The photo of the Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko – gaze defiant, lying in intensive care – taken in November 2006. Litvinenko had met with visitors from Moscow: they poisoned his tea with radioactive polonium. A public inquiry concluded that Putin had “probably” approved the hit, sending two clownish assassins to carry it out.
The London deathbed picture featured in newspapers across the world. It was a powerful symbol of what post-millennial Russia had become: a cruel and vindictive place, ruled by a paranoid KGB tsar. Litvinenko was its ill-fated prophet.
He was the target, he told British detectives, of a vengeful mafia state. If unchecked, Putin would start a war in which millions would die, he warned presciently. Twenty years after these lurid events, Litvinenko’s wife Marina has told her own story in a memoir.
Her book, co-written with Emily Fairbairn, is a moving act of reclamation. In it, she brings her dead husband back to life – not as a tragic figure, hurtling towards a grisly public doom, but as a real and vibrant person. Instead of Litvinenko we get Sasha: a loving partner, softie dad and incorrigible optimist, who always saw the best in people.
Throughout, she rejects the label of widow. She describes the word as reductive, saying: “I never felt comfortable with it.” Instead of embracing her victim status, Marina decided to continue her husband’s battles. Her chief opponent was the Kremlin, which covered up its crime and shamelessly celebrated Litvinenko’s killers.
One of them, Andrey Lugovoy, became a parliamentary deputy and fixture on state television. A more surprising adversary was David Cameron’s coalition government. The justice secretary at the time of the murder, Chris Grayling, refused her legal aid, while home secretary Theresa May turned down her request for a public inquiry.
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