Chapter 1. Our story begins with a simple, unassuming but nonetheless shocking and shocking murder. On the night of 16 June 1993, a woman and her three children were shot and killed in their home in the village of Rostov, just a few miles north of Moscow. In a crime of uncommon savagery, the murder of this humble family became a byword for the perils of Russia's new post-communist way of life, a cautionary tale of everything that could go wrong when the state suddenly loses control. In the words of Russia's most powerful and infamous investigative journalist, Vladimir Putin, it served as 'the textbook example of total lawlessness'. Why had such a tragedy happened in Rostov? Was it, as the police first concluded, a settling of old scores related to an unpaid gambling debt? Or could there be another explanation? In Russia, the answer is usually related to the interests of one superpower or another. While the Soviet authorities used the murder to cast Russia as a 'wild, primitive and violent country', the US State Department and, to a lesser extent, the British and German foreign ministries, played the same card to 'prove' that Russia was unstable, under-developed and in need of assistance.
'I don't understand how this could have happened', confessed Anna Ivanova, a local policewoman who had responded to the call at 4:45 pm. 'It was already the third time that we had come to the same address for robberies', she told an interviewer a few years after the tragedy. The family had been a happy one. The father, a professional singer with his own band, was away at the time of the attack; his wife and children were home alone. But their attacker did not look like a professional burglar, nor did he seem to be a random burglar. It was he who first raised the alarm. When he called the police, he was wearing a military camouflage outfit and carrying a gun in his hand. 'Everything is calm', he said, 'we have come to rob the house'. That, however, was not the only strange thing about him. 'He went on talking about how he had gone to Moscow to kill a big bad man', Ivanova told a reporter. 'I knew very well that this was a reference to someone from our town. He went on about how he had killed the man, about how he had been tortured, and how he'd been held under arrest for two months. There were also two other men. One of them was sitting next to me, looking at me all the time'. She noticed two other unusual things about him. He was always holding his gun in his left hand. And the next day, after the investigation had been completed, she learned that there were about 10,000 missing cases in the Rostov archives, which is a figure that is 'hard to believe', as she put it. Finally, when he had left the house, he had turned his hat backwards, a style that was hardly common in those parts.
Ivanova is one of the few people to have survived to tell the story of the Rostov massacre, which, for a long time, was a source of mystery in Russian history, and, in one way or another, has been related to every secret of modern Russia.
At first glance, the Rostov story is not exceptional at all. Its echoes resonate in other pages of modern Russian history. It is there in the terrible murder of Boris Nemtsov, the former deputy prime minister, who was killed in downtown Moscow in 2015 while walking home to the apartment of his girlfriend. And it resonates further in the killing of Anna Politkovskaya, a crusading journalist who was shot from behind as she was leaving her apartment in the centre of Moscow on 7 October 2006. Both Nemtsov and Politkovskaya were clearly targeted, but only by men of extreme determination, who then decided to carry on shooting until they were sure that the target had been eliminated.
But in both cases, the murderers had made themselves known and had explained their motives. We might argue that their victims were the embodiment of authority, which makes it especially dangerous to do away with them, since by becoming a target, they necessarily become a representative, a surrogate, of those they lead. The men who attacked the home of the Rostov family, and who killed these three people, were, in contrast, unknown – at least to us. It is important to say that nothing in this story indicates that they were professional killers; they did not come with a gun and do a professional job, nor were they carrying a bomb. They came with a plan and acted with determination – all this is a normal pattern in post-communist Russia. It is not uncommon to see people in remote areas, or even in large cities, carrying a rifle and saying that they are there to either kill a dangerous criminal or to defend their community or to avenge the suffering of someone else. But the idea of attacking a home and killing people is, in most cases, a sign of desperation.
'The murder had been planned well in advance', the local police told one of the journalists who later covered the story, but he had still been able to discover the identity of one of the gunmen. 'I just happened to see a photograph of him at the local police station, standing with other guys, wearing camouflage gear', he told the journalist.
After the killing of Anna Politkovskaya, her former colleagues, colleagues in the Kremlin and a variety of other prominent people came out and identified 'A Beard', one of the killers, as the person who was behind the most famous whistle-blower in Russia, the reporter Anna Politkovskaya, who was shot in the back and left in a small park in the centre of Moscow on 7 October 2006. 'A Beard' was identified as a person named Dmitry Pavlyuchenkov, who at the time of his arrest, was a 27-year-old taxi driver who came from one of Russia's most remote regions. His face had been seen in videos in which he had been seen walking with Politkovskaya, carrying a copy of her bestselling book, _Putin's Russia_. He appeared in the footage the day before she was murdered. On 6 March 2006, he posted a video online that showed a group of armed men killing a taxi driver who had been kidnapped in Tatarstan. In the video, we can see a man walking into the scene, holding an automatic rifle in his hand, wearing combat gear and, according to some sources, a 'Bushmaster' assault rifle. Although this is clearly not enough evidence to convict someone of murder, for example, prosecutors still do not seem to have doubts that this was the killer. The video footage is so explicit that people even recognise his weapon as a Bushmaster, which could be bought at any number of arms bazaars in Russia. The story of the murder of Politkovskaya is, in one way or another, a classic story of a woman who was in the right place at the right time.
She was not just a whistle-blower; she was also, in the tradition of her colleagues, an _anti-Putin_ whistle-blower. If her work was often highly subjective, she understood very well that Putin's Russia was something more than the mere continuation of the 1990s 'Wild Russia', or the Russia that the West and Putin himself had inherited. In early 2004, she made the mistake of attending a meeting in Moscow with an anti-communist activist. He was, apparently, about to denounce Stalin when the police arrested him, in order to prove that the whole thing was orchestrated by Putin. At a meeting in Strasbourg in January 2007, she suggested that a number of high-ranking Russian officials were under the spell of 'the dark powers', a reference to the occult or demonic forces that, according to a range of religious and occult specialists, are still at work in the Russian state. Her colleagues also accused her of being a 'Kremlin spy' or a 'coffee lady', but the last one does not hold up under scrutiny. For one thing, she was not a _mafia_ , or even the wife of a _mafia_ boss, which would have provided her with a powerful protection against threats, since in Russia, the _mafia_ tends to be the one protecting the 'real people'. While on a television show in the summer of 2006, she even told the audience that she did not consider the FSB to be the 'KGB of the Soviet Union', but, rather, a 'new kind of KGB'. She meant the organization headed by Putin, which, with the help of many millions of dollars, had taken over the old KGB, including its archives. The implication is that the FSB's powers go beyond mere legality and that its operations are now aimed not so much at political opposition as at 'disinformation' and 'fake news' and so on.
It should come as no surprise to learn that one of the last things that her colleagues said before her murder was that they were all beginning to fear that she would die at the hands of the security services. That would suggest that her death was not just a crime of passion, but was the result of a complex and highly sophisticated operation that had taken some months to prepare, involving the murder of a journalist and an investigative reporter, a long video-re-enactment of the murder, and various other elements.
On the evening of 7 October 2006, Anna Politkovskaya left her apartment in the
