Just before midnight on November 1, 2006, Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian intelligence agent living in political exile in London, awoke terribly sick. Within days, a ghastly photograph of his wasted body in a hospital bed shocked the world. Three weeks later, he was dead. He had been poisoned by polonium-210, a radioactive isotope that investigators believed had been slipped into a beverage.
The forty-three-year-old Litvinenko had fled his native country with his wife and six-year-old son six years earlier. He was an unrelenting and harsh critic of President Vladimir Putin and the methods of Russia’s intelligence apparatus, which he labeled immoral.
In life, Litvinenko had been only a foot soldier in the opposition to Putin, and his outbursts were often dismissed by journalists, politicians, and researchers. But his death became an international sensation, and many suspected the president’s involvement. The poisoning of Litvinenko riveted attention on Russia’s visible slide toward autocratic rule and its increasingly bellicose attitude toward the West, even as Russia’s economy was booming, thanks to the surging value of its energy exports, and Putin was seeking to restore his nation’s lost stature after the Soviet collapse.
I could find no precedent for an assassination of this type. Who was responsible? I traveled to Moscow to sort through the circumstances of his death. My investigation gradually widened to encompass what seemed to be an epidemic of assassinations and bloodletting, both inside and outside the country.
I came to view Litvinenko’s assassination—and the spectacular use of polonium to kill him—as emblematic of the dark turn that Russia had taken under Putin’s rule.