As Vladimir Putin’s presidency was winding down, he sent two miniature submarines on a daring 2.5-mile dive under the Arctic ice. When they reached the seafloor, the three-person crew in one of the submersibles ejected a titanium capsule containing a Russian flag. This symbolic planting of the flag in August 2007 laid claim to the underwater region of the North Pole as Russian territory—a bold challenge to four other nations, the United States, Denmark, Norway, and Canada, that also asserted undersea rights there. But the unprecedented feat was no mere explorer’s vanity. According to the United States Geological Survey, some 25 percent of the world’s oil and natural gas underlies the Arctic. The Russian president was sending dual messages: Don’t underestimate Russian technology, nor Russia’s resolve to compete for global riches.
It was the type of gesture that Putin watchers had come to expect during his two terms in office. He regarded himself as a man of action, and, judging by opinion polls and election results, Russians as a whole did, too. As he made preparations to leave the presidency in 2008, Putin had become the closest thing to an all-powerful czar that Russia had known since the rule of Josef Stalin. He made no secret of his intention to remain at the pinnacle of power, and found a deceptively simple way to do so. Rather than run roughshod over the Russian constitution, which forbade a third term, he anointed himself as the next prime minister, enabling him to share power with his presidential successor. True, prime ministers after the collapse of the Soviet Union had served at the sufferance of the president; Boris Yeltsin and then Putin had fired them at will. But Putin decided that it would be different with him—Russia would have a government of equals and the new president would not, could not, arbitrarily fire him.
Achieving this arrangement required a critical mass of agreement among the Kremlin hierarchy, the military, and the security services that Putin was indeed essential. The ways of power in Russia have never been wholly visible, but this critical mass could bring down a government if it wished. Its leaders must have decided that it was in their mutual interest—professionally and probably financially as well—for Putin to remain a key player. Only one matter had to be resolved: With whom would Putin share power?
Eight years earlier, Yeltsin had set a precedent by declaring that Putin would be his successor, and had relied on the power of the Kremlin to make it happen. Now Putin set about doing the same. Many outsiders predicted that the next president would be Sergei Ivanov, a three-decade-long Putin intimate from his St. Petersburg days who had the added advantage of having served two decades in the foreign service of the KGB. Those who viewed Putin’s Russia as the “KGB State,” as Western publications and think tanks were prone to do, thought the fifty-four-year-old Ivanov was a shoo-in.
In December 2007, however, Putin announced that he would support another intimate for the job—a forty-two-year-old St. Petersburg lawyer named Dmitri Medvedev. In the post-Soviet custom, the election was rigged far in advance; Putin systematically disqualified any opponent he wanted to sideline, and state-controlled media accorded Medvedev the same worshipful coverage that Putin had enjoyed as presidential contender. Three months later, Medvedev won with about 70 percent of the vote, almost precisely Putin’s popularity rating in the country.
What explained Putin’s choice of Medvedev over Ivanov? By some measures, they were evenly matched. Both had served as first deputy prime ministers and neither was known for particularly strong leadership skills. But Ivanov, the KGB veteran, seemed far more likely to win the respect of the difficult-to-handle generals and spy chiefs. Medvedev, the son of university professors and the holder of a doctorate in law, had no experience in the military or Putin’s beloved intelligence agencies. Since Putin isn’t going to share his innermost thoughts, here is where only informed speculation is possible: Putin must have decided that Medvedev was more likely than Ivanov to tolerate, and perhaps even embrace, a subordinate relationship with the designated prime minister.
In a chat with the Financial Times, Medvedev seemed to give credence to this idea. “The incumbent president is an effective leader and he’s ready and able to continue to work to advance the development of our country, to make sure our development continues in the way set out eight years ago,” Medvedev said. “This is why this tandem, or this team of two, was formed between the presidential candidate and the Russian president as a possible future prime minister.”
Yet, one wonders if Putin was taking too much for granted. It is easy to call the undistinguished Medvedev colorless, but the same—and worse—was said of Putin himself when he took power eight years earlier. History is replete with mild-mannered understudies who became hubristic leaders once on the throne. In addition to Putin, there are the examples of Anwar el-Sadat and Hosni Mubarak of Egypt; Zia ul-Haq of Pakistan; and Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany. Would Medvedev truly be content continuing his predecessor’s policies and receiving second billing? Or would he seek more? Putin would not have been blind to that peril, but he apparently saw little cause for concern.
He and Medvedev did their best to fend off doubts about their proposed power sharing. They remarked on their history of mutual trust and noted how long they had known each other. Medvedev had worked quietly as a subordinate to Putin for some eighteen years, starting in the early 1990s, when the scholarly lawyer was a legal consultant in the office of the St. Petersburg mayor. As the story goes, when Putin became prime minister in 1999, he had no one on whom he could truly depend. So he summoned Medvedev to Moscow to be his chief administrative deputy. Then, when Putin became president, he named Medvedev chairman of Gazprom.
The latter appointment was an important demonstration of confidence, since Gazprom is Russia’s strategically most important company, accounting for a quarter of all government revenue, according to 2006 tax figures. It also served as the main lever of Putin’s foreign policy. When he decided to seize oligarch Vladimir Gusinsky’s television station, it was Gazprom, with Medvedev at the helm, who actually took over NTV. When Putin ordered that the natural gas pipeline to Ukraine be shut down, incurring the wrath of European customers who depended on the same line for their supply, it was Medvedev’s Gazprom that actually carried out the order.
The same alliance went into action in 2007 when Putin moved to reassert Moscow’s power on the Caspian Sea, a longtime Russian preserve where the United States had been laboring for a decade to establish a strong Western presence.
There was nothing Putin could do on the western side of the sea—Washington had already cemented Azerbaijan’s and Georgia’s links to the West by successfully championing the construction of a non-Russian oil pipeline to the Mediterranean that made the region somewhat independent of Moscow. But the Americans had not yet brought the eastern side of the sea into its fold, and that’s where—through Medvedev—Putin acted.
Washington was loosely championing a set of two new natural gas pipelines that would link the energy-rich eastern Caspian countries of Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan with Europe. The crowning glory would be Nabucco, a two-thousand-mile line that would reach into the heart of Europe.
Putin countered by proposing that Gazprom ship the same natural gas—from Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan—straight north into Russia, and from there on to Europe. The scheme would renew Moscow’s bond with the two western Caspian states, both traditional Russian dominions, and would confound the West’s attempt to deepen its penetration of the former Russian empire. Medvedev and Putin personally courted the Turkmen and the Kazakhs, and by the spring of 2008 it was clear that the Russian strategy had all but won; the two Caspian states had signed over much of their natural gas to Russia, and the transit countries in Europe had agreed as well. It appeared to be a signal Russian triumph.
How far Putin—and $100-a-barrel oil—had brought his country was demonstrated even more starkly at the annual NATO gathering in April 2008. On the agenda were applications by Ukraine and Georgia to join the Western military alliance. Many Russians felt that the West had already violated an unofficial pledge to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev during the late 1980s. At that time, Moscow voluntarily withdrew its army from Eastern European states, and senior Russian officials have said they were under the impression that Poland, Hungary, and the rest would not be absorbed into NATO, which, after all, was an anti-Soviet alliance. When the West did so anyway, taking in eleven former Soviet and Eastern Bloc countries, many Russians felt betrayed and humiliated. Now President Bush was strongly backing the inclusion of two more former Soviet states, an act that would push the NATO alliance smack against Russia’s western and southern territories. As Medvedev put it, “no state can be pleased about having representatives of a military bloc to which it does not belong coming close to its borders.”
But this time it didn’t go so smoothly. Lobbied heavily by the outgoing Russian president, Germany and France both suggested that, as a sign of respect, the alliance should delay consideration of the Ukrainian and Georgian applications until the end of the year, after Putin left office. Bush offered one of his trademark speeches about the march of freedom and the cause of liberty, but Germany, France, Italy, and others vetoed his proposal—solely because Putin objected.
That could not—and did not—happen during the time of Yeltsin, whose wishes NATO routinely ignored. Putin had not only made Europe listen; he had compelled it to act.
Russia’s ascendance to a new level of influence was reflected in the difficulty encountered by a second Bush proposal at the NATO meeting—the construction of a missile-defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic. It was approved unanimously by the twenty-six members of the alliance. Yet, possibly for the first time in his presidency, Bush elected to give ground on what he had identified as a primary strategic objective. He agreed to freeze the actual deployment of the missile shield until Moscow could be brought on board, something that clearly could not be achieved before his presidency ended.
Bush then turned his dual defeats into something resembling obsequiousness by flying to Putin’s vacation home in Sochi. He went there without any sign of a face-saving concession from Russia on any issue, and in violation of his own definition of when a U.S. president should put his prestige on the line by deigning to visit another country. He said only that he wanted to pave the way to a more cooperative relationship between the two countries. One would be foolish to carry this too far, but it did not seem excessive to say that, as far as Bush was concerned, Russia had finally earned equal ranking with the world’s most powerful nations; its wishes had to be respected. It was quite a turnaround for both leaders—a shot of hard-fought-for respect for Putin, and a step down for the customarily uncompromising Bush.
Some observers in the West searched for signs that Medvedev would be his own man, and his soft speaking style—along with an open fondness for the 1970s band Deep Purple—fed optimism that he would be more conciliatory toward the outside world. But Putin remarked publicly that if the West thought that Medvedev would be easier than he to deal with on foreign policy issues, it was wrong. And Medvedev agreed.
Indeed, the signs were that the long Russian continuum stretching from the time of the czars to the present would go on. There was no indication that Medvedev would inherit Putin’s influence over the siloviki, nor that, even if Putin did relegate true control over the military and spy agencies to his successor, Medvedev would change their operating style. Medvedev expressed no misgivings about unsolved murders, the indifference of the system, or the impunity enjoyed by killers. In Medvedev’s public appearances, it was difficult to find any opinions distinguishing him from Putin. Asked by Financial Times reporters what he had learned from Putin, Medvedev replied, among other things, that “Russia needs the maximum consolidation of power, consolidation of the Russian elite and consolidation of society. Only in this case we can attain the goals we have set in front of us.”
Late in 2007, I dined in London with Mariane Pearl, the French widow of Danny Pearl, my Wall Street Journal colleague who was gruesomely murdered in Pakistan five years earlier. Mariane was writing a popular series of articles for Glamour magazine on women leaders around the world, and told me that she was coincidentally in town to see Marina Litvinenko. Mariane—not an easy person to impress—was obviously taken with Marina, and pushed me hard not to judge her and those close to her too harshly. I had been dismayed by some of the self-promoters who had attached themselves to Marina Litvinenko after the assassination of her husband, but I said I would take a second look.
The next day, I met with Marina for lunch. Mariane’s sentiments were obviously mutual. Marina had seen photographs of Mariane with the actress Angelina Jolie and had wondered how she managed to handle Danny’s murder. “It was completely incredible,” Marina said. “We discovered we had very much in common. Not only in what happened to us, but in our lives in general. That we gave birth at the same age. That she used to love dancing, and that I do, too. Some of the complexities in our families. Incredible. I hope it will lay the foundation for a long-term friendship. I just hope.” Who could genuinely understand what Marina Litvinenko was feeling? Perhaps only another widow, such as Mariane.
After her husband’s murder, tension remained between Marina and Alexander’s children from his first marriage, to Natalia. The son, Sasha, was bitter because he believed his father had died for nothing, and the daughter, Sonya, felt that she and her brother were afterthoughts in their father’s second family. Alexander and Marina had hosted Sonya in England three times in the six years they were there, and Marina had thought that she and the young girl had established a rapport. But that did not seem to be the case after Alexander’s murder. “Marina is making money from my father’s death,” Sonya said. Marina said such comments from her stepdaughter made it difficult “to speak with her right now. I’m offended.”
By March 2008, Marina had given up hope that Andrei Lugovoi would be extradited to Britain to face trial. So she asked her lawyer to petition the country’s coroner to hold a public inquest and reveal publicly the evidence that led it to charge Lugovoi with murdering her husband fifteen months earlier. In a first-person article in The Times of London, Marina said that Scotland Yard and David Miliband, Britain’s foreign secretary, had advised against the petition because such a hearing could prejudice any future trial. Marina said she proceeded anyway because “I cannot wait for another ten years for a slim chance that their approach would bear fruit.”
Marina was right—there seemed to be no chance that the British case against Lugovoi would advance any time soon. In the same vein, Alex Goldfarb, who had helped the Litvinenkos flee Russia, filed a freedom of information request with the U.S. Department of Energy seeking a trace on the origin of the polonium-210 used in the murder. Notwithstanding the confidence of British investigators, the Kremlin claimed that there was no hard evidence that the isotope came from Russia. But Goldfarb cited sources who had told him that the U.S. government’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory had examined a sample of the poison, at the request of British investigators. “We hope to show the polonium originated in Russia,” Goldfarb said.
Ivan Safronov, a fifty-one-year-old retired lieutenant colonel in Russia’s Space Forces, which control the country’s military satellites and missile defense strategy, was one of the country’s leading military analysts. By most accounts, Safronov, a military affairs reporter for Kommersant, Russia’s leading business paper, was a happy man on March 2, 2007. He had rung up his editors to say he had a scoop on a backdoor government scheme to sell sophisticated fighter jets and missiles to Syria and Iran. The Russian officials behind the deal planned to use Belarus as the middleman state, to avoid being challenged by the West for arming nations that were under United Nations sanctions, Safronov said. A little before four p.m., Safronov arrived home after shopping for oranges, went up to the fifth floor of his apartment building, and, according to the official story, jumped to his death. Police ruled it a suicide.
Most of Safronov’s colleagues were skeptical of the police account. Safronov’s son, Ivan, was about to enter college, and his daughter, Irina, was pregnant with his first grandchild. As for his health, he had just had a checkup and, though his doctor warned him of an ulcer, he was told he was otherwise fine. “He had no reason to do it,” said one of his editors, Ilya Bulavinov.
A few people said that in fact Safronov’s mood had appeared a bit dark of late. And there was always the possibility that it was neither suicide nor foul play—that Safronov for some reason had gone out onto the ledge of the fifth-floor window for one reason or another, and fell. Yet, it was precisely his accomplishments as a reporter—revealing illegal and quasi-legal business deals involving huge sums of money—that could get a journalist into deep personal trouble. When one got in the way of a business deal, one could be in peril. In addition, Safronov was at an especially dangerous point in his reporting. He had the arms sale story already in his notebook but had yet to publish it. If those who would be damaged by the story knew that it was in hand, they might have decided to attack in hopes it would never be published.
As of the publication of this book, authorities still regarded Safronov’s death as a suicide.
Unlike in past years, the Safronov case was not accompanied by a spate of other sensational deaths. After Litvinenko, there seemed to be a sort of moratorium on lurid murder in Russia. But that had not eased the apprehension of some Russian journalists. In April 2008, a former Kremlin correspondent named Yelena Tregubova obtained political asylum in Great Britain. Tregubova had gained notoriety for her 2003 book, Tales of a Kremlin Digger. The combination of saucy insider detail and the thirty-year-old Kommersant reporter’s blond good looks made the book a Russian bestseller. One of her stories described a 1998 dinner with Vladimir Putin while he was FSB chief. Putin commandeered an entire sushi restaurant for the evening. Such an occurrence would normally be of no consequence, given the natural order in the Kremlin, but it attracted attention as the only thing approaching an indiscretion on Putin’s public record. “I couldn’t decide if he was trying to recruit me—or pick me up!” Tregubova wrote.
After the book’s publication, Tregubova said she received a few verbal death threats. In February 2004, a package left outside her apartment door exploded. She was fired from Kommersant. Finally, she decided it was too dangerous to stay in Russia and—on the same day that Boris Yeltsin died—sought asylum in Britain. She said that she seemed to be under surveillance by a woman similar in description to one who was said to be watching Anna Politkovskaya prior to that reporter’s death. “They would have found a way to kill me,” Tregubova said. “That is the reality in Russia today.”
Anna Politkovskaya’s friends and family worked to keep alive her memory—and the investigation of her murder. In March 2008, Russian prosecutors said they now knew the triggerman’s name and were hunting him down. But her newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, dismissed the announcement as a ploy meant in part to persuade a judge to continue to detain other suspects in the case. In an article, the newspaper noted that the chief police investigator had said precisely the same thing six months earlier. Her editors worried that authorities were seeking to warn Anna’s killers that they could be caught soon. “It’s easy to guess [that] the investigation has made significant progress. And some people [have begun] to feel anxious,” the newspaper said.
Before Anna’s murder, a doctor informed her daughter, Vera, that she was going to give birth to a girl. Vera and Anna discussed what to call the baby, but could not reach a decision.
Five months later, the baby was born.
There was no question what her name would be.
Anna.