What does Marina Litvinenko think of Andrei Lugovoi’s Moscow press conference
last Thursday at which he claimed that her murdered husband worked for MI6
and that the British government was behind his agonising death?
“Ridiculous!” she seethes, her nostrils flaring. “We were
expecting Lugovoi to come up with something. But . . . it’s so completely
stupid.”
British prosecutors have spent three months preparing a case against Lugovoi
as prime suspect in the polonium poisoning of his fellow former KGB agent,
Alexander “Sasha” Litvinenko, but Russia is refusing his extradition.
The press conference was staged so that Lugovoi could rebutt the accusation.
British Moscow-watchers promptly dismissed it as a classic KGB-style
misinformation exercise.
Strictly speaking, the Russian secret police have been known as the FSB since
soon after the fall of the Soviet Union; but to Marina and many other
Russians, the old communist terminology is more appropriate.
It was all so different a year ago when Marina met Lugovoi in London at the
60th birthday party of Boris Berezovsky, the billionaire Russian exile for
whom her husband had worked. Lugovoi was among a planeload of guests flown
in from Russia.
“He was the sort of person who can’t really concentrate; he was all over the
place looking out for famous people. He couldn’t be more different to Sasha.
He’s a bodyguard!” she spits.
A former dancer, Marina left everyone and everything she knew in Russia to
follow Litvinenko into exile after he had been repeatedly arrested in a feud
with former KGB colleagues. Six years to the day from their arrival in
Britain, he died last November of what was later revealed to be poisoning by
a rare radioactive isotope, polonium-210.
Since then a curious celebrity has been thrust upon Marina, 44, because “I
fell in love with a man who became famous because of his death.”
Now she has collaborated on a book about the case, Death of a Dissident: The
Poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko and the Return of the KGB (Simon &
Schuster), with Litvinenko’s old friend Alex Goldfarb.
She lost not only her husband but also her home in north London and some of her
most important mementos when he died. Only hours after his death the police
insisted she and their son, Anatoly — whom she calls Tolik — leave the
property to avoid further radioactive contamination. It was not until
February that she was able to return to gather memorabilia of their years
together. “But I felt sick; it wasn’t my house any more.”
Crowded with policemen, their home was full of notices warning about
contamination. She wanted to collect some of the pictures Litvinenko had
taken of their family from the wall of his study, but they were contaminated
because he had used it as a bedroom while ill.
“When he was first poisoned, Sasha was in a lot of pain and vomiting heavily.
I had to get up to get Tolik up for school, so Sasha slept in his study.”
In the kitchen, the food had not been cleared away since her enforced flight.
Three months on, flies buzzed around the decaying bread and rotten bananas.
For Marina bananas are a reminder of a more innocent time. On their first date
she told Sasha she loved bananas but often couldn’t afford them.
She met him at her own 31st birthday party in the summer of 1993, 18 months
after the collapse of the Soviet Union. When her friend Lena announced she
and her husband were bringing a young KGB officer, she said, “That’s a
strange birthday present!” But Lena convinced Marina she would like him:
“He’s funny and laid-back and he saved us from racketeers.”
Sasha Litvinenko had met many kinds of people in his life besides racketeers,
but this was the first time he’d met someone who danced for a living. Marina
was equally surprised by the man she met: “He looked 10 years younger than
his age, 30, and he certainly wasn’t your typical KGB guy, he didn’t drink
or smoke. My friends told me he was a serious person. But I found him light
somehow, and radiant, and as emotional as a child.”
He was married with two children, and Marina, although herself a divorcee, was
strict about dating married men. To her surprise, Litvinenko turned up a
week later, having been kicked out by his wife. Lena told her: “You can only
be serious with this guy.”
After their first date he asked her for another, but Marina told him she was
going to a concert with a girlfriend. In the interval she felt a tap on the
shoulder, and there was Sasha with a big bag of bananas. He had to go away
suddenly, he said, and he wanted to make sure she had a good supply.
They first lived together in Marina’s apartment in south central Moscow while
her parents were in their dacha. After that, Litvinenko often went away but
“he always made sure I had enough bananas till he returned”.
Just four months after they had first met, Marina realised she was pregnant.
For her, it was a small miracle. In her first marriage she had been told she
would have to have fertility treatment if she wanted children.
“Now I can be sure you won’t leave me,” he told her.
Marina smiles broadly at the memory: “This is usually the reasoning you hear
from women.”
She continues: “My husband was my other half and I was his. We were very lucky
to find each other. He used to talk about what we would do in the future and
how he looked forward to us growing old together.”
In 1996, Litvinenko went to Chechnya with the Russian army. When he returned,
Marina hardly recognised him. “He was a different man, totally
exhausted, with an empty stare. He could hardly walk because his feet were
frostbitten.”
This was the beginning of a long and agonising period of disillusion and
confusion for her husband, she says.
Two years later, he was losing weight and sleeping badly. “I saw how unhappy
he was and I said to him, ‘Why don’t you sleep?’ He told me, ‘I can’t be
happy, I have such horrible information. I’ve been ordered to murder
Berezovsky’.
“I said, ‘You’re kidding, I can’t believe it’. He said, ‘I can’t do this,
Marina’. You see, Sasha never did anything he believed to be wrong. He saw
fellow KGB officers who were afraid and had no will, but he could not be
like them. He said, ‘If we stay in Russia they will kill me, or I will go to
prison’.”
Berezovsky, one of the new business oligarchs, had for several years been a
key financial backer of Russia’s post-communist president, Boris Yeltsin,
with immense political influence. He earmarked Vladimir Putin, another
former KGB agent, as the rising star in the regime; but both Yeltsin and
Berezovzky were on their way out, and more sinister forces were re-emerging.
Litvinenko publicly exposed the Berezovsky murder plot but miscalculated the
new alignment of forces in the Kremlin. Harried by former KGB colleagues, he
fled with Marina to England, via Turkey, a journey that involved dodging
shady agents at passport control. Marina says: “It sounds like something out
of a Hollywood movie, but actually it was hell.”
In London, the Litvinenkos began afresh. With her new life revolving around
her son, Marina found she didn’t miss Russia at all, except for her mother.
Litvinenko, however, still needed a daily fix of Russia through the
internet, Russian DVDs and books.
He was writing a book, she said, and become involved with a security firm run
by former British secret service personnel, specialising in detection and
prevention of Russian organised crime. “It was a very different life in
London and very liberating for Sasha,” says Marina. “He was free to use his
knowledge to help other émigrés.”
At first they lived in Kensington, but it was expensive. Marina found a family
house in Muswell Hill which was duly bought by one of Berezovsky’s companies
and rented cheaply to them. Litvinenko converted the basement into a gym and
they both took pleasure in gardening; he planted blackcurrant bushes, which
reminded him of Russia.
Among the guests at the housewarming was Ahmed Zakayev, the exiled Chechen
foreign minister. Zakayev had fled to London in 2002 — pursued by Russian
extradition charges of kidnapping, torture and mass murder — and was granted
political asylum. Having been on warring sides six years earlier, the two
men became firm friends.
When Litvinenko was taken to hospital last November, Marina says, the Zakayevs
provided a second home for her son. Then, in the final days, Litvinenko made
a deathbed conversion to Islam. She remembers the moment he told her.
“Are you agreed that when I recover I will go with Ahmed to the mosque?” he
said.
“Why not?” she replied.
“And if I die I want to be buried next to Ahmed,” he added.
She says now: “I didn’t mind at all. I’m not religious and at that moment it
seemed very important to him.”
He died on November 23 at 9.21pm — killed by polonium-210 at “21.21” hours,
she points out. His last words to his wife were, “Marina, I love you so
much.”
Grieving, Marina and her son returned home. When the police told them to leave
immediately for their own safety, they spent the rest of the night at
Zakayev’s house.
Everyone who had come into contact with Litvinenko had to be tested. Marina,
who had cared for him and cleared up after his vomiting attacks, was the
most exposed. She tested positive for ingesting polonium, but not enough to
be an immediate health hazard. But she says: “No one has been able to
tell me how it will affect me in the long term.”
Marina and Tolik stayed with the Zakayevs before moving to a safe house.
“Everything was abnormal,” she says. “People kept asking me how I was
feeling. I did interviews with the press and sometimes I’d get very
emotional, and sometimes I didn’t.
“Yet, just before Sasha was poisoned we’d been so happy and optimistic. We’d
planned to go on holiday to Spain with Tolik and Zakayev’s grandchildren,
and Sasha was going to teach them how to swim. But I don’t want my friends
to see me crying and upset. I’m the sort of person who keeps things in, but
I know that’s not good, either.”
Today life is very busy. With the help of a solicitor, Louise Christian, she
has complained to the European Court of Human Rights about Russia’s failure
to investigate the murder.
Meanwhile Columbia Pictures is competing with Warner Bros to get the story on
the screen.
“My husband was a very ordinary man, but he was also uncompromising and
extraordinary,” she said. “And you know, I am a very happy woman because I
have had it — I have had love, and some people never have it. I think Sasha
would be proud of me.”
Thank you, my dear foreign friends. I showed your comments to my Russian friends and to my british friends and we are so glad that this brain washing propaganda did't touch your brains and hearts. They think we are stupid robots and can be involved to their dirty games. Russians nowadays are nor soviets any longer and we will not let anyone to involve us to a new cold war. We want PEACE NOT WAR. Those people who exaggerate all this fuss are staking on the lame horse.
Margarita, Moscow, Russia
Scared of MI6, london...... IF as you say the murder was not carried out by Russia then that by implication means that you know who did murder him ,so why not say who killed him and how you know ?.
Frank, London, UK
..... usual brutal propaganda from the west - this article "fogets" about the real facts for his death?
What is the motive for his death?? He told MI6 everything for the last 4-5 years, and he was not a force against Putin - this is just what the west tries to prove to its population...
Also, Why would anyone want to spend millions to kill a guy who could have been killed by 5 dollar knife or by a speeding car? Or simply dissapear one day - like the CIA does?
Why West campains agains Russia and Putin all the time?
Why the WEST distorts facts and increases propaganda agaist Russia?
Ignorance is blisss...
Scared of MI6, london,
Marina Litvinenko has collaborated on a book about the case before publicly showing her outrage - money? Why are these dissident Russians (who are plotting the unlawful & violent overthrow of Russia’s democratically elected government) allowed asylum here to carry out their anarchy from the privacy of their luxury British homes & on the streets of London when the Russians come looking for them, but end up endangering the lives of innocent British people with radio-active materials. Already the Russian mafia has a firm stranglehold on organised crime here. If Berezovsky & his mates are so adamant about their cause, and if, as they say, they are innocent of the crimes Russia has accused them of, then they should carry on their cause in Russia, not in Britain. This is not our battle, we don't want them here. I wonder what's in it for Britain to allow these trouble makers to remain here. Could it be the tax on Berezovsky's billions, or is that safely secured in an off shore account.
michael pickles, bournemouth, england
A farrago of lies! And why convert to Islam...None of characters in this extraordinary melodrama are 'pure as the lily' but are interested in money. U.K certainly shouldn't get embroiled with this case.
Morgane, Dunedin, New Zealand