As Vladimir Putin’s political star rose, journalist Anatoly Levin-Utkin was a key researcher behind one of the first Russian media reports digging into the former KGB officer's past. Then he was beaten to death.
By Andrei Soshnikov and Carl Schreck
June 22, 2022
In the late summer of 1998, Russian
journalist Anatoly Levin-Utkin was returning to his St. Petersburg apartment
after a long day at the startup newspaper he'd helped launch. He made it as far
as the elevator before his attackers pounced.
The assailants smashed the journalist's
skull with a metal bar and fled the scene with Levin-Utkin's documents, cash,
and a briefcase carrying material for his newspaper's next issue.
Levin-Utkin was taken to the hospital
after a neighbor found him unconscious next to the elevator. The doctors who
tried to save him said his attackers "deliberately beat him to death with
excessive brutality and cruelty," his colleagues would later write.
Levin-Utkin died four days later, on
August 24, 1998. He had turned 41 a week earlier.
Publicly, police said the deadly attack appeared
most likely to be a robbery. But Levin-Utkin's colleagues at Yuridichesky
Peterburg segodnya (Legal Petersburg Today) linked it to his profession.
Anatoly
Levin-Utkin in February 1998, six months before his death (Courtesy photo)
Levin-Utkin had worked closely with the
reporters at the newspaper "and was one of the first to be aware of all
the scandals," Editor in Chief Aleksei Domnin told a news conference after
his deputy editor's death.
Just eight days before the attack, the
newspaper had published its second issue, which included sensitive
investigations into the regional customs directorate and Russia's cutthroat
banking sector.
Levin-Utkin's colleagues say he was a
phenomenal and dogged open-source researcher in an era before massive caches of
public data and user-generated images were available to journalists online.
"Tolya had connections in [the
National Library of Russia in St. Petersburg]," Domnin recalled, using a
diminutive form of Levin-Utkin's first name. "He was a bibliophile who
collected an enormous home library."
This report is the fifth and final
installment of an investigative project examining
the scandals and scams that swirled around Vladimir Putin and his associates during
his tenure as a St. Petersburg city official in the 1990s.
According to Domnin, Levin-Utkin
himself did not write the more explosive articles in the paper's final issues
before his death, though he contributed critical research and reporting. After
publication, the paper fielded angry calls from the customs service and
"not very bright people" from bank security staff trying to figure
out where the information for the investigations came from, Domnin said.
There was another article Levin-Utkin
worked on, Domnin added, that was published in his final issue and that also
drew outside attention: a dive into the past of the newly appointed head of
Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB), an ex-KGB-spy-turned-functionary named
Vladimir Putin.
'As Befits A Spy'
On
July 25, 1998, Russian President Boris Yeltsin named Putin as the new head of
the FSB. For Putin, who had come to work in Yeltsin's administration in 1996
after a six-year tenure at St. Petersburg city hall, it was a homecoming of
sorts.
"I started as a junior agent...in
the St. Petersburg [KGB] directorate. That was 23 years ago or so. I repeat,
these walls are home to me," Putin told a news conference following
his appointment.
As the head of St. Petersburg's
External Relations Committee under Mayor Anatoly Sobchak, Putin was an
influential local official whose involvement in lucrative and murky deals drew
scrutiny from local lawmakers, who at one point called for his ouster.
Russian President Boris Yeltsin (right) meets with Vladimir Putin, whom he appointed head of the FSB a month earlier. The meeting was held on August 24, 1998, the day journalist Anatoly Levin-Utkin died. (TASS)
Russian
President Boris Yeltsin (right) meets with Vladimir Putin, whom he appointed
head of the FSB a month earlier. The meeting was held on August 24, 1998, the
day journalist Anatoly Levin-Utkin died. (TASS)
But outside of Russia's tsarist-era
capital, Putin was virtually unknown to the broader public. And his appointment
to the country's most powerful security post left journalists scrambling to dig
up information on a man whose professional life had for years largely been
devoted to misdirection and subterfuge.
It was Levin-Utkin's newspaper, in
Putin's hometown, that offered readers one of the first profiles in the Russian
print media to draw on deep digging into little-known aspects of his time as a
city official in St. Petersburg.
Under the headline "Lieutenant
Colonel Putin Illegally Heads Up FSB," the article delves into Putin's
personal and professional ties with regional and national political figures,
including his mentor, Sobchak; Yeltsin's former chief of staff and first deputy
prime minister, Anatoly Chubais; and former Prime Minister Viktor Cherdomyrdin,
head of the Our Home Is Russia party, whose regional campaign in St. Petersburg
was led by Putin in the 1995 parliamentary elections.
"Since his recent appointment,
journalists have been trying to dig up more information about the past of the
new Lubyanka [FSB headquarters] boss. It turned out that Putin has left neither
good nor bad memories about himself: Very little is known about his career
aside from the official information. As befits a spy, he doesn’t have a single
major scandal on his record. Still, a few facts about his work in St.
Petersburg have managed to be 'declassified,'" the article states.
The article features no bombshell
revelations about Putin. In fact, parts of it appear to have been plagiarized
from a shorter piece published by the Moscow
daily Kommersant two weeks earlier.
But the profile of Putin published in
Levin-Utkin's paper does touch on areas and claims unaddressed in the
Kommersant piece, including the inquiry by St. Petersburg lawmaker Marina Salye into
Putin's suspicious barter deals as head of the External Relations Committee
that led Salye to call for his firing.
The St.
Petersburg Lawmaker Who Became Putin's First Accuser
The profile, published under the
pseudonymous byline "A. Kirilenko," concluded with the questionable
claim that Putin's appointment as FSB director violated the agency's internal
staffing policy. It cited an alleged internal requirement that the position can
only be filled by someone with the rank of general, while Putin had never risen
higher than the rank of lieutenant colonel. (Russian law governing the FSB
states that the director is appointed by the president and makes no mention of
rank requirements.)
Domnin, the editor in chief of
Yuridichesky Peterburg segodnya, told RFE/RL that Levin-Utkin did not write the
profile but was among those who contributed research to it.
"I sent all of the newspaper's
employees to the libraries" to search for information, Domnin recalled in
a telephone interview.
He also claimed that, after it was
published, an associate of Putin's approached him and inquired about how the
paper was financing its operations.
Domnin gave the name of this alleged
intermediary, a St. Petersburg political strategist who had worked with the St.
Petersburg operations of Our Home Is Russia, whose regional campaign in 1995
had been spearheaded by Putin. He said the two men met at the McDonald's on St.
Petersburg’s central Sennaya Square.
"His first words were: 'Why did
you publish such a bad photo of Putin? If you'd called me, I would have given
you a good one,'" Domnin recalled about the alleged meeting.
Reached by RFE/RL, the political
strategist denied knowing Domnin or being familiar with the profile of Putin
that Levin-Utkin worked on.
RFE/RL is not identifying the man by
name because it could not independently corroborate Domnin's account of the
alleged meeting with the political strategist, who does not appear to have any
current links to Putin or the Kremlin.
'Encyclopedic Knowledge'
Information
about Levin-Utkin is virtually nonexistent online beyond a handful of
contemporaneous articles about the attack that led to his death and brief
snapshots in lists the media watchdogs maintain on the dozens of Russian
journalists who have been killed since the collapse of the Soviet Union in
1991.
But those who worked with him described
Levin-Utkin as a bookish, kind, and cautious man and the archetype of a member
of St. Petersburg’s intelligentsia.
"He was always searching for a
grain of rationality. He was a very soft-spoken and knowledgeable person. It
often seemed to me that he had encyclopedic knowledge," Aleksei Lushnikov,
who owned a St. Petersburg media holding where Levin-Utkin worked, told RFE/RL.
Before embarking on a career in
journalism, Levin-Utkin had worked at a factory producing leather sofas,
Lushnikov said.
"I still remember his tales about
leather sofas: how they are made, what kinds of leather there are. Tolya knew
almost everything about all of this. Tolya was always sitting in
bookshops," Lushnikov said.
Domnin said Levin-Utkin began working
in the media in 1993. "They killed a professional journalist," he
told RFE/RL.
In an obituary published a month after
Levin-Utkin’s death, his colleagues wrote that their fallen colleague
"made no enemies in his 41 years of life."
"We are confident that he simply
didn't have any," they wrote. "He managed to preserve his childlike
spontaneity in his relationship to people and to life in general. We loved him,
as one can only love very good, wonderful people."
1 / 2The obituary of Anatoly Levin-Utkin published in Yuridichesky Peterburg segodnya a month after his death.
'Deliberately Killed'
Nearly
a quarter of a century after Levin-Utkin was beaten to death, the crime remains
unsolved, like numerous other fatal attacks on journalists in post-Soviet
Russia.
"For me it was completely
incomprehensible precisely because Tolya was a cautious person,"
Lushnikov, the media executive who employed Levin-Utkin, told RFE/RL. "How
could he become a victim?"
In a newsletter shortly after Levin-Utkin's
death, the Glasnost Defense Foundation, a Russian media watchdog, quoted a
doctor who treated him following the attack as saying that "the nature of
the injuries allow us to state that the journalist was deliberately
killed."
The newsletter also quoted a St.
Petersburg police precinct chief as saying that "as of now there is no
confirmation that the attack on Anatoly Levin-Utkin was connected to his
professional activities."
"Police are inclined to believe
that this case involved a routine robbery," Sergei Kukshtel, chief of the
59th precinct, was quoted as saying in the newsletter.
Domnin, however, told RFE/RL that
investigators appeared more interested in a different possible motive when he
was questioned at a local police station.
"They were particularly interested
in the professional motive," he said.
Domnin said he was questioned twice in
connection with the crime -- once at the paper's office on the day after the
attack, and once at a police precinct in St. Petersburg’s Primorsky district,
though the crime was committed in the city's Vyborgsky district. Domnin said
the men who questioned him at the police station did not even keep a record of
the interview, and that he believes they were likely FSB officers rather than
police.
St. Petersburg police did not respond
to an inquiry about the status of the investigation of Levin-Utkin's killing.
Yuridichesky Peterburg segodnya managed
to put out four more issues after Levin-Utkin's killing -- six in total --
before it was shut down in the wake of the Russian government's default, which
coincided with Levin-Utkin's 41st birthday on August 17, 1998, and came three
days before his fatal attack.
Domnin left the media industry in 2007
and now works as a musician and DJ.
Levin-Utkin's
editor, Aleksei Domnin, now works as a musician and DJ. (Courtesy photo)
Levin-Utkin was survived by his wife,
who declined to speak with RFE/RL when reached by telephone. Despite the
contemporaneous statements by police, media watchdogs, and Levin-Utkin's
colleagues about his work for Yuridichesky Peterburg segodnya, his widow
claimed that he never worked for the newspaper. Follow-up calls for
clarification about this claim went unanswered.
Levin-Utkin's widow to this day lives
in the same apartment where the couple resided 24 years ago, in the building
where he was fatally beaten on his way home from work.
RFE/RL is publishing below an English
translation of the profile of Vladimir Putin that Anatoly Levin-Utkin worked on
shortly before his fatal beating. RFE/RL has added hyperlinks and images for
background on the events and individuals cited in the text.
The
profile looking at Vladimir Putin's past published by Yuridichesky Peterburg
segodya published in August 1998.
Lieutenant
Colonel Putin Illegally Heads Up FSB
According
to staffing structure, the director of the security service must be a
lieutenant general.
On July 25, the first
deputy of the presidential administration, retired KGB Lieutenant Colonel
Vladimir Putin, was appointed director of the FSB by presidential decree.
He has been assigned
to reform the agency in the short term, reducing its central staff several
times over to 4,000 officers. The funds saved by this will allow for salary
increases for the remaining staff. If the FSB is financed by the residual
model, its best officers are likely to leave. As they say, a new broom sweeps
clean. However, Putin has declared that there will be no massive reduction of
FSB staff.
Kovalyov
Putin’s
predecessor, army General Nikolai Kovalyov, was not particularly popular with
his subordinates after he proved unable to secure salary increases, something
the heads of the Interior Ministry and the Prosecutor-General's Office
succeeded in doing. Indeed, Kovalyov was notably shy for a high-ranking officer
and preferred to report about the successes of his agency than its problems.
Within the FSB, his
dismissal had been expected. That was the reason for the postponement of the
staff exercises in the North Caucasus -- which involved the Interior Ministry,
army units, the FSB, the Emergency Situations Ministry, and the Federal Border
Service -- from July 25 to July 27. Interior Minister Sergei Stepashin was the
commander of the exercises.
Kovalyov was appointed
head of the FSB more than two years ago, following the famous scandal with the
"Xerox box" that was used by the members of Yeltsin's election
campaign staff Sergei Lisovsky and Arkady Yevstafyev as they tried to
take more than $500,000 from the White House [Russian government headquarters].
FSB head Mikhail Barsukov, who was involved in their detention, soon left his
post.
No specific reason
was given for Kovalyov's dismissal. Prime Minister Sergei Kiriyenko conveyed
the president's "gratitude" for the "big and important"
work he had done. However, Kovalyov isn't known for any significant
achievements. Quite the opposite. His only success was in setting up an FSB
hotline for repenting agents of foreign intelligence services. But even without
a hotline, the FSB had always worked steadily in its counterintelligence
operations: In 1997 alone, 30 foreign intelligence officers were expelled from
Russia, and seven Russian citizens working for foreign intelligence were
neutralized.
[These successes]
were not matched by the FSB's economic counterintelligence department, which
was constantly understaffed due to the transfer of many of its officers to the
tax police. In 1997, however, economic counterintelligence helped to increase
state budget revenues by more than 16 billion rubles.
A special operation
under Kovalyov's personal command to free a Swedish diplomat taken hostage late
last year gained worldwide fame. During the operation, the Alfa special forces
group shot one of its top officers, chief of staff, Anatoly Savelyev. To
preserve the group's reputation and support the officially declared cause
of death as a "heart attack," Savelyev's colleagues removed his
medical records from the hospital the next day. Anatoly Savelyev was
posthumously awarded the title Hero of Russia.
In executive circles,
they said Kovalyov had "stayed in his post too long." Everything is
good in its season. Yeltsin, however, promised him another job, and Kovalyov
has received a few lucrative job offers, according to those in the know.
It recalls one of Krylov's fables,
The Quartet: What was the result of all the reshuffles there?
Putin
And The Security Apparatus
"After
university, I started working as a junior investigator. Now -- imagine that --
I have become the director of the whole system," Vladimir Putin told
journalists when he took up the post.
Indeed, 23 years ago,
Putin accepted an offer to work for the security services after he graduated
from the law department of Leningrad State University. He started as a junior
investigator at the KGB Directorate of Foreign Intelligence. He worked there
for 15 years, specializing in German-speaking countries: West Germany, Austria,
and Switzerland. He eventually rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel but
resigned from the KGB voluntarily in 1991.
Since his recent
appointment, journalists have been trying to dig up more information about the
past of the new Lubyanka [FSB headquarters] boss. It turned out that Putin has
left neither good nor bad memories about himself: Very little is known about
his career besides the official facts. As befits a spy, he doesn't have a
single major scandal on his record. Still, a few facts about his work in St.
Petersburg have managed to be "declassified."
Putin
and Sobchak
Putin's
career in St. Petersburg was inextricably linked to Anatoly Sobchak, right up
until the former mayor lost the 1996 elections.
They first met when
Putin was studying law at Leningrad State University, where Sobchak lectured on
commercial law. Later, Putin's experience in the security services helped him
become vice rector for international relations at Leningrad State University (this
area of operation had been monitored by the KGB), where he met his former
professor and soon took a post in Leningrad's first democratic city council.
Putin's administrative career began in May 1990, when Sobchak became chairman
of the council. As his aide, Putin managed to be his assistant, desk officer,
and secretary all at once.
St. Petersburg Mayor Anatoly Sobchak
(right) sits next to his deputy, Vladimir Putin, in August 1993.
According to those
who knew them, Putin had significant influence on the former mayor. But
outside the Mariinsky Palace, the general public knew practically nothing about
him. An experienced professional -- he spoke German, had contacts with Western
partners, and earned trust -- Putin had the reputation of a power broker during
his work in the city administration. After Sobchak was elected mayor of St.
Petersburg, Putin became one of his three deputies and, in fact, one of the
most influential political figures in the city.
But Putin never
emphasized his exceptional proximity to power, not even when he served as acting
mayor (which happened often). He always kept his distance.
Putin the bureaucrat
oversaw the establishment of the currency exchange in St. Petersburg,
diplomatic offices, the gambling industry, and nongovernmental organizations;
he brokered the sale of the Astoria hotel and the opening of one of Russia’s
first foreign bank offices, BNP-Dresdner Bank (Rossija). He also coordinated
all security services: army, police, counterintelligence, prosecutor’s office,
and customs. Only one of his foreign-investment projects was implemented: a
Coca-Cola production facility was built.
During his tenure at
the mayor's office, Putin was officially accused of using the methods of secret
services only once. According to the former chairman of the St. Petersburg city
council, Aleksandr Belyayev, the External Relations Committee established by
Sobchak and headed by Putin was collecting information on Russian companies to
be sold to foreign owners. At the same time, the prosecutor's office reproved
Putin for being too gullible and issuing illegal gambling licenses.
In 1992, a [city]
parliamentary investigation of
the committee's activities was conducted with regard to several import and
export deals. It revealed that some of the deals were made at prices that did
not correspond to world prices. Putin admitted errors during public hearings,
the deals were called off, and no one was punished.
Putin
and Chernomyrdin
In
1995, Putin took part in a political campaign. At the time, governors or their
deputies were expected to run the regional offices of the [pro-Yeltsin] Our
Home Is Russia party. Putin became the head of its St. Petersburg office.
Residents of the city could see posters of [Viktor] Chernomyrdin on
almost every billboard in the city. But Putin didn't live up to the
expectations: Our Home Is Russia took only third place in the parliamentary
election in St. Petersburg, securing two seats (the
mayor’s wife, Lyudmila Narusova, took one of them).
Russian President Vladimir Putin
(right) listens to Viktor Chernomyrdin, leader of the Our Home is Russia
faction, during the pro-government movement Unity congress in May 2000.
Putin
And Yakovlev
Putin
was the head of Sobchak's campaign in the 1996 election, and in many respects
the way the campaign was conducted determined its result. After Sobchak lost,
there were rumors circulating in the city
that Putin had "sold out" his boss at a meeting with his rival,
Vladimir Yakovlev, a couple of days before the election. However, Putin
resigned immediately after the election.
St. Petersburg Governor Vladimir
Yakovlev (left) with Vladimir Putin in January 2000, shortly after Putin was
named acting president by Boris Yeltsin.
This failure didn’t
stop his career. According to
Putin, he came to Moscow at the invitation of Pavel Borodin and became his
deputy. But presumably the personal political preferences of powerful figures
also played a role here.
Putin
And Chubais
The
head of the presidential administration, Anatoly Chubais, had supported Sobchak
and, after his defeat, tried to weaken the new governor's team. It was his
initiative to invite two former first deputy mayors into the federal
government: Chubais's old friend Aleksei Kudrin, and Vladimir Putin.
In March 1997,
Vladimir Putin took the vacant post of the head of the Government
Accountability Office. He often grabbed headlines in this capacity: It was
Putin who disclosed the sensational results of the inspection of arms sales to
Armenia and systematic delays in army salary payments.
Russian President Vladimir Putin
(center) at a meeting with Anatoly Chubais (right), Deputy Prime Minister
Viktor Khristenko (left) and Gazprom head Rem Vyakhirev in October 2000.
For a few months
before becoming the director of the FSB, Putin served as a deputy head of the
presidential administration, where he was responsible for regional policy. A
week before the new appointment, Yeltsin commissioned him to prepare papers on
the demarcation of jurisdiction between federal and regional authorities.
Putin
And Kovalyov
Putin
has spoken about his predecessor with sympathy: [Kovalyov] worked in the agency
during the tough early years of the reforms. Will Putin follow Kovalyov's
policies? It's possible because he believes Kovalyov's reform plans were
sufficiently developed, so there's no need to invent anything. The main thing
is that reforms should increase the efficiency of the agency. Some sectors
require expansion rather than cuts. According to Putin, that is the case with
the department of economic crimes and the computer control group that prevents
leaks of classified information to the Internet. The new head puts special
focus on counterterrorism operations: In Putin's opinion, these forces need to
be less dispersed and more effective.
Russian President Vladimir Putin
(right) and Nikolai Kovalyov, whom Putin succeeded in 1998 as head of Russia's
Federal Security Service (FSB).
Besides, a recent
presidential decree has tasked the new FSB head with restoring the department
of protection of the constitutional order. However, it’s similar to the KGB's
infamous Fifth Directorate [responsible for crackdowns on dissidents in the
U.S.S.R.], so that shouldn’t be a tough challenge for Putin.
In the wake of
Putin's appointment, there has been a lot of interest in his former boss,
Sobchak. He is a witness in a corruption case
launched not only by Yury Skuratov, but also by the heads of the Interior
Ministry and the FSB. Will Vladimir Putin use his position to protect his
former boss? Putin has repeated in his interviews that the former mayor
has nothing to fear should he decide to return to Russia.
As for the idea of
uniting the FSB and the Interior Ministry, which has been recently promoted by
Sergei Stepashin, Putin believes that it has already happened -- he and
Stepashin are friends and will be working together. But no FSB officers will
ever become police officers.
Vladimir Putin is not
worried in the least by the fact that, according to staffing policies, only a
general can be head of the [FSB].
A. Kirilenko
https://www.rferl.org/a/putin-journalist-killing/31910359.html
No comments:
Post a Comment