Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [147]
Since early 2004 Ukraine had become the principal focus of Boris’s, Sasha’s, and my activities. In the period immediately preceding the standoff in Kiev, Boris quietly channeled more than $40 million to the Orange camp, making it possible to sustain the street protests for nearly two months. When Viktor Yuschenko, the democratic opponent of the Moscow-backed candidate, Viktor Yanukovich, was felled by a mysterious poisoning in September 2004, we despaired. Not only the Ukrainian future, but the fate of freedom in the entire post-Soviet bloc seemed to hang in the balance. Thankfully, Yuschenko survived to win the presidency in a second, carefully monitored runoff election. In the aftermath of the Orange victory, the IFCL established an office in Kiev with an eye toward using it as a bridgehead for a similar peaceful revolution in Russia.
In the period prior to the Orange Revolution, Sasha, Felshtinsky, and I expended a major effort on trying to solve a mystery that was the Achilles’ heel of the authoritarian regime of Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma: the murder of a Kiev journalist, Georgy Gongadze, in September 2000. Most people believed that the critical journalist had been eliminated on Kuchma’s orders. Gongadze’s murder fueled a conspiracy theory that galvanized Ukrainian society and became the rallying cry of the Orange camp. After the revolution, Sasha, Felshtinsky, and I testified to the Ukrainian prosecutors investigating the Gongadze case, which, like Yuschenko’s poisoning, remains unsolved to this day.
When Anna Politkovskaya was gunned down by an assassin in Moscow on October 7, 2006, the parallels with Ukraine were striking. She was perhaps the most outspoken critic of Putin in Russia. Could Anna play the same martyr’s role that Gongadze had performed for Ukraine? Could her murder be a spark that would lead to the downfall of the FSB regime during the presidential election in 2008?
Both sides realized the far-reaching political implications of Anna’s death and blamed it on each other. Speaking at a press conference during a visit to Germany on October 10, President Putin blamed Anna’s assassination on unnamed opponents aiming to destabilize his regime. “We have information, and it is reliable, that many people hiding from Russian justice have long been nurturing the idea of sacrificing somebody in order to create a wave of anti-Russia feeling in the world,” Putin said. The following week, speaking at the Frontline Club in London at a Politkovskaya commemoration, Sasha Litvinenko accused Putin of ordering her murder.
The mood in October 2006 was a reciprocity of paranoia. The Kremlin and the London group accused each other of murder, and nursed conspiracy theories that were mirror images of each other. Each accused the other side of killing people with the aim of blaming it on them. It set the stage for the climax of Sasha’s story. Three weeks after Anna was shot as she carried a bag of groceries in the elevator of her apartment house in Moscow, and a year before Putin would have to step down after serving two terms as president of Russia, Sasha was murdered by a mysterious poison.
The call from Radio Echo Moscow came on Saturday, November 11, 2006: “Can you confirm that Alexander Litvinenko has been poisoned?”
I was in Paris en route to London, and I didn’t know anything about it so I went on the Internet to check. The initial source of the report was Akhmed Zakayev’s Web site, ChechenPress.info, which announced that on November 1, Sasha had been poisoned, allegedly by the FSB.
I reached Sasha