It isn’t just one story that ends with a journalist’s death; a climate of intimidation builds. If no one is punished, killers are emboldened, and violence repeats.
Myroslava Gongadze, The Committee to Protect Journalists
Russia stands on the threshold of a new era. I am convinced we will be witnesses of a huge revitalization of Russian society.
Paul Klebnikov, editor of the Russian edition of Forbes, three months before he was murdered
The brutality of Russia’s second military campaign in Chechnya—particularly after the Kremlin, in early December 1999, gave an ultimatum to residents of the capital, Grozny, to leave the city or be killed—drew harsh criticism from Western governments. (There was even speculation about economic sanctions against Russia.) President Bill Clinton, while acknowledging that Russia had to pursue counterterrorist operations in the wake of the apartment bombings, warned that such operations could incite even more extremism.1 Nonetheless, in a telephone conversation in February 2000 with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Clinton expressed optimism about the new Russian leader: “We’re trying to resolve bilateral issues with Russia and kind of get this Chechnya thing resolved. Putin has enormous potential, I think … he’s very smart and thoughtful. I think we can do a lot of good with him.… His intentions are generally honorable and straightforward, but he just hasn’t made up his mind yet. He could get squishy on democracy.”2 President George W. Bush had a similarly favorable impression of Putin, noting famously after their first meeting in June 2001: “I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy and we had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul.”3
The September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the U.S. cemented the friendship between Bush and Putin, and they also quelled U.S. concerns about the Kremlin’s military campaign in Chechnya. Putin was the first government leader to call Bush and voice his condolences over the attacks. He later said in a televised address to Russians: “Russia knows directly what terrorism means. And because of this we, more than anyone, understand the feelings of the American people. In the name of Russia, I want to say to the American people—we are with you.”4
Indeed, the 9/11 attacks were serendipity for Putin. The atrocities being committed daily by Russian troops in Chechnya could now be justified as part of a global war against terrorism. Putin went on to offer logistic and intelligence support to the United States in its war against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, including the use of bases in the former Soviet Union. In doing this, Putin endeared himself further to Bush, while linking Russia’s fight against Chechen separatists to the overall struggle against global terrorism. As terrorism expert Elena Polakova noted in a recent book: “The triumph of Putin’s position became clear when U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell declared [in May 2002] that Russia was ‘fighting terrorism in Chechnya, there is no doubt about that.’”5 Polakova points outs that this shift in Western opinion was furthered by reports about connections of North Caucasus rebels with Al Qaeda, although in fact there was little solid evidence to link Chechen terrorists to Osama bin Laden.6
When Boris Berezovsky, having fled Russia, visited Washington with his aide Alex Goldfarb not long after 9/11, they were told by Thomas Graham, then a top State Department official, that Putin was now considered a U.S. ally. This news caused the two men great consternation, given that Berezovsky had become an outspoken Putin opponent. As Berezovsky said to Goldfarb after their meeting with Graham, “Volodya [Putin] is so fucking lucky. If there was no bin Laden, he should have invented him. I wonder whether the Americans understand that he is not their friend at all. He will play them and the Muslims against each other, exploring every weakness to his advantage.”7
Addressing Domestic Criticism
Although Putin now had international opinion on his side, the Kremlin still had to suppress its own internal critics, including the courageous Russian reporters who were witnessing the devastation of Chechnya firsthand. In the year 2000 alone, five reporters covering the Chechen conflict—Aleksandr Efremov, Luisa Arzhieva, Vladimir Yatsina, Iskandar Khationi, and Adam Tepsurgaev—were killed. To be clear, Efremov, Arzhieva, and Yatsina died in war zones. But Khationi and Tepsurgaev were actually assassinated. Khationi, a correspondent for Radio Free Europe, who reported on human-rights abuses in Chechnya, was butchered with an axe outside his Moscow apartment block. Tepsurgaev, who filmed footage from Chechnya for Reuters, was shot to death by an unknown assailant in a Chechen village.8 Clearly, someone wanted to discourage journalists from showing the outside world what was happening in that republic.
What was in fact happening? When Russians began their bombing campaign of Chechen territory in September 1999 and moved troops into Chechnya in early October, it soon became clear that their “anti-terrorist” operation was really a full-scale war against the civilian population. Grozny was bombarded daily, reducing buildings to rubble, killing scores of innocent people and causing thousands of refugees to flood out of the city. Federal forces began carrying out “cleanup” operations in areas under their control, which resulted in widespread murder, rape, and wanton violence against civilians. The Kremlin installed a puppet Chechen regime, headed by Akhmat Kadyrov, which ignored the atrocities being committed by Russian troops in exchange for monetary rewards.
Anna Politkovskaya, in her book A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya, described the terrible suffering she witnessed in the monthly trips she had been making to Chechnya: “Torture is the norm. Executions without trial are routine. Marauding is commonplace. The kidnapping of people by Federal soldiers … is the stuff of everyday Chechen life.” As for Putin, Politkovskaya observed: “He’s in the Kremlin, enjoying the respect of the world community as an active member of the international ‘antiterrorism’ VIP club, the so-called coalition against terror.” She went on to note: “Bush is in Moscow … fraternization … a ‘historic visit’ … but barely a word about Chechnya, as if the war did not exist.”9
Outside of Chechnya, Russian journalists were reporting on the rampant corruption that was plaguing the Putin government at all levels. And sometimes they paid for their investigations with their lives. In addition to the five journalists mentioned above, scores of other Russian journalists were killed during Putin’s first term in office.10 These cases could not be attributed directly to the Kremlin, because they often involved reporters covering local corruption throughout the country. But the general atmosphere of lawlessness and impunity that the Kremlin did nothing to discourage was what gave rise to these crimes. And it also meant that many of the perpetrators went unpunished.
Igor Domnikov
On May 12, 2000, Igor Domnikov, a reporter for Novaia gazeta, was attacked in the entryway of his apartment building in southeastern Moscow by unidentified assailants. He was beaten unconscious on the head with a heavy metal object, suffering traumatic injuries. No money or documents were stolen by the killers. After being hospitalized in a coma for more than two months, Domnikov died on July 16 at age forty-two. His murder was not only devastating for his family (his parents, wife, and young son), but for his colleagues at Novaia gazeta. The editors there could not understand why Domnikov had been singled out for what seemed to be retribution for his writing: “Igor of course wrote critical articles, but the entire newspaper team was committed to investigating the dirty work of the authorities at all levels.” As Novaia gazeta pointed out, Domnikov was reporting on financial malfeasance and bribery within the government of the region of Lipetsk. But, after all, the paper noted, “when are Russian officials not involved in corruption? This is the routine and only lazy reporters don’t write about it.”11
The investigation of the case dragged on for years. Finally, in 2007, five members of a notorious criminal gang headed by Eduard Tager’ianov, were convicted in the death of Domnikov, as well as in a number of other murders. (In fact, because Domnikov did not die immediately, the crime was not called murder but rather “inflicting bodily harm leading to death.”) But these were only the attackers. The mastermind was still at large. It was not until December 2013 that Pavel Sopot, a member of Tager’ianov’s gang, was sentenced to seven years in a labor camp for organizing the attack on Domnikov. In fact, investigators concluded that Sopot was actually acting on the orders of the former vice-governor of Lipetsk, Sergei Dobrovskii, who Domnikov had criticized in his reporting.12 In the end, because the case dragged on for so long, Dobrovskii was able to avoid being tried because the statute of limitations ran out. In May 2015, a Moscow court declared the case closed.13 Such is the way with Russian justice.
Sergei Iushenkov
Meanwhile, questions over the 1999 apartment bombings would not go away. Sergei Iushenkov, a liberal member of the Duma, was serving as vice-chair of the Kovalev Commission on the bombings when, in April 2003, he was shot four times in the chest as he walked from his car to the entrance of his apartment building. He died immediately. On that very day, Iushenkov’s party, Liberal Russia, had officially registered to compete in the next Duma elections that December.
Iushenkov was an especially prominent parliamentarian, and his death was devastating to his colleagues in the political world. Boris Nemtsov, at the time the leader of the Duma faction Union of Right Forces, noted that Iushenkov was a key inspiration of Russia’s democratic movement and that he was a person of flawless reputation. (Ironically, given his own assassination almost twelve years later, Nemtsov added that he hoped this time [italics added] the murderers would be found.)14
Iushenkov, who was fifty-three years old when he died, first entered politics in 1990, when the Soviet Union was still an entity, representing the bloc Democratic Russia as a deputy to the RSFSR Supreme Soviet (later the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation). He was one of those who defended Yeltsin and his supporters at the Russian White House during the coup attempt in August 1991 by organizing a chain of civilians to block a possible assault by KGB troops. Iushenkov was elected a deputy to the Russian Duma in 1993 and was at the time of his death a vice-chairman of the Duma Committee on Security. He was a rarity among politicians, in that he had no interest in reaping the rewards of the privatization of state enterprises that occurred under Yeltsin. As political analyst Leonid Radzikhovskii observed, he was among a small minority that “did not become wealthy in politics, who didn’t steal, whether directly or through hidden connections,” although he “had every chance, whenever he wished, to take part in the winners’ feast, in the privatization of government property.… To him, it was repulsive.”15
In 2000, Iushenkov founded, with Boris Berezovsky, the movement Liberal Russia, which in March 2002 became a party. The goals of the party were to promote small and medium businesses and to turn Russia into a European-style democracy. Berezovsky’s presence in the party’s leadership became a source of contention, however, especially since Russian authorities apparently were refusing to register the party as long as Berezovsky, living in London and now a bitter foe of Putin, was a part of its ruling body. In October 2002, Berezovsky was removed from the leadership of Liberal Russia. In the meantime, on August 21, 2002, one of Liberal Russia’s leaders, Duma deputy Vladimir Golovlev, was shot dead on the street near his Moscow home while walking his dog. His killers were never found.
Iushenkov was not deterred by Golovlev’s murder from pressing forward with his political agenda. At the beginning of March 2003, he flew to London and had talks with Berezovsky, with whom he reconciled despite past differences, about strategies for Liberal Russia in the months leading up to the December parliamentary elections. One plan that Iushenkov had in mind was to organize mass protests against the authoritarian measures of the Putin regime and the war in Chechnya. After Iushenkov was murdered, Liberal Russia foundered and did not gain the required votes to have its candidates participate in elections.16
Investigation of the Iushenkov Murder
Russian investigators acted quickly in the Iushenkov case, rounding up two suspects, including the alleged zakazchik, and charged them by June 2003. (Four others would later be detained.) The suspects were held in Moscow’s high-security Lefortovo Prison. The investigation was led by Procurator-General Vladimir Ustinov and deputy MVD chief Rashid Nurgaliev, both of whom could be counted on to create a Kremlin-inspired scenario of the murder. The alleged mastermind of the murder was Mikhail Kodanev, a leader of Liberal Russia along with Iushenkov. Kodanev was accused of hiring his party aide, Aleksandr Vinnik, to carry out the crime, along with four accomplices, all of whom had criminal records. Supposedly, Kodanev’s motives were that he was being pushed out of the leadership of Liberal Russia by Iushenkov and that he wanted the money Berezovsky had contributed to the party for himself.17
Berezovsky, who had met with Kodanev several times in London, insisted publicly that Kodanev could not possibly have ordered Iushenkov’s murder, because he had no motive. And Kodanev’s defense attorney, who was hired by Berezovsky, pointed out at the trial, which began in March 2004, how sloppy the investigators had been. The case against Kodanev rested solely on the testimony of Vinnik, which was highly contradictory. Vinnik gave conflicting accounts of his meeting with Kodanev, who had allegedly paid him $50,000 to kill Iushenkov. It was never made clear where the money had come from or what Vinnik had done with it. Investigators did not bother to follow up. Vinnik claimed that Kodanev had told him that he wanted Iushenkov dead because the latter had made an agreement with Berezovsky that gave Kodanev a lesser role in Liberal Russia. Yet he said that Kodanev paid him the money to kill Iushenkov in February 2003, before the meeting between Iushenkov and Berezovsky in London over the fate of the party took place.18
The jury found Kodanev guilty, along with Vinnik and two accomplices. Kodanev was sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment. Grigorii Pasko, a journalist and environmental activist who had been persecuted by the FSB and had become associated with Iushenkov not long before his death, connected the Kremlin directly with the murder. Pasko stated: “Who killed Sergei Iushenkov? I would like to remind [you] here that FSB Major-General Alexander Mikhailov threatened Sergei Iushenkov directly on television, in the talk show Poedinok (Duel). Everyone saw and heard the general saying: ‘Mr. Iushenkov, we will take care of you later on.’”19
Berezovsky maintained from London that the Kremlin was behind the murder as part of an effort to thwart challenges from democratic parties in the forthcoming Duma elections: “You have to look at the pattern: two of our party members have been killed, and I cannot enter Russia.”20 But others pointed out that Liberal Russia had so little support among the population that it did not pose an electoral threat to the Kremlin. Most probably it was a combination of factors that made Iushenkov a target for murder, especially his public contention that the FSB had organized the September 1999 bombings.
Iushenkov and the FSB
Iushenkov had flown to London in March 2002 for the world premier of Assassination of Russia, the above-mentioned documentary about the FSB’s role in the 1999 explosions. He returned to Russia with copies of the film to be distributed all over the country, including in the Duma. The next month, Iushenkov carried his campaign to publicize the FSB’s involvement in the bombings to the United States. He showed the film on Capitol Hill, at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, and at Harvard and Columbia universities. According to Alex Goldfarb, who accompanied Iushenkov for much of his tour: “Invariably he made a strong impression. He was a good speaker and he projected passion and conviction.”21
The Kremlin cannot have been happy about Iushenkov’s promotion of Assassination of Russia, especially at a time when Putin was engaging in a charm offensive toward the West, trying to convince Western leaders that he was a reliable partner in the battle against international terrorism. Then, of course, as co-chairman of the Kovalev Commission, Iushenkov began pressuring Russian authorities to furnish information that they had refused to release on the bombings. As he told Goldfarb: “I don’t have to prove anything. The government has been accused of mass murder of its own citizens, and half of the people believe it; this is enough for me. Presumption of innocence does not apply to governments; it’s a device to protect people from the government. Putin has an obligation to dispel the suspicions.”22
A further source of Kremlin ire toward Iushenkov was undoubtedly his questioning of the FSB’s role in the October 2002 Moscow theater siege. In early 2003, the Kovalev Commission expanded its purview to look into the circumstances of the siege. There were several aspects of the hostage crisis that suggested the FSB had inspired the attack, not the least of which was that fifty known Chechen terrorists had gathered in Moscow with weapons and explosives under the very nose of the FSB. And once the terrorists were finally incapacitated by the poison gas that had been funneled into the theater, why had the police and the FSB reportedly executed all of them, instead of keeping them alive to provide valuable information?23
In fact, Chechen sources in London claimed that one of the terrorists, Khanpash Terkibaev, had in fact escaped the theater and was living in hiding in Chechnya. Terkibaev was suspected of being an agent of the FSB, and a file on him was handed over to Iushenkov by Litvinenko when Iushenkov was in London in early April 2003. Iushenkov then gave the file to Anna Politkovskaya—who, ten days after Iushenkov was shot, published a sensational article based on interviews with Terkibaev, in which she alleged that the authorities had known about the hostage seizure before it happened.24
Alex Goldfarb recalls that he was initially “of two minds” about who had ordered Iushenkov’s murder, especially when the authorities first came up with a zakazchik, Kodanev, who seemed to have a motive: Kodanev was losing his standing in Liberal Russia after Iushenkov reconciled with Berezovsky. But Litvinenko, who Goldfarb saw often in London, convinced him that indeed the FSB had ordered the murder. The two killers, Litvinenko noted, were drug addicts who had probably been recruited by the FSB when they were in jail with promises of a reduction in their sentences for drug activity if they carried out the killing and named Vinnik as the organizer. Vinnik was apparently told he would get a lesser sentence if he in turn accused Kodanev. This was, according to Litvinenko, a classic FSB operation. There would be others.25
Iurii Shchekochikhin
Iurii Shchekochikhin, a member of the Kovalev Commission, a Duma deputy from the Yabloko Party and one of Russia’s most respected investigative journalists, died suddenly in July 2003 at the age of fifty-three from apparent poisoning. A 1975 graduate of the journalism department of Moscow State University, Shchekochikhin had worked as a reporter for several leading Russian newspapers and since 1996 had been a journalist for Novaia gazeta, where he became deputy editor. He was an outspoken critic of both the first and second Chechen wars and was among the first to voice skepticism toward official versions of such incidences as the 2000 Kursk submarine disaster, in which the entire crew perished, and the Moscow theater hostage crisis.26
In addition to his work for the Kovalev Commission, Shchekochikhin had been investigating the corruption scandal involving a large Moscow furniture store called Three Whales [Tri Kita], whose managers were suspected of weapons-smuggling, money laundering, tax evasion, and bribery of government authorities, in particular customs officials and employees of the MVD, FSB, and Procuracy. After Shchekochikhin published a story in early 2002 noting that millions of dollars had been laundered by owners of the Three Whales, rumors abounded about the involvement of top law-enforcement officials, who were allegedly using the furniture business to funnel vast sums of money through the Bank of New York. In apparent retaliation for his revelations, Shchekochikhin was beaten up outside his home by unknown assailants, and he received death threats against himself and his family, which prompted him to hire security protection for one of his sons. He remained steadfast. In February 2003, his party Yabloko issued a defiant statement: “If the life of a journalist and his family is the price to pay for telling the truth, then there is no freedom of speech in the country.”27
Shchekochikhin kept digging, using his Duma position to request interviews from government figures and gain access to documents. He also wrote to Putin directly, requesting that Putin intervene in the Three Whales case. Although Putin said he would, nothing ever came of it. This is hardly surprising, given that senior officials from the security services were implicated. On June 2, 2003, Shchekochikhin published yet another article in Novaia gazeta, providing new details of the far-reaching corruption in the case. He observed that, whereas authorities in Europe and the United States had arrested people connected to the affair, Russian law-enforcement agencies had done nothing. He concluded: “Do not tell me fairy tales about the independence of judges. Until we see a fair trial, the documents of the case will be eliminated, witnesses intimidated or killed, and investigators themselves prosecuted.”28
Shchekochikhin, a member of both the Duma Anti-Corruption Committee and the Security Committee, was also investigating financial malfeasance on the part of former Minister of Atomic Energy Evgenii Adamov. Shchekochikhin uncovered evidence that Adamov had stolen millions of dollars that the U.S. Department of Energy had given to Russia to improve its nuclear security. In March 2003, Shchekochikhin passed on a report against Adamov to the Procuracy, but with no result. Adamov was finally arrested in Switzerland in 2005 and extradited to Russia. Despite the fact that he was found to have defrauded the Russian government of $31 million and convicted of these charges by a Moscow court in February 2008, his sentence was suspended by a higher court two months later, and he was released from prison.29
Shchekochikhin Meets His Fate
Shortly before his death, Shchekochikhin met in Moscow with officials from the FBI to discuss the Three Whales scandal and its connection to the Bank of New York. He was planning on flying to the United States in early July to testify about the case, as well as about Adamov’s defrauding of the Russian government. But he never made the trip. In mid-June he fell ill, and was hospitalized in grave condition on June 21.
Shchekochikhin’s death, on July 3, was excruciating. He lost his hair, his skin peeled off his body, and he suffered failure of all his major organs—kidney, liver, lung, and brain. His wife, Nadezda Azhgikhina, herself a journalist, told me that when she saw her husband’s body after he died, he was unrecognizable: “he was only fifty-three and he looked like a man in his eighties.”30 Officially the cause of death was toxic epidermal necrolysis, also known as Lyell’s syndrome, a very rare and often deadly affliction that is usually caused by an allergic reaction to drugs. But in this case doctors could not establish the substance that caused the reaction. Shchekochikhin did not take any medications, and his only allergy was to honey. When Shchekochikhin’s family requested his medical records so that they could learn more about his illness, they were told that information about the diagnosis and treatment was a “medical secret.” Later, when pressed, the Procuracy claimed that Shchekochikhin’s medical record had been accidentally thrown out by a charwoman.31
The Procuracy did not initiate a criminal investigation into Shchekochikhin’s death on the grounds that the cause had been established. But in 2008, his family and former newspaper colleagues managed to persuade the Russian Investigative Committee to open another investigation. The process was short-lived, and the case was soon closed again. Sergei Sokolov, Shchekochikhin’s newspaper colleague, stated in 2010 that he and his colleagues had new evidence that they were looking into and that they would get to the bottom of the case. But the years have passed, and still there are no answers.32 His widow remains hopeful: “I do believe, and so does Grigory Yavlinsky [leader of the Yabloko party], that we will know the truth sooner or later.… We are waiting until someone will be ready to talk,” she told me.33 Shchekochikhin was hardly the only one in Russia to write about high-level corruption, but what probably sealed his fate was his giving of information to the FBI and his planned trip to the United States to present testimony. As with Iushenkov (and later Nemtsov), approaching the Americans was something that would not be tolerated by the Kremlin; Shchekochikhin had crossed a tripwire.
Paul Klebnikov
A little over a year after Shchekochikhin’s death, another muckraking journalist died in Moscow, this time an American. On July 9, 2004, Paul Klebnikov, editor of the Russian-language Forbes magazine, was walking from his office to the subway at around 9:30 P.M. when a Zhiguli automobile drew up beside him and its tinted windows were lowered. Klebnikov was shot four times in the chest and stomach and once in the head. The editor of the Russian edition of Newsweek, Aleksandr Gordeev, happened to be nearby and rushed to the scene. Klebnikov was still conscious and able to tell him that he had seen the face of the killer—a dark-haired man thirty to thirty-five years old. Emergency medics came quickly and took Klebnikov to the hospital, but he died in the hospital elevator. Two unidentified persons had pushed their way into the elevator cab, despite pleas of medics that it was overloaded. The cab fell to the basement floor, where its doors were stuck for fifteen minutes as Klebnikov lay dying.34
The forty-one-year-old Klebnikov, who was descended from a family of prominent Russians, left behind a wife, Musa, and three small children, who lived in the United States but visited Moscow often. Klebnikov had intended only to spend a year in Russia working for Forbes and then to return to his family. Just the day before he was killed, he had sat with Musa at a Moscow playground, watching one of their boys play in the bright sunshine, before Musa and the children flew back home.35
Klebnikov’s most recent piece for Forbes had listed the hundred wealthiest businessmen in Russia, which could hardly have endeared him to the Kremlin, given that several of these men were close to Putin. First on the list was Mikhail Khodorkovsky, with a net worth of over $15 billion. (Khodorkovsky had been arrested by Russian authorities on charges of tax evasion and fraud the year before.) Second was Roman Abramovich, with a net worth of $12.5 billion.36 Although he was generally optimistic about Russia and its future, in an interview the morning of his murder Klebnikov had this to say: “It [the government] is meddling in absolutely everything it thinks should be meddled in. All too soon, we may begin talking of another danger. Instead of [this danger] being posed by oligarchs, it will be posed by the bureaucratic machinery applying the law as it sees fit.”37
Russian Authorities Respond Quickly
Literally hours after Klebnikov’s killing, Russian authorities claimed that Chechens were the perpetrators, thus reinforcing the Kremlin’s familiar line about Chechen terrorists. Then, after an almost year-long investigation, the Procurator-General announced in June 2005 the identity of five Chechens who were involved in the killing. Three were in custody—Kazbek Dukuzov, Musa Vakhaev, and Fail Sadretdinov—but two others remained at large, including the alleged mastermind, Chechen rebel leader Khozh-Akhmed Nukhaev, who was said to have paid the killers to carry out the murder. Nukhaev, according to the Procuracy’s account, was motivated by a 2003 book Klebnikov had published about him in Russia, A Conversation with a Barbarian, which was based on extensive interviews the journalist had conducted with Nukhaev in Baku, Azerbaijan.38
Those who knew Klebnikov were surprised by the Procuracy’s claim that Nukhaev had ordered his killing, because Klebnikov’s book did not portray Nukhaev or Chechens in a bad light. The book’s publisher, Valerii Streletskii, voiced particular skepticism: “I cannot imagine what could have displeased Nukhaev about this book.”39 Journalist Anna Politkovskaya agreed: “the suggestion by the law-enforcement agencies that the perpetrators were Chechens taking revenge for a badly written book about the adventurist Khozh-Akhmed Nukhaev is nonsense.”40 Nukhaev was a well-known Chechen businessman and politician, with deep ties to the criminal world. The so-called godfather of the Chechen mafia in Moscow, he was said to be the model for the book Icon (later made into a film) by Frederick Forsythe. Nukhaev, who at one point had been deputy prime minister of Chechnya, had in the nineties established several businesses and organizations promoting ventures, including oil, that would both be profitable for him and at the same time help Chechen militants in their struggle against Russia.41
By this time, Nukhaev was implicated in numerous crimes—he had been arrested several times, but was always released—and was on the wanted list of Russian law-enforcement agencies. But he nonetheless had visited Moscow freely before he left Chechnya to live in Baku in 1997. This suggested that he had a covert arrangement with the FSB, which was using him for its own purposes. As one source observed: “The FSB pays close attention to Nukhaev’s activities within and outside of Russia.”42 Aside from the lack of an obvious motive, the theory that Nukhaev was the zakazchik in the Klebnikov killing was also thrown into question by reports that Nukhaev had been killed in Chechnya in early 2004, several months before Klebnikov was murdered.43 Whether or not those reports were true, Nukhaev completely disappeared and most probably has been dead for a very long time.
Trials in the Klebnikov Case
In May 2006, the three men charged in the Klebnikov murder were acquitted by a jury after a closed trial. Later that year, the Russian Supreme Court overturned the verdict and announced a new trial. But two of the accused Chechens who had earlier been exonerated—Vakhaev and Dukuzov—failed to show up for the retrial and the other defendant, Sadretdinov, was already in prison on other charges, so in 2007 the case was dropped. President Putin had told Klebnikov’s family in September 2005 that he knew who the killers were and that they would be brought to justice. But when the journalist’s wife and brother went to Moscow for a ceremony to honor him five years after his death, they saw nothing to encourage them. Klebnikov’s brother Peter could only say this: “It gets whittled down. They chip away at the resolve of the family and the people who care about it. It’s death by a thousand blows.”44
The Klebnikov case was revived in 2013, with a new twist. In September of that year, former militia officer Dmitrii Pavliuchenkov, a defendant in court proceedings over the 2006 murder of Anna Politkovskaya, claimed that two of the accused in the latter case, former militia officer Sergei Khadzhikurbanov and one Loma-Ali Gaitukaev, had enlisted him to trail not only Politkovskaya, but also Klebnikov in the days before his murder.45 The connection between the murders of Klebnikov and Politkovskaya was the prosecution’s suggestion that Gaitukaev, in both cases, was acting on orders from Berezovsky. A witness had supposedly heard Gaitukaev discussing plans to murder Klebnikov with Nukhaev, but the witness said it was clear that Nukhaev was only the middleman and that the orders came from abroad (i.e., Berezovsky).46
It Is Easy to Blame the Dead
By this time, investigators had long been leaking to the Russian media the theory that Berezovsky had ordered the Klebnikov murder from London and had used Nukhaev as a middleman. Given that he died in March 2013, it was all the more convenient to implicate Berezovsky because he could not challenge the accusations. The main thrust of the argument implicating Berezovsky was that Klebnikov had published an article for Forbes in 1996 (“Godfather of the Kremlin”) in which he painted Berezovsky as a crook with ties to the Chechen mafia and even suggested that he was behind the 1994 murder of journalist Vladislav Listev. Berezovsky was beside himself and in 2000 took Forbes to court in London for libel. (Forbes was forced to apologize for misrepresenting Berezovsky but was not subjected to fines.) Klebnikov then went on to expand his material on Berezovsky into a book with the same title as his article, which appeared in 2000.47
Shortly before his death, Klebnikov was supposedly looking into Berezovsky’s tenure as deputy secretary of the Security Council and the Kremlin’s point man on Chechnya. There were reports that Berezovsky had funneled money designated for the reconstruction of Chechnya into his own pocket, and Klebnikov had expressed to a fellow journalist his interest in the matter. One of Klebnikov’s sources of information was a former vice-premier of Chechnya, Ian Sergun, but Sergun was also murdered, just two weeks before Klebnikov was killed. Berezovsky’s former security guard Sergei Sokolov claimed that after Klebnikov’s 1996 article appeared, Berezovsky told him in no uncertain terms that Klebnikov should be killed. (Sokolov’s statements became part of the evidence in the murder case.) Klebnikov’s brother Peter recalled that Klebnikov felt threatened by Berezovsky, and a business associate of Berezovsky in London told Forbes that Berezovsky had voiced to him the idea of killing Klebnikov.48
Musa Klebnikov and Paul’s brother Peter told me when I met with them in July 2016 that there should be more investigation into the Sergun case and the relationship between Paul and Berezovsky, who they have not ruled out as the possible mastermind of Paul’s murder.49 But most of those who knew Berezovsky considered the idea that he would order the murder of Klebnikov to be far-fetched. Berezovsky was known to be passionate and often voiced feelings of revenge toward those who offended him; but Klebnikov’s writings, in their view, would hardly have motivated Berezovsky to have him murdered. Klebnikov’s article about Berezovsky came out seven years before his murder. His 2000 book on the same subject had mixed reviews and did not create much of a stir. Critics claimed that his book relied extensively on the disgruntled former chief of Yeltsin’s security guard Aleksandr Korzhakov, who was fired by Yeltsin in 1996. More importantly, Berezovsky had been living abroad since 2000 in France and then London, where he was at the mercy of his British hosts. It was hardly in his interests (or even his ability) to organize political murders in Russia, despite his possible connections to the Chechen mafia. As one observer noted, Berezovsky was “pathologically afraid” of having Britain’s security services focus on his ties with that group.50
Endings Dragged Out
In 2015, the chief investigator in the Klebnikov case announced on behalf of the Investigative Committee that their probe had come to an end because the three main suspects—Kazbek Dukuzov, his brother Magomed, and Khozh-Akhmed Nukhaev—were out of reach. All were on the authorities’ wanted list. But in early 2016 the Procurator-General’s office overturned this decision and kept the case open, on the grounds that Sergei Khadzhikurbanov, in a penal colony for the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, might provide more information on the Klebnikov murder.51
In the Klebnikov case, like those of many other political murders in Russia, investigators went through the motions of trying to solve the crime without really doing so. It was if they had been hired as actors in a play, where the scenario was already written. The fact that most trials in Russia are held in secret enables this process. Questions about evidence can be ignored. No one is held responsible for sloppy work, lost documentation, forced confessions, or the fact that key suspects and witnesses disappear. As Peter Klebnikov observed to me about the trial in his brother’s case: “It was a farce. There were many impediments to justice. The jurors were threatened, the judges changed, the shooters were released.”52
Peter and Musa are still hopeful that there will be a resolution of the murder case, although they told me that they are concerned about the fact that time is running out. They have not been allowed access to important evidence that they think might lead to the mastermind and are frustrated by the communications they receive from Russian investigators, who they say are deeply divided about the case. As Musa told me, “they are not doing their job because their hands are tied.” She and Peter have not seen evidence of Putin’s involvement in the murder, but they are convinced that the order to assassinate Paul came from the upper echelons of power. They are also certain that the Chechens who were charged did in fact commit the crime. Of course their main goal is to have the mastermind identified and prosecuted. And that, sadly, may not happen, at least as long as the current regime remains in the Kremlin.