Marina Litvinenko’s husband, Alexander (Sasha) Litvinenko, was poisoned to death with a radioactive substance called polonium 210 in London in November of 2006. After his murder, as she told an audience at the Brooklyn Public Library recently, “I wanted to know who killed my husband.” She was speaking to the crowd via Skype, so the view of her on the screen at the front of the auditorium was from desk level. It showed a slim, red-haired woman in a brown jacket with a Nehru collar in front of a bookshelf in an apartment. At first, her eyelids kept almost closing; it was 7:45 p.m. in Brooklyn, 12:45 a.m. in London.
Mrs. Litvinenko had just accomplished something that no one in power had encouraged her to do. Her husband, a former agent of the K.G.B. (its successor agency is the F.S.B.), had been a loud critic of that organization and of President Vladimir Putin. In the U.K., where the Litvinenkos received asylum for themselves and their son, in 2001, Litvinenko was looking into connections between Putin and international organized crime. At a meeting with a veteran of the Russian security services named Andrei Lugovoy, who he thought was a friend, he drank some tea. Twenty-three days later, after a dreadful sequence of symptoms, his heart gave out and he died.
“This has not been an easy period for our family,” Mrs. Litvinenko said. “At the time Sasha was killed, our son, Anatoly, was twelve. We had started a new life. In 2000, Sasha had saved us by getting us out of Russia; but unfortunately we couldn’t save him. By making the world to see exactly what happened to him, I did what I could do for him.”
The murder investigation by the London police involved scores of officers and experts. Because of the poison’s radioactive residues, almost every move of Lugovoy and his sidekick, a man named Dmitri Kovtun, could be traced. The police charged Lugovoy and Kovtun with murder, the British government asked Russia to extradite them, and the Russians refused. A coroner’s inquest into the death was suspended pending police investigation. There matters stood for nearly five years. Meanwhile, Mrs. Litvinenko and her lawyers kept asking that the inquest be reopened. The sight of Putin visiting Prime Minister David Cameron during the London Summer Olympics in 2012 spurred her on even more. In 2013, Britain’s Home Secretary rejected a petition for a public inquiry into Litvinenko’s death, and said that relations with Russia had been a factor in the decision.
Eventually, Mrs. Litvinenko filed a court challenge to force the government to open an inquiry, which is of wider range than an inquest, and can take into account classified documents, though without revealing their contents. Bringing the challenge was a risky step, because had Mrs. Litvinenko lost she would have been liable for the government’s court costs as well as her own. But she won, and the Home Secretary appointed Sir Robert Owen, a former High Court judge, to lead the inquiry. It collected evidence and heard from witnesses for more than a year, and in January it published its findings. They were: that Lugovoy and Kovtun murdered Litvinenko; that the Russian state very likely sponsored the killing; and that the head of the F.S.B. at the time and President Putin probably authorized it. Lugovoy and Kovtun have denied any involvement in the murder, as have Kremlin officials.
“The only reason there was an inquiry was Marina’s will,” Alexander Goldfarb, the Russian dissident and author, who shared the stage that evening, said. “Sasha was my friend, I am head of the Litvinenko Justice Foundation, but at one point even I was telling her maybe it is time to give up.”
Members of the audience asked her if she had support in Russia (yes), if she planned to return there (not soon), and if she expected any reparations, or for the killers to be punished (“No. Russia can’t be changed”). A woman with dark-rimmed eyes and long dark hair who said she had once met Mrs. Litvinenko near Litvinenko’s grave, in Highgate Cemetery, told her she was an inspiration.
“My son was indicator for everything I did,” Mrs. Litvinenko said. “He was always worried about me, trying to show he is fine, not depressed. He never talked about his father, but he sat next to me every day during the hearings. I wanted him to understand who his father was. My son is now twenty-two and about to graduate from university. Somebody interviewed him, and he just exploded with all he had learned and all he had been thinking about his father. He said to me, ‘Mummie, now I have my father back to me.’ Today, the world knows that what Sasha was saying about Putin’s crimes is true. I never thought we could do this. I never thought I could have this influence on people.” ♦
