Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [112]
Three months later, two men appeared at the Litvinenkos’ flat. Marina, home alone, answered the doorbell.
“We are from the Russian Embassy to see Mr. Litvinenko,” the visitor said in broken English through the speakerphone.
“Go away, there is no Litvinenko here,” Marina screamed in Russian. “Go, or I’ll call the police!” She was terrified. Their address was supposed to be a secret.
The visitors slipped an envelope under the door and left.
It was a summons for Sasha to appear in court for his third case, the one about stolen explosives, the pursuit that refused to go away. Sergei Barsukov, Sasha’s old Moscow investigator, had signed it. But this time Sasha was not concerned at all. “Civis Britannicus sum” sounded convincing.
By the end of summer Blowing Up Russia was completed. While it was being printed by a small émigré press in New York, Felshtinsky contacted the MP-journalist Yuri Schekochihin to arrange for serialization in Novaya Gazeta. The excerpts were published on August 27, filling twenty-two pages of the tabloid-size newspaper.
Alas, the book did not provide any definitive proof of the origin of the 1999 blasts. Nevertheless, it contained a great deal of new circumstantial evidence. It detailed various terrorist operations carried out by groups created by and affiliated with the FSB, suggesting a pattern that fit with the apartment bombings.
First, there was the Lazovsky case. In the fall of 1994, just as the first Chechen War was about to start, Sasha was sharing an office at the FSB with another investigator, Evgeny Makeyev. Makeyev was looking into an explosion that took place on November 18, 1994, on a railway bridge over the Yauza River in central Moscow. It would have been a major terrorist attack if the explosion had occurred while a passenger train crossed the bridge. Apparently the bomb malfunctioned, killing the man who was planting it. A few days later there was another blast in Moscow, in a passenger bus. Due to another apparent mishap by the terrorists, there were no passengers nearby; only the bus driver was wounded. At the time the blasts were blamed on unspecified Chechens. The first Chechen War started within days.
Two years later, the case of the ’94 bombings was solved by a Moscow detective named Vladimir Tshai. The man killed on the bridge was Ret. Capt. Andrei Schelenkov, an employee of the oil trading company Lanaco. The owner of Lanaco was Maxim Lazovsky, a longtime FSB agent. The man who planted the bus bomb was apprehended and confessed. He was Lazovsky’s driver, Vladimir Akimov.
Tshai arrested Lazovsky and Ret. Lieutenant Colonel Vorobiev, who also turned out to be an FSB agent.
The evidence was overwhelming. In addition to the two bombs, the group carried out several murders, with apparent FSB backing. Lazovsky and Vorobiev were convicted of terrorism, and their FSB connections became part of the record. They never explained who ordered them to plant those bombs, or why. They had no apparent motives themselves. In his last statement in court, Vorobiev called the case “a mockery of the secret services.” Lazovsky served three and a half years. He was killed shortly after his release, shot by an assassin on his own doorstep. The man who arrested him, Detective Tshai, died in April 1997 at the age of thirty-nine of sudden, inexplicable organ failure. He was a legend—the best detective in Moscow. Rumors flew that he had been poisoned as FSB revenge for the Lazovsky case.
Then there was the case of a Russian officer in Chechnya who in 1996 launched a massacre in the village of Svobodny and was arrested as a war criminal. According to Blowing Up Russia, the officer was told