them in Russian military songs to keep spirits high. “We’re fighting for Mother Russia and the czar!” went one lyric.)
He acquired his enthusiasm for things Russian at an early age. His family’s Manhattan apartment was festooned with memorabilia of the old country. Descendants of Russia’s displaced nobility were regular visitors, and the young Klebnikov was taught to respect his family’s place in history. Stories were told around the dinner table about men such as Ivan Pouschine, a Klebnikov ancestor who was imprisoned for involvement in an 1825 uprising known as the Decembrist revolt, and great-grandfather Arcadi Nebolsin, a Russian admiral slain by mutineers during the Bolshevik revolution. An entire generation of the family had fled Russia during the 1917 uprising.
At the same time, Klebnikov became comfortable around the well-to-do. He was a guest at the homes of schoolmates from St. Bernard’s, on the Upper East Side, and Phillips Exeter Academy, in New Hampshire, both exclusive schools. Later, he studied at two highly selective universities, UC Berkeley, in California, and the London School of Economics. His wife-to-be, Helen, or “Musa,” as she was known, was the daughter of John Train, a wealthy New York investment adviser and bestselling author of books including The Money Masters.
Forbes hired Klebnikov in 1989 at the age of twenty-six, soon after he completed his research for a doctorate in Russian studies. His intimate knowledge of life in the upper class dovetailed nicely with the magazine’s interests. He visited Institut Le Rosey, in Rolle, Switzerland, where he had taught tennis five years earlier, and wrote an unforgettable piece about this boarding school for the coddled rich, including the children of princes and kings. Klebnikov’s inquisitive mind was evident in a later investigative report on the wealth of Iran’s Rafsanjani family, whose patriarchs were among “a handful of clerics who call the shots behind the curtain and have gotten very rich in the process.” It was groundbreaking work.
Along the way, he traveled regularly to Russia and wrote stories lamenting what he saw as its decline into criminality under the presidency of Boris Yeltsin. In December 1996, he made his biggest splash ever, with a story highly critical of Boris Berezovsky. The piece—headlined “Godfather of the Kremlin?”—suggested that the oligarch had become Russia’s greatest baron by consorting with gangsters and being complicit in murder. The latter charge led to a Berezovsky libel suit, which was resolved when Forbes publicly retracted the implication that the billionaire had played a role in anyone’s death.
The Berezovsky story had run without a byline, apparently out of concern for Klebnikov’s safety. But it did not take much guesswork in Moscow to determine the author’s identity, and death threats soon began to arrive. He continued to write about Russia, but with an armed bodyguard at his side whenever he visited the country.
Klebnikov heaped scorn on Yeltsin, soon to be succeeded by Putin. In a 1999 piece for Forbes, he accused the lame duck president of presiding over a “gangster state. Corrupt from top to bottom, it is ruled by a small group of political bosses and their crony capitalist friends. The gang feeds on state assets and protects itself with violence.” These virtual traitors were preventing the revival of his beloved Russia, Klebnikov believed.
But Berezovsky topped his list of scoundrels. In 2000, a Klebnikov biography of the oligarch was published under the title of Godfather of the Kremlin. The book drew heavily on the piece four years earlier in Forbes, although this time there was no question mark. Klebnikov ticked off Berezovsky’s alleged misdeeds on the path from small-time mathematician to wealthy kingmaker—a career, he wrote, that was “replete with bankrupt companies and violent deaths.” Klebnikov thought that Berezovsky was an object lesson in why foreigners during Yeltsin’s rule should have let Russia be Russia instead of trying to impose Western traditions. “If it is hard for westerners to understand how the introduction of democratic principles could have been so poisonous to Russian society, Berezovsky’s career holds one of the keys,” he wrote.
According to his editors, to understand Klebnikov one had to read Eastern Approaches, the 1951 memoir of Fitzroy Maclean. The classic account follows the swashbuckling Scot through hair-raising adventures as a British diplomat observing Stalin’s 1937 purge trial of Bukharin; as a clandestine traveler to Central Asia and Afghanistan; and particularly as Winston Churchill’s personal ambassador to Tito in the mountains of Croatia during World War II. I was lucky enough to meet Maclean in Georgia a few months before his death, in 1996, at the age of eighty-five. He dozed off a few times as we sat in his hotel room, discussing his hopes for Georgia’s young independence. But with a bejeweled Georgian sword on the nightstand and a pair of carved Scottish canes by his side, Maclean was still at heart a man of action.
This exceptional man inspired generations of diplomats and journalists, including me. But I never thought I was Maclean. Klebnikov apparently did. “Most journalists think of themselves as observers. But Paul thought of himself as a participant. Like Maclean, Klebnikov wasn’t only interested in recording what he saw. He really believed he could play a part in public affairs,” said James Michaels, the Forbes editor who hired him. William Baldwin, another of Klebnikov’s editors, said, “He had this messianic belief that he was going to be part of the transition from a gangster country to a civilized country.”
I couldn’t relate to this side of Klebnikov. I felt highly uncomfortable with the notion of injecting myself into the affairs of a foreign country. Not Klebnikov. He seemed to have acquired Lord Jim pretensions, exhibiting the vanity of a Westerner who imagined himself rescuing the natives. As to his bashing of Berezovsky, I had dealt with many such unappealing characters over the years, but I felt it was crossing a journalistic line to invest so much personal outrage in one’s reportage.
But that, of course, was precisely the point for Klebnikov. He was personally invested in the story. He did take offense at the perceived misconduct of those he wrote about, Berezovsky being a prime example.
The Russian edition of Godfather of the Kremlin became a nonfiction bestseller, with 110,000 copies sold. Klebnikov tried to repeat that success with a book based on fifteen hours of taped conversation with a well-known Chechen warlord named Khozh-Ahmed Nukhayev. The man had been a debonair law student in Moscow and then a mobster before becoming a Chechen guerilla fighter and finally an anti-Western Islamic fundamentalist. But the book, Conversation with a Barbarian, was a flop, selling only six thousand copies.
Still, Klebnikov’s writings about Berezovsky had impressed his editors. They offered him the editorship of his own magazine, a Russian-language version of Forbes, and he readily accepted. All these years, Klebnikov had been flying from the United States and elsewhere to Moscow to do his reporting, then returning home. Now he could live in the Russian capital.
The forty-year-old Klebnikov, handsome, with piercing hazel eyes and a shock of brown hair, plunged headlong into his new assignment. He threw a champagne party for the magazine’s launch, at the five-star Baltschug hotel on the Moscow River. And he set in motion an editorial project that was breathtaking by Russian standards—an American-style listing of the country’s wealthiest citizens. It would throw the spotlight on Russia’s profiteers and surely offend the gangster element that would be well represented on the list. Klebnikov’s brainstorm seemed impossible to execute. How could anyone assemble such a list in a country where personal wealth is hidden from view, largely stashed in offshore accounts under false names? Yet Klebnikov and his team somehow succeeded, and the resulting layout, “The Golden Hundred,” was an instant sensation. It appeared in the magazine’s second issue, in May 2004, and catapulted Forbes Russia into the top tier of the country’s business magazines.
One might expect Klebnikov’s editorial daring to have triggered threats of physical retaliation; death threats had been quick to follow publication of “Godfather of the Kremlin?” in the magazine’s U.S. edition. But I could find no record of any threats against Klebnikov while he edited Forbes Russia. This was somewhat puzzling. As Leonid Bershidsky, his publisher in Moscow at the time, observed, “He was doing investigative stories and was making enemies with every story.”
Klebnikov now moved about Moscow without bodyguards, outwardly confident that he was in no personal danger. He was heartened by Boris Berezovsky’s self-exile in London and the firm rule of Vladimir Putin, now president of Russia. A fresh breeze was blowing through the country, he thought. But the private Klebnikov seemed somewhat ambivalent about security conditions. His wife and their three children had remained in the United States; she didn’t want to live in Russia and Klebnikov had agreed to take the job for just a year. When a visitor asked why his family was not with him, he replied, “I don’t know if it is safe for my family.”
Bershidsky, technically Klebnikov’s boss at Forbes Russia, was employed by Newsweek when I first met him in Moscow in the early 1990s. I was writing for the magazine and he was a “fixer,” on call to translate and solve any problems encountered by its reporters. He had since become a notable success in the business world. He told me that Klebnikov’s managerial skills were lacking, but that his journalism was towering. Klebnikov, he said, could “spend a month on a project and dig out something that others wanted to but couldn’t for ten years.” The American editor dazzled on all fronts. “People gathered around to hear how he carried out interviews,” Bershidsky said.
But as I talked with other journalists in Moscow, I discovered that Klebnikov’s reputation was mixed. Again and again I was told that his main claim to fame—the book Godfather of the Kremlin—was based on documents and interviews provided by a single disgruntled former Berezovsky ally, Alexander Korzhakov, who had been Boris Yeltsin’s chief of security. Prevailing wisdom said it was a hatchet job.
I concluded that some of the criticism was sour grapes. From the endnotes, one can see that Korzhakov provided Klebnikov with a road map—the knowledge and documents that he needed to get started. But finding fault with Klebnikov seemed to overlook how investigative journalism often begins with information supplied by an insider. Then the real work begins: The reporter must seek corroboration, authenticate documents, test the credibility of sources, and broaden the story to include all sides. Klebnikov’s twenty-nine pages of endnotes are an impressive display of such footwork. Overall, the book was solid journalism, covering a vast amount of ground, with insider detail that gave the reader a “you are there” feeling.
Not that it is bulletproof. Valeri Streletsky, the publisher of the Russian-language edition, was in fact Korzhakov’s former deputy, and thus an interested party. Streletsky told me that Klebnikov brought him the English-language manuscript that was being published by Harcourt, the Florida-based house, and that he simply hired a translator for the Russian edition. He didn’t see anything unscrupulous about his role, and given that it was a straight translation of the English edition, I didn’t either. Still, it was reckless for Klebnikov to expose himself to this appearance of partiality.
The English-language edition occasionally suffers from disingenuous writing. It hints at a Berezovsky connection to certain murders, but presents no proof. For example, Klebnikov writes that many of Berezovsky’s business ventures “were marred by the assassination or accidental death of key players,” but “there is no evidence that Berezovsky was responsible for any of these deaths.” What was Klebnikov’s point, other than to plant in the reader’s mind the opposite message—that Berezovsky somehow was to blame? Klebnikov also overexerts himself in some instances to show cause and effect. For example, he intimates that Berezovsky caused the Second Chechen War by making ransom payments to Chechen kidnappers who then attacked Russia. Berezovsky’s aim, according to Klebnikov? To make Putin president. Without something more in the way of evidence, the scenario is strained and unconvincing.
Some colleagues grumbled that Klebnikov was simply reporting what “everyone knew” about Berezovsky and the other oligarchs. I wrote that off as bar-stool talk. While he misfired on some occasions, Klebnikov was practicing professional, tough, American-style journalism and was among the very few writers who penetrated Russia’s criminal underside.
Which raises yet another rap against him—that he was a romantic. Alexander Politkovsky, an investigative reporter and the estranged husband of Anna Politkovskaya, told me that Klebnikov “didn’t really understand what was going on in Russia in reality.” Oleg Panfilov, who runs a nonprofit Moscow office that teaches journalists how to protect themselves, said: “He was naïve. He worshipped Russia, and understood nothing about Russia.”
Others whose advice I also respected made similar assertions—that Klebnikov’s reporting on Russia was flawed from the beginning because he was less knowledgeable than he thought. If so, I wouldn’t have been surprised. I had met numerous well-meaning but presumptuous second-and third-generation Americans who traced their ancestry to the former Soviet Union and came seeking to help the homeland. Their relatives in Russia and the neighboring republics often found these visitors to be condescending, and the Americans just as often were disappointed by the experience. In Armenia, some visiting kinfolk from America were told that the best thing they could do was stay home and send a check.
There was something to that advice.
I wondered how Berezovsky felt about having been the object of Klebnikov’s vilification. I dropped by his Mayfair, London, office on April 23, 2007, just hours after momentous news had arrived from Moscow—Boris Yeltsin had died at the age of seventy-six.
The billionaire, sporting a black silk shirt and striped white-and-gray slacks, was pacing and brooding. “Everything is topsy-turvy,” he said. Berezovsky, who had adulated Yeltsin, went on at length about the debt Russia owed this man who “helped millions of people to be released from slavery.”
He felt quite the opposite about Yeltsin’s ungrateful successor, Vladimir Putin, whom the billionaire aimed to bring down. If he couldn’t manage to oust him, he would at least make the autocratic Russian leader as miserable as he was.
Berezovsky had retreated to London about six years earlier, and the warfare between him and Putin had only worsened since then. Russia repeatedly sent prosecutors after him, hoping to extradite the onetime oligarch on a series of charges, including the alleged theft from a Russian manufacturer of two thousand cars worth some $13 million. But British courts refused to hand him over.
For his part, Berezovsky sank tens of millions of dollars into an anti-Putin crusade. He was the backer of Blowing Up Russia, the book that accused the Kremlin of complicity in the terrifying 1999 apartment bombings, and a companion documentary called Assassination of Russia.
In 2004, Berezovsky financed Putin’s opponent when he was up for reelection, a veteran lawmaker named Ivan Rybkin (whose campaign went off the rails when he vanished for five days, then reappeared in an incoherent state that suggested he had been drugged). The same year, Berezovsky panicked Russia’s ruling class by spending $30 million to support the so-called Orange Revolution in Ukraine. A Kremlin critic named Viktor Yushchenko emerged as president of the former Soviet republic after he was poisoned with dioxin, an unsolved assassination attempt that left his face disfigured. Popular opinion in Ukraine upended a rigged election and forced the rejection of a Moscow-backed candidate. Similar “street power” had unseated the president of neighboring Georgia only a year earlier, and Putin feared Russia—and he—could be next.
Berezovsky assembled a team of intellectuals and writers to help orchestrate the ouster of the Russian president. In this respect, he resembled an Old World patron of kept artists. His key allies in this endeavor were the former 1970s dissident Alex Goldfarb, the Boston-based political scholar Yuri Felshtinsky, and of course Alexander Litvinenko. These men churned out books, blog postings, and statements lambasting Putin. But Putin continued to rule, leaving Berezovsky to pout.
At its simplest, the ongoing struggle between Berezovsky and Putin was about one issue: Who would control Russia’s treasures? Berezovsky wanted the nation’s industrial might to be in private hands, with a large part reserved for him, naturally. Putin believed in state ownership, albeit with a generous helping set aside for his own favored oligarchs. Television was an excellent example of this. Once, the industry was controlled by media moguls such as Berezovsky, who acquired huge television holdings in the corrupt 1990s and made stations serve their political desires. Then the state wrested control, and television became the dutiful servant to Putin and the Kremlin.
As for Klebnikov, Berezovsky met with him once, for an interview in 1996. He described the Forbes editor as “a captive of his emotions, with all this idea of great Russia, of Russia for Russians.” He did not find Klebnikov to be an impressive journalist. What particularly upset him, Berezovsky said, was the suggestion in the original “Godfather” article that he had played a role in the murder of Vlad Listyev, the talk-show host at Berezovsky’s television station. He had sued, he said, “to demonstrate in the West that I am ready to protect my reputation, and I have done so.”
With that, Berezovsky was off to his next meeting. A Russian journalist wanted to talk about defecting to Britain. Could the billionaire help?
Klebnikov praised Putin for beginning to correct the errors made during “Russia’s flawed transition from Communism to a market economy in the 1990s,” which he labeled “one of the most mishandled reforms in history.” While much remained to be done, “the Russian marketplace is benefitting from the stability brought by the administration of President Vladimir Putin. Gone is the gangster free-for-all of the Yeltsin era. Putin has chosen a more measured pace of market liberalization, as well as more predictable rules.” Under Putin, the admiring editor wrote, “the country is finally creating a serious consumer market. Some of the oligarchs’ wealth, it seems, is starting to trickle down.” The May 2004 issue of Forbes Russia that listed the country’s richest citizens contained this exuberant testimony from Klebnikov: “Dynamism is one of the core characteristics of capitalism, and capitalist Russia is one of the most dynamic countries in the world right now.”
In July of that year, his wife, Musa, came to visit for a few days. They strolled Moscow together and dined with Mark Franchetti, the investigative reporter for the London Sunday Times. The three had been meaning to meet socially for some time—Musa was friends with a cousin of Franchetti’s—but had been unable to synchronize their schedules. Over a four-hour meal at the Pushkin Cafe, the two men debated the state of affairs in Russia. Franchetti told me that Klebnikov thought he was too negative about the country, while Franchetti felt that the American was “too much an apologist for Putin and naïve about the place.”
At one point, Musa asked Franchetti, “Is it safe here, or not safe?”
Franchetti, sensing that she was worried about her husband, didn’t know how to reply.
“Russia is changing,” he finally said. “Now people turn to lawyers, not contract killers.”
Klebnikov took Musa to the airport two days later, then returned to his grueling routine, working late hours at the Forbes Russia office. It was situated in a building across from the lovely Botanichesky Sad, or “Botanical Garden.” Klebnikov was in the habit of commuting by metro, using a station in the park a short walk from his office.
On Friday, July 9, two days after his wife’s departure, Klebnikov was working late again. He made a series of phone calls—to Musa, his brother Peter and his sister, Anna—in which he voiced high hopes for both Russia and Forbes Russia. Then he quit for the night. On his way out of the building, he passed an office used by Newsweek reporters, some of who were still working. It was about nine-thirty p.m., but still light outside.
Klebnikov walked across the street and approached the park. Suddenly, a dark Russian-made car, a Lada, halted behind him. A man inside the vehicle pointed a 9-millimeter Makarov pistol at the editor and fired four bullets. The car drove off without any words being spoken.
A guard rushed into the Newsweek office: “Somebody just called. He says that someone shot Paul Klebnikov in the stomach.”
Reporters Mikhail Fishman and Alexander Gordeev trotted into the street, where police, ambulance attendants, and spectators formed a circle around the fallen editor. Klebnikov was on his back on the sidewalk. Gordeev saw blood coming from one of his ears, soaking his shirt. A pool of blood was visible about thirty yards away, marking the spot where Klebnikov had been hit. It appeared that he had tried to get back to the office, but collapsed. He was still conscious and able to talk.
“Do you know what happened?” Gordeev asked Klebnikov in English.
“No,” Klebnikov calmly replied in Russian. “Someone was shooting.”
“Do you know who?”
“No.”
Klebnikov described the gunman as a Russian, with black hair and wearing black clothing. He asked the Newsweek reporter to call his wife and brother. Then he asked for oxygen. There was none, but fluids were administered intravenously, and Klebnikov was loaded into an ambulance. Gordeev saw that he was tensing up. His eyes took on a desperate look, and he began to shake his head, as if to say, “No.” A doctor had to restrain Klebnikov from getting up. After a twenty-minute wait, the ambulance crew was told which hospital would receive them, and the vehicle sped from the scene.
Fishman, the other Newsweek reporter, rode along. “You can do it. It will be all right,” he repeated as Klebnikov slipped in and out of consciousness. At the hospital, there were more delays. The entrance gate was locked, forcing the ambulance to wait to be admitted. Once inside, Klebnikov was loaded onto a gurney and into an elevator, but it became stuck between floors.
At 10:48 p.m., just over an hour after Klebnikov had left his office, Gordeev’s phone rang. “It’s all over,” Fishman said. “He’s dead.”
Klebnikov had died either in the stalled elevator or shortly after, in the operating room. The doctors gave different stories, and no one knew whom to believe.
“None of us ever had the feeling that someone could kill him,” said Klebnikov’s deputy, Maxim Kashulinsky. “In retrospect, obviously everyone missed something.”
Russian police sometimes resemble the Keystone Kops. But they can be quite effective if they are motivated to solve a case, and if politics doesn’t get in their way. The killing of Klebnikov had their full attention.
Pyotr Gabriyan, one of the most skilled investigators in the federal prosecutor’s office, was assigned to the case. His team located the Lada used in the attack the very next day, and dusted it for fingerprints. Then they applied some old-fashioned shoe leather, with a high-tech twist. Gabriyan’s men reviewed cell phone activity in the vicinity of the park and discovered a number of suspicious calls to or from the area almost nightly for two weeks prior to and including the day of the murder. The callers were Chechen thugs who were identified as members of a murder-for-hire gang. Fingerprints and trace amounts of lint linked some of them to the Lada.
Four months after Klebnikov’s murder, authorities announced that two Chechens had been arrested in the case. One of them, Kazbek Dukuzov, the alleged triggerman, had been captured in Belarus. Extradition proceedings moved slowly at first, arousing suspicion that corrupt Belarus officials were protecting him. When the delays suddenly ended and the Chechen was shipped back to Russia, some suspected that Putin had intervened.
“I think Putin himself called [Belarus president Alexander] Lukashenko and pushed to have him extradited,” one of Klebnikov’s colleagues told me. “I think that Putin has pushed to make sure that the case is pursued.”
Putin openly expressed interest in the case, something that was unusual for him. In fall 2005, he met with Klebnikov’s widow and one of his brothers in New York. At his annual news conference in 2007, he said, “Not long ago one of our American partners said something very true: ‘Paul Klebnikov died for a democratic Russia, for the development of democracy in Russia.’ I completely agree with him. I fully agree with this evaluation.”
Police said they believed that the killing was ordered by Khozh-Ahmed Nukhayev, the central figure in Klebnikov’s book Conversation with a Barbarian. The book was highly critical of the Chechens in particular and Muslims in general. It was said that Nukhayev had become so incensed that he hired the Chechen gang to assassinate its author. But he disappeared from sight after Klebnikov’s slaying and was never tracked down by police.
(Valeri Streletsky, the book’s publisher, is skeptical about Nukhayev being the mastermind. Not long after Conversation with a Barbarian was released, a package arrived at the publisher’s office. It contained writings by Nukhayev and a note from his representative asking if Streletsky might want to publish them. The publisher declined, but told me that the package helped to persuade him that “Nukhayev had no role in the killing.” If he was so furious about the Klebnikov book, why would he want to have any dealings with the man who had made it possible?)
Once in custody, both suspects openly boasted that they had participated in the murder of Klebnikov, according to inside information that reached Russian journalists. Such braggadocio might strike Westerners as reckless. But gangsters regarded Russian law enforcement as largely impotent and had few inhibitions about virtually daring police to take them on.
The trial was closed, not witnessed by reporters or family members. But the prosecution was confident of its case, which was based on an array of circumstantial evidence: cell phone records; fingerprints and other clues gathered from the Lada; information linking the gang to other murders; and testimony that prior to Klebnikov’s killing, the gang members had bragged that they were to be paid $3 million for a “big job.” The boastful confessions did not figure in the trial because the two suspects refused to sign them, ruling out their use by prosecutors.
Klebnikov’s supporters began to have misgivings when word got around that the defendants and defense lawyers seemed to relax as the trial wore on. Suspicions arose that someone had tampered with the jury, always a possibility in Russia. In May 2006, the jury acquitted both defendants and the judge ordered their release. The Klebnikov camp felt defeated. But six months later, the Supreme Court intervened—in Russia, there is no concept of double jeopardy—and overturned the acquittals. A new trial was ordered. The second Chechen suspect, Musa Vakhaev, appeared at preliminary hearings, but the accused shooter, Dukuzov, vanished. In his absence, the judge halted all proceedings; the retrial was pending as of this writing.
Like his book publisher, I was not satisfied with the notion that Klebnikov died because of the way he portrayed a Chechen warlord in print. I turned to Mark Franchetti for some insight. He had lived and worked in Moscow for a decade, and was a seasoned reporter. Franchetti figured that a journalist in Russia had to do one of two things to get killed: either get really seriously into someone’s personal life, or ruin someone’s business deal. For instance, in 1994, a twenty-seven-year-old Russian reporter named Dmitri Kholodov was investigating allegations that the then defense minister, Pavel Grachev, and others were selling off military goods for personal gain. One day, a source called to say he had documents that could help advance Kholodov’s corruption probe. When the reporter opened the briefcase supposedly containing the documents, it blew up, killing him.
Investigative reporters in Russia know that the unpublished story poses the greatest danger to the writer. After a piece is printed, the damage is done. But when the makings for a potentially explosive article are still in a journalist’s notebook, everything is at risk, especially the reporter’s personal safety. Some believe Klebnikov was working on a blockbuster at the time of his death, a story involving large sums of money stolen in the multi-billion-dollar reconstruction of Chechnya. Klebnikov’s family, which has access to his computer hard drive and other personal effects, said there was no evidence of such a story. But it is an angle worth further consideration.
It is not possible to know, of course, but I think it likely that Klebnikov would have disapproved of this book, especially my critical view of Putin and the “new Russian state” that he fathered. Klebnikov was a tough reporter in pursuit of elements he felt were sullying the state he loved, but toward the end of his life he thought it was time to write more positively about the country itself. Klebnikov’s wife, Musa, and his brother Peter declined to cooperate while I was doing my research. They specifically objected to his murder being lumped in with the deaths of Litvinenko and others who had defected from Russia or were enemies of Putin, or both. Klebnikov’s story was fundamentally different—he was not one of them—and he did not deserve to be in their company.
But here is the trouble with that reasoning: Klebnikov’s murder repudiated his own message about Russia—that Putin was taking it toward deserved greatness and that it was on the cusp of achieving equal footing with the West. In my opinion, his death sent the opposite message: that Russia was more prosperous but ultimately the same dangerous place it had always been. Putin was following the path dictated by his autocratic predecessors for centuries, glorifying the state over the individual. He was presiding over a system that continued to protect those who killed to further its interests.
It makes no sense to pretend that Klebnikov does not belong in the company of these victims of the Putin era. He crossed the same invisible line as the rest, and it became acceptable for someone to murder him.
In the end, he became the victim of a Russia whose nature he never fully grasped.