Original subtitles

I am Marina Litvinenko.

I am wife of Alexander Litvinenko, my husband.

I call him Sascha.

14th of October 1994,

when we married,

we didn't want to make any photographs,

but a woman from the civilian centre said, "Please, just do it.

"It will be a good memory."

And now I'm very happy I have this picture.

When I met Sascha first of all, he was a KGB or FSB officer,

fighting organised crime.

It was a very difficult period for Sascha.

Criminality was everywhere

and there was a connection

between officers of very high rank from FSB and organised crime.

This was a very dangerous moment

and Sascha became more and more upset.

When Sascha told me they have a new director

and it is Vladimir Putin,

I said, "And? Who's this guy?"

So, Sascha went to meet Putin himself

and he explained to Putin

the connection between people from the security service

and organised crime,

drug dealing, all of this kind of criminality.

Putin didn't show any interest and they finished.

When Sascha came back, he was worried what might happen to us.

I said, "And what is next?"

And he said, "Actually, they might kill me or may be arrested."

It was just two options.

MAN: For Putin, there are enemies and there are traitors.

Enemies are something he can live with,

but the traitors is a different, totally different kettle of fish.

Betrayal is one thing he absolutely doesn't tolerate.

He's a vengeful man.

MAN: I've been threatened with murder,

I've been threatened with kidnapping.

He took over Russia, which was on its knees,

and he has dealt with all that, controlled it.

MAN: Money is power.

There are now new rules of the game.

Putin didn't win, and Putin hates not winning.

WOMAN: Putin doesn't really need to say,

"I want this person to be killed."

REPORTER: Police are investigating the unexplained death

of the controversial Russian businessman, Boris Berezovsky,

who's been found dead at his home in Berkshire.

At one stage he was one of Russia's most influential oligarchs,

but in the late-'90s he quickly fell out of favour with the Kremlin

after becoming critical of Vladimir Putin.

REPORTER: In the Kremlin, there's a new man in charge.

Six months ago, hardly anyone had heard of him.

To stay in the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin needs to be a strong man,

but he'll also need the political skills of a superman

if he's to succeed in turning Russia into a functioning democracy.

WOMAN: Well, I interviewed Mr Putin a year into his first presidency.

He was still new.

He was a bit unsure of himself.

(SPEAKS RUSSIAN)

He came into the room, you didn't quite notice he'd come in.

Because he was new, we were asking him all sorts of different questions.

On occasion, I would ask him personal questions

like, "What books are you reading?

"What's your daily regime?

He didn't quite know how to answer.

So, he was a new president who'd never had a public persona,

never run for office, and...before,

and, um, he wasn't yet comfortable

in who he should be and how to handle those questions.

You felt a sense of vulnerability.

NEWSREADER: More than 100 Russian sailors are trapped tonight

in a crippled nuclear submarine.

The Kursk sank while taking part in an exercise in the Barents Sea.

It's lying on the seabed, apparently badly damaged

and out of radio contact.

MAN: The Kursk was certainly the worst thing that happened to Putin

in his first year in office.

My naval attache was in very close contact with the Russian Navy

and as soon as we'd heard that the Kursk went down,

he had instructions from the Ministry of Defence in London

to go and offer help to the Russian Navy.

The answer was, "Well, thank you very much, we'll get back to you,"

and they hummed and hahed.

It was a very traumatic story, not well handled by Putin.

He didn't come straight back to Moscow

and take charge of the incident

and a lot of anger built up.

NEWSREADER: A full week now since the Kursk was sent to the bottom,

a Russian admiral has said there is almost no hope

of finding any of the 118 crew alive.

MAN: There was a window of opportunity

where perhaps at least some of the sailors who died

could have been saved.

And that was...

..that was a shock to a lot of people in Russia.

And to add insult to injury,

Putin didn't even leave his holiday home in Sochi,

where he was at the time.

Just continued to enjoy, you know, the seaside.

SIR RODERIC: When he did eventually come back,

he went up and he had meetings

with some very angry relatives of the sailors who'd died.

If you are the leader, as Putin was,

you don't want to be associated with this bit of bad news.

The first thing he did was to tell lies about it and cover it up.

MAN: You have to get in Putin's mind.

He knows that a few months before he was nobody,

and with the help of television

he became Russia's president.

So, he already knows what power television has,

what kind of weapon it is.

KARA-MURZA: Channel One was controlled by Boris Berezovsky...

..one of the most influential so-called oligarchs

in the 1990s in Russia,

and who was actually a major force behind Putin's ascension to power.

The first major rift between the two came in the summer of 2000

with the Kursk disaster.

Channel One launched into a scathing attack on Vladimir Putin,

perhaps the most famous episode of the Sergei Dorenko's weekly show,

when he basically completely destroyed Putin's justifications,

line by line.

Berezovsky thought, "I helped to put this guy in power,

"I have this media thing."

And to an extent Boris Berezovsky perhaps made the huge mistake

of seeing himself as the puppet master and Putin as the puppet.

And Putin was determined, and quite understandably as a politician,

to show that he was the boss, not the guy who owned the media.

KARA-MURZA: In the same month, in September of 2000,

the state recovered full control over Channel One -

and Berezovsky was out.

Shortly after that, Boris Berezovsky who was living here in London,

applied for political asylum,

because I think he feared being extradited to Russia,

and the Russians applied for his extradition.

So, I had to explain to the Russians

that Berezovsky was not coming back to Russia.

When a KGB general says to you,

"We will retaliate if you do not do what we wish,"

and you absolutely know that under our system and our values

and our rule of law, we are not going to do what they wish,

then you know there's going to be retaliation.

MAN: Every time I cross a border I could be arrested

Um, er, every time an unexpected package comes,

could be a bomb or poison.

I've been threatened with murder, I've been threatened with kidnapping.

The Russian government has come repeatedly to the British government

to try to have me extradited back to Russia.

I'm clearly a targeted individual.

I'm very high on their list of enemies,

but I was once the largest hedge fund manager in Russia.

There's a possibility of it or there's a 25% chance?

Russia was run by Boris Yeltsin, who was the president.

He had come up with this idea,

which was, "If we wanna go from communism to capitalism,

"you need to create capitalists."

And so they launched something called the Mass Privatisation Programme.

What should've happened was that all people would own a lot of stuff

and they would behave like capitalists.

But instead, a small group of oligarchs

ended up hoovering up all the state assets at a discount.

And it had a dramatic effect, a particularly dramatic effect,

the moment that Vladimir Putin came to power.

Normally, if you're president of the country,

you control your government you control your law enforcement,

you control your foreign ministry et cetera.

But when Putin showed up,

all those normal things that a president, er, has and does

had been effectively usurped or privatised by the oligarchs.

And so his big thing was, "We can't let the oligarchs own the country."

He believes that judo taught him a lot,

and part of the political philosophy is in this asymmetric response.

Judo is all about

using the weight or the strength of your opponent against him.

MAN: When Putin came to power,

he essentially sat down with the oligarchs,

these figures who had become so obscenely rich in the 1990s

and as a result had basically come to dominate politics.

And he made it very clear that a new dawn had broken.

They could remain rich, powerful and free,

however, only so long as they understood the new rules of the game.

FISHMAN: Money is power.

Russia's richest people

and those who actually run Russian economy

all has to be under Putin's personal control.

In other words, they had to stay out of politics.

And some oligarchs essentially left the country as a result.

But one was Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the richest of them all.

Khodorkovsky, whether it was because of his own values,

whether it's because he just thought he was too big to take down,

continued to be involved in politics, he continued to hold forth.

He actually upbraided Putin about corruption.

His mistake was to raise it publicly with Putin on camera.

And Khodorkovsky,

as far as Putin was concerned, he became not necessarily a threat,

but an opportunity.

Bringing down Khodorkovsky was an opportunity for Putin

to demonstrate to everybody that no-one was too big to be taken down

and that there were a new set of rules,

and they'd better learn them fast.

(REVERSING ALARM BEEPS)

BROWDER: In 2003, Khodorkovsky was on his private jet,

and Putin had the jet surrounded by members of the Russian FSB.

They boarded the plane, they arrested the richest man in Russia

and they put him on trial.

FISHMAN: It was clearly political.

It was only about power.

It was simply the robbery,

orchestrated by the state and Putin himself,

of one of the most powerful political players at that time.

REPORTER: The Russian oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky

has been sentenced to nine years in jail.

Khodorkovsky, who was once thought to be Russia's richest man,

was found guilty of six charges of fraud and tax evasion.

BROWDER: Now, imagine you're the 17th-richest man in Russia

and you see a guy far richer,

far smarter, far more powerful than you sitting in a cage.

What's your natural reaction?

You don't wanna sit in that cage yourself.

And so one-by-one-by-one, the oligarchs go back to Moscow

and they effectively sit down with Putin.

And they say, "Vladimir, what do we have to do

"to make sure we don't sit in the cage?"

"You keep your nose out of politics and everything will be fine."

FISHMAN: You cannot take all the power instantly, you need time.

And that's what Putin was doing

from the very first day when he became Russian president.

He started his assault on television

and then the arrest of Khodorkovsky changed it all, totally, absolutely.

Putin wasn't trying to get rid of the oligarchs.

Putin just wanted to become the biggest oligarch himself.

Putin was succeeding because he had got more political power

and had a more orderly administration.

Chechnya, if you like, was, was the bit of downside.

It was almost impossible

to have a constructive discussion with Putin about Chechnya.

The moment you raise Chechnya,

he gets completely uncontrollably emotional.

WOMAN: The post-Soviet period was incredibly difficult for Russia.

The Soviet Union was falling apart,

and Chechnya thought that it could break away as well.

A lot of the separatism was waged by Islamist rebels

who really wanted to pull away

and create a fundamentalist state in Chechnya.

And the federal government in Moscow

was having a really hard time

bringing the Chechen government under control.

SIR RODERIC: Putin was very sensitive to the fact

that Russia was being criticised over its tactics in Chechnya

and the way that its military and its security forces

were behaving there, which was very brutal.

Attacks on civilians,

allegations of torture and rape and so on.

WOMAN: As a journalist, I've been arrested,

detained,

I've been, um, taken to places and tortured

and, er everywhere I went

there was a portrait of Putin looking at me.

What Moscow called special operation

was practically war against local population all over the Caucasus.

The brutality in which the Russian military dealt with the situation

was absolutely mind-blowing.

Absolutely zero respect for human life.

(APPLAUSE)

Anna Politkovskaya was amazing.

She believed that as a journalist everything needs to be reported,

no matter what the costs are.

She was reporting on the special operations,

on the methods that the FSB used against civilians.

She was reporting on, er, disappearances of people

and the extrajudicial killings of civilians.

Her reporting was very uncomfortable to Putin personally,

because she was showing exactly what he wanted to hide.

NEWSREADER: World leaders have been congratulating Vladimir Putin

on his sweeping re-election as president of Russia.

Election observers criticised the poll,

saying it did not meet democratic standards.

This election has highlighted Mr Putin's desire for control.

He has been surrounding himself with men like him,

former members of the KGB and military.

They now fill half of all posts here at the Kremlin,

and their reach is spreading far.

SIR RODERIC: It was not going well for the Russians in Chechnya.

Putin ended up doing a deal

with the most powerful clan of war lords in Chechnya,

the Kadyrov Clan, later on headed by Ramzan Kadyrov.

FISHMAN: The type of contract he has with Ramzan Kadyrov

is that he keeps things quiet in Chechnya.

The order in Chechnya is restored.

Whatever Kadyrov does to achieve that

is not Vladimir Putin's problem.

We know that he is the type of leader

who can kill his political opponents.

We know how his political opponents were murdered.

It's documented.

It was the most close people to Kadyrov

took part in these murders,

so we know that this is something Ramzan Kadyrov is capable of doing.

GALEOTTI: Kadyrov absolutely has a track record of having his enemies,

or people even he's just vaguely peeved with, murdered,

in Moscow and in fact around the world.

TLIS: Anna was murdered on Putin's birthday, October 7th.

At this point, Putin doesn't really need to give direct orders.

He doesn't have to say, "I want this person to be killed."

The Russian authorities found

and named the people who did the actual murder.

But what about the people who ordered it?

Russian justice did not name them.

Absolutely, and they consider this case closed.

But people who knew Anna pointed their fingers at Ramzan Kadyrov.

LITVINENKO: I told Sascha, "It's very bad news,"

and he couldn't believe it.

He was very, very devastated

and he directly said he knows

who killed Anna Politkovskaya,

and he said it was Vladimir Putin.

(SPEAKS RUSSIAN)

Somebody has asked you directly, "Who is guilty of Anna's death?

"Who has killed her?"

(SPEAKS RUSSIAN)

And I can directly answer you, it is Mr Putin,

the president of the Russian Federation who's killed her.

SIR RODERIC: London had become this focus

for a whole collection of Russians who had fallen out with Putin

or just basically did not like what was happening in Russia under Putin.

LITVINENKO: London looked like a completely safe place to us,

and Sascha made a joke,

"You should be very relaxed, because we are on island,

"we're under protection of Queen."

And I was very proud of him.

I just saw he was so busy, he was so enthusiastic,

and he met, er, many people, new people.

And I was really, really happy for him.

So, this is a picture, er, at Berezovsky's birthday party,

and we have here Akhmed Zakayev, Sascha, myself,

and the actor who represented the Queen.

And, um, it was great fun.

The one who is missing in this picture is Andrei Lugovoy,

because he was sitting at the same table with us.

Lugovoy is a career KGB officer

who served in the government security.

It's equivalent to American secret service.

Lugovoy started talking to Sascha

about maybe setting up some joint venture, so they had a meeting.

LITVINENKO: I knew he met Lugovoy.

When he came back, everything was just very nice, very quiet.

But, er, when I was almost ready to go to sleep,

he started to feel very bad, just sudden.

And when he asked me to call for ambulance,

I was shaking.

REPORTER: The claims of skulduggery are reminiscent of the Cold War -

a Russian dissident poisoned after a meeting in Central London

and left fighting for his life.

GOLDFARB: He is getting worse.

He has been moved to intensive care unit

and he's becoming, kind of, yellowish,

which is an indication of liver problems.

LITVINENKO: One doctor from cancer unit,

he said he looks like his patient after chemotherapy.

That was radioactive material used.

It was not a knife. It was not a gun.

It was a radioactive material from nuclear station.

WOMAN: What we've had is an unprecedented event in the UK,

that someone has apparently deliberately been poisoned

with a type of radiation.

Let's be open.

Litvinenko was granted political asylum

and a couple of months ago he became British citizen.

It means that it was terror attack from Kremlin aga...

..against the British, on Britain.

GOLDFARB: If you ingest polonium,

it spread through every cell of your body, so it destroys your DNA.

Er, you can't eat, you can't drink.

Sascha started to develop all the signs of radioactive poisoning,

but he was able to talk.

Sascha said, "So, what's happening? Where is the story?"

"To make it a front-page story," I said, "We need a picture."

I was so against to take a picture of him.

But Sascha said, "No, Marina, we should do this,

"because people need to see what they did to me."

GOLDFARB: And that became a real, global front-page story.

He was adamant that this would not have happened

without Putin's approval.

NEWSREADER: Today, a judge concluded Alexander Litvinenko was killed

in an operation by the Russian security service, the FSB.

There is a strong probability that his death was ordered

by the Russian security service

and was probably approved personally by President Putin.

Two Russian men have been identified as the killers.

They and the Russian government have vehemently denied any involvement.

The murder of Litvinenko was not just about silencing Litvinenko.

There were much, much quicker, easier ways of doing that

than putting polonium in his tea.

This was also about the theatre of murder.

This was also about using Litvinenko as an example

to the whole so-called 'Londongrad' set of expats

and emigre Russians in London,

and telling them, "You may be in London now,

"but don't think that means you're safe."

REPORTER: The exiled Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky

has been found dead at his Surrey home.

At one stage he was one of Russia's most influential oligarchs,

but in the late-'90s he quickly fell out of favour with the Kremlin

after becoming critical of the soon-to-be president,

Vladimir Putin.

GOLDFARB: The police thinks it's suicide,

but the coroner couldn't make it out beyond a reasonable doubt.

The family thinks it's not suicide.

I personally think that he killed himself because he was ill,

he was depressed.

Well, I interviewed Mr Putin twice - once in 2001 and again in 2006.

And what was most striking was how much he changed in between.

By now, Russia had paid off its foreign debts,

it was doing very well

and it was the Mr Putin we all know.

Would there ever be a situation

where Russia would use its political power

to shut off the gas supplies to Western Europe?

(CHUCKLES)

He was presidential, he was confident.

If I asked him a difficult question,

he turned it round and asked me a question.

There had been a complete transformation.

TRUMP: Look at Putin, what's going on over there.

I mean, this guy has done -

whether you like him or don't like him,

he's doing a great job in rebuilding the image of Russia

and also rebuilding Russia period, forget about image.

FISHMAN: By 2008, the rule of law means basically nothing.

The state is now the major player.

By that time, he had under control everything.

But there's still one thing that he complies to -

the constitutional demand to step down

after two consecutive presidential terms.

GALEOTTI: In many ways, Putin's faced with exactly the same dilemma

as any mafia godfather.

How do you retire when everything that you are,

everything that you have, and all your security,

depends really on your position?

He needs someone who will be dependent upon him,

who he thinks would be efficient, who will be loyal,

and who above all will protect not just him but Putin's own legacy.

Captions by Red Bee Media

Copyright Australian Broadcasting Corporation