He was, she said, a “lovely dad, a very caring person and a very special man” who would be deeply missed.
Speaking through tears in halting English, she said: “I don’t feel good and, of course, I don’t know when I [will] start to feel good after what
happened.”
She said that her husband — known to his family and friends as “Sasha” — was “a very caring person about us” and had always tried to look after her and their 12-year-old son Anatoly: “He tried to protect me, he just tried to protect me.
“Sasha told me we were very safe, I’m very safe . . . I think he felt nobody could kill him.”
She said that throughout the three weeks that her husband was in hospital after being poisoned with a massive dose of polonium-210, she watched his condition deteriorate but never gave up believing he would recover: “I didn’t lose my hope. He was very fit for his age. He didn’t smoke, he didn’t drink.”
But she could see him slipping away day by day: “He was a very handsome man. But each day for him was like 10 years, he became older in how he looked.”
Marina said she had tried to hide her feelings and fears from him. It was not until the end that she finally accepted that he would die last month.
“Suddenly I saw he was tired, too tired to fight. Before that, he’d been a strong fighter. This time I saw he’d almost given up. I wasn’t sure if I should go home. I said, ‘Are you okay? Shall I go home?’
“Then he said the first full sentence he’d said all day: ‘Marina, I love you so much’. I said, ‘Thank you’.”
She said that he used to tell her every day that he loved her.
Marina said that they had so enjoyed the freedom of living in Britain that they had fallen into a false sense of security. In Britain her husband, an emotional man, she said, had felt able to speak freely about his passions.
“Life here in England fooled us. After six years we were different people from who we were in Russia,” she said.
“Of course he had enemies but not [enemies] to kill him in this horrible way. Sasha never felt that he was a first target.
“Everybody tries to write about Sasha like he was an ex-spy, but it’s completely untrue. He never was a spy.”
It was only when her husband was close to death that Marina finally realised the enormity of what had happened. “Finally I can see that he was a target,” she said.
Police believe that Litvinenko, a vehement critic of the regime of Vladimir Putin, president of Russia, was poisoned when he met two or three Russian businessmen in the bar of the Millennium hotel in Mayfair, central London, on November 1. They suspect he was targeted by a Russian “hit squad” that flew to London in October.
Last week it emerged that seven other people at the Millennium hotel were contaminated with polonium, although at far lower levels than Litvinenko. The Health Protection Agency is trying to trace a further 200 people who visited the bar that day so that they can be tested.
Marina was reluctant to enter the diplomatic row that has ensued from the murder of her husband, who has been denounced by the Russians as a fantasist who had a grudge against Putin.
Asked to comment on Tony Blair’s promise that relations with Russia would not interfere with the police investigation, she said: “I don’t like to say words like pathetic . . . But Sasha said personal life was very important in England. It’s not very important in Russia.
“In Russia it doesn’t matter how many people are killed. I’d like to believe [the] life [of] only one person can still be very important in England.”
She declined to say whether she thought the Russian authorities or Putin were behind her husband’s killing. But she added that her husband’s public claims about his former employers at the FSB had alienated them.
“Sasha never had enemies in his life but because he was a former FSB officer and knew, just like me, that you never can escape from the FSB and he was starting to speak openly about crime . . . I can’t say [it was]
he was starting to speak openly about crime . . .
“I can’t say [it was] these people but I’m absolutely sure they didn’t forgive him for what he did.”
November 1, the day he was poisoned, was a special day for both of them: the sixth anniversary of their escape from Russia, where Litvinenko had fallen foul of his political masters after coming to believe that corruption permeated the FSB security service and the upper levels of government.
They had made a new life in north London where Sasha — and, by extension, Marina and Anatoly — felt safe. “Sasha told me, ‘In Russia people can do what they like. In England it’s rules, it’s law’.”
At first Marina felt lost in London, but as Anatoly began to make friends at school and she began to learn English, she settled down. The best thing was that Sasha, who had become an obsessive workaholic as he investigated corruption in Russia, began to relax.
“When I met him in Russia I could see he had potential,” she says. “In England he became more of a man, more of a person. He spoke to Vladimir Bukovsky [another dissident] every night. That was his university. ()
“In Russia it was all about his job. He’d be busy for two, three days at a time. He’d forget to eat and drink. It was difficult to cope. We couldn’t plan anything. Although he’d be so happy when he’d finished, when he’d caught somebody. He was full of life. He was 32 years old and he had a high-level job. Everybody was predicting that he would be the youngest general in the FSB.”
His downfall, she believes, was a result of being too honest: “It was the last two years before we left Russia that he was really unhappy. He was trying to investigate crime at a high level but he was frustrated.
“[In Britain] he wrote articles, he spoke out, but he felt nobody would kill him for it. He felt safe here. He never told me exactly what he was doing, but he had his business and I had mine: I was in control of the family, my son, my home. He tried to protect me.”
On the anniversary of their escape they always had a celebratory supper. Marina was planning to cook a chicken dish. But first Sasha had meetings in town and Marina went shopping to buy a birthday present for a friend’s son.
“It was very normal. Sasha came home and changed his clothes, watched some internet news. He said he had to be up early the next day as he was busy.”
That night, Sasha complained of feeling sick. Marina could not understand it; she had eaten the same food. Sasha began to suspect immediately that he had been poisoned.
