Gaidar, 50, edited the Communist Party’s ideological journal until joining Boris Yeltsin’s government in 1991 as a liberal reformer. As Russia’s Finance Minister in 1992 he abolished price controls to launch Russia’s market economy.

He was acting Prime Minister from June to December 1992, when his candidacy was rejected by Russia’s Parliament. By now he had become one of the most unpopular among a host of unpopular members of the Yeltsin government. Mr Gaidar was protected by FSB bodyguards, who included . . .

Andrei Lugovoi

A former Major in the FSB, Lugovoi, 40, is now a multi-millionaire businessman in Moscow specialising in security and consulting services. He became head of security at TV channel ORT, then part-owned by the billionaire Boris Berezovsky before he fled to Britain after clashes with President Vladimir Putin. At ORT, Mr Lugovoi got to know . . .

Alexander Litvinenko

Litvinenko, 43, was in an elite FSB organised crime unit until he publicly accused his superiors in 1998 of ordering him to assassinate Mr Berezovsky. Mr Putin was head of the FSB.

He fled to Britain in 2000, becoming a close friend of Mr Berezovsky. Mr Litvinenko met the murdered journalist Anna Politkovskaya in London last year. Among the last people to meet Mr Litvinenko on November 1, the day he fell ill, were Mr Lugovoi and a business partner called Dmitri Kovtun

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