I beg you, if anything happens to me,
I beg you to show this tape to the whole world
and say that these people may very well
have committed contract killings inside Russia and abroad.
The damning press conference...
Alexander Litvinenko...
The FSB is a money-making tool.
A new twist in the story of Alexander Litvinenko...
The origin of these terrorist acts lies
with Chechen bandits.
Today, on the last day of the century,
I am stepping down.
I think I have completed the greatest task of my life.
Russia will never
go back to the past.
I would like to say to every one of you, be happy!
You deserve happiness
and peace.
Happy New Year!
Happy New Century, my dear people.
... fighting for peace,
for the unity of Russia.
Shall we deny that we have losses?
Because Russia's enemies are talking about our heavy losses.
Should we not admit
our soldiers get killed?
But call them what they are - heroes?
All killed - my brothers and sisters.
So how did this short film make you feel?
You, sir?
Alexei Shcherbakov, political scientist. The film is one-sided.
These children become terrorists who cut people's heads off.
A man asks,
"Are these children that you kill, Putin, really terrorists?"
Yes. They are future terrorists!
So are we to kill all of them,
because they may become terrorists?
Here is Andrei Nekrasov, the director of the film you just saw.
Sometimes we call this conflict war, sometimes an anti-terrorist operation.
It's not the same thing.
We call it war to justify civilian deaths.
But it's often more convenient
for our leaders to call it an anti-terrorist operation.
Nowhere else on earth are there any such anti-terrorist operations.
I don't want to compare us to the West all the time,
a civilised society, et cetera.
It's a question of morals.
The state has no right to confuse security with revenge.
If the state puts itself on the same level as terrorists,
the state becomes terrorist.
We've all grown up in disgust and fear of war.
I was born 15 years after World War II ended.
Our mothers and grandmothers said, "Never let war happen again!"
In 1975 we were scared of nuclear attacks from the United States.
We wept watching scenes
in World War II films of Russian soldiers being tortured by Germans.
We are heartbroken when we see a child with a leg blown off.
But there is another side.
Maybe if it wasn't for the bombings of the apartment blocks
our attitude to this war would have been different.
How can we explain the bombings in Moscow? Who did it?
Yes, who did it?
...connected to Litvinenko.
Thank you. Goodbye.
Right after the tragedy of 9/11 we, the Chechen government,
proposed vigorous help in investigating that crime...
What I am familiar with is totally confirmed by the documents,
and also, what is most important, by Litvinenko's personal experience.
Thank you.
Will your assistant give me the number?
I'll give it to you.
Everybody's talking about the FSB,
but only few understand
what this mysterious organisation is all about.
In our country, the special services are in fact
a secret political organisation,
that uses sharp methods,
secret methods not against spies and terrorists,
but solely to keep a ruling class in power.
In 1999, for example,
to seize power, the FSB used secret methods
that are only allowed against terrorists and spies.
If the army were to seize power, they'd roll in with tanks and guns
and fly in with jets, maybe.
But everyone would notice!
The FSB, on the other hand, has secret methods,
and nobody noticed anything until chekists made up the government
and seized every organ of power.
If the KGB was the armed unit of the Communist Party,
then the FSB is the armed unit of...
of a caste of corrupt Russian officials.
These criminals, who sold out to the enemy,
the traitors and spies who sold our country to the enemy,
shall be shot as mad dogs.
What is it, how and why? Boys, ask your fathers, ask.
Here one learns to be brave, resourceful,
loyal to one's duty.
This is a serious matter.
Not all of you will graduate...
Putin, before entering a university,
offered his services to the KGB.
And his services were made use of.
That means, during his student years
Putin had to inform on his friends.
As a university student
who had volunteered for the KGB, Putin would be trained
for at least a year by the officers of the Fifth Department of the KGB.
They were only interested in one thing,
the fight against the enemy's ideology.
The fight against intellectual dissent.
So Putin's task would be to single out students
who criticised the Party,
Soviet Leaders, who told political jokes.
He'd inform about it in writing.
Putin claims the KGB taught him to love the motherland,
well, he learnt to love the motherland while he was squealing on his pals.
Glory
Soviet students!
Glory to Soviet Youth!
It was right here
that members of the People's Will were kept.
They were locked up in these cells.
There has always been fear, sure.
You think being a dissident wasn't scary?
It was. I was once hit on the jaw with a foot.
How was it possible to have such a law?
Anti-Soviet propaganda!
You say the truth and are arrested for it.
But today you can't really criticise the government either, can you?
I was interrogated every day.
For three months.
You know who Cherkesov is, don't you?
He would come in while I was being interrogated by another officer.
He'd ask who I was and so on.
When, at the beginning of the '90s, a friend told me
that Cherkesov was getting into the Duma,
I said I didn't know any Cherkesov.
But when I saw him on television,
I remembered everything.
Forgive me, but in the camps we called such people arse-lickers.
I ask you, why did they have to torture us?
Proof of guilt... poems by Anna Akhmatova
Liteyny Ave, 4, "The Big House"
The KGB may not be preserved!
CHERKESOV IS THE SHAME OF ST PETERSBURG
OPEN THE KGB ARCHIVES!
Now Mr Cherkesov admits, "Yes, we persecuted dissidents.
"But such were the laws then." And he says he acted legally.
In his own way he is right. He acted legitimately in an illegitimate state.
DOWN WITH THE JUNTA!
Then we moved to a new stage. The state became legitimate,
we got free elections,
a democracy appeared.
The special services were now illegitimate in a legitimate state.
But for the special services to continue operating with impunity,
they needed to make the state illegitimate again.
But how can you make a democratic state illegitimate?
You must provoke it into a political trap. War!
The invasion of Chechnya was on the cards.
A tank corps was formed out of the Cantemir division
and sent to Grozny.
Remember, in 1994, no one understood why
this column of tanks just stood there in Grozny.
Until they were attacked and burnt down.
Yeltsin was presented with a devastating picture.
Look, the Chechens attacked us!
Some Duma members decided
to go and speak to the Chechen leader Dudayev to avert the war.
And right at this moment, in 1994, explosions were heard in Moscow,
introduced by the warnings that Chechen rebels
were on their way to Moscow.
They started by massaging public opinion, the explosions followed.
The first blast was at the bridge over the Yauza River.
Captain Shelenkov was killed by his bomb.
Explosions at the railroad followed.
Specialists think terrorists wanted to test public opinion.
At the site of the explosion, a mangled body was found
that was identified as Russian Army Captain Andrei Shelenkov.
Then there was the explosion on a bus.
In that case they arrested and charged the army officer Vorobyov.
Both these Russians, Shelenkov and Vorobyov,
were FSB agents.
Those terrorist bombings were perpetrated by the FSB.
Don't let the war in here, please!
Yeltsin be cursed!
He'll spill the blood of our children!
We thought he'd give us freedom!
When Yeltsin started the Chechen war,
he stopped being a democratic leader and became illegitimate.
BORIS, THE BLOOD OF OUR SONS IS FLOWING.
YOU SHALL NOT BE FORGIVEN!
New Year was at our door and merry music all around
When Chechnya found itself at war
And bombs were falling on the ground
Why should we pay for stupid blunders
With the lives of our sons?
War was long away from our homeland.
"Why is it back?" one wonders
We lived as brethren, not as foes
Chechnya was close to our hearts
God Almighty, why is all in tatters? And who can help us understand?
Where are we heading? Who is after our boys?
We dote on them, raise them, only for them to be slain?
Don't you dare come near our sons and send them to kill others!
For our tears, for their blood, you shall never be forgiven!
The army is using forbidden means.
A tragic example is Pervomayskoye.
It was shelled with tanks and jets. Every third house was wiped out.
Who gave you the right to shell peaceful villages
from helicopters and tanks?
I fought in Chechnya, yes.
But when I interrogated a Chechen prisoner of war in Pervomayskoye,
he was only 17 years old,
a very young guy, but very clever.
An intelligent chap.
I asked him, "Why did you go and fight against us?"
Do you know what this 17-year-old boy answered?
He said, "I hate this war."
"So why did you fight?"
"Because our whole school class went to fight."
He said that and I was reminded of all those films about World War II
when whole school classes stood up and went to defend our country.
In the same way, the Chechen children
go to the front with their school classes in Chechnya.
Now tell me, do we have a chance in Chechnya?
The truth was, it was war. Moscow was engrossed in an invisible war.
Alexander Litvinenko, then an officer at the 7th Directorate
of the Federal Security Service...
I worked with him on the Podolsk organised crime gang.
After 1996,
he was transferred away from my sub-division
and made responsible for a separate project.
And he was also dealing with the Podolsk gang, the Georgian gang.
At the time we had 34 criminal organisations in Moscow alone.
What always struck me
was the amount of people streaming into our jails.
It's simply not normal that we have so many criminals.
It's a country of criminals.
Almost 50 percent
of the entire adult population has served time in prison.
That opened my eyes.
I stopped looking up at every general, at every senior officer,
and saw them no longer as gods.
I realised that it's not the best people who make a career and go up the ladder.
I saw too many mediocre people go up.
I remember one case very well.
Thanks to his professional skills,
we could solve a crime very quickly.
Some criminal had attacked
a colleague of ours and made off with a gun.
We caught him within three days. Litvinenko had been
in charge of this successful investigation.
- He solved it? - Yes. He did.
Imagine what it takes, to find someone in Moscow!
He worked selflessly,
as one used to say in the old days.
As a cop,
with his professionalism...
He had a determination to fight...
How shall I say?
A determination to fight the bad.
He could stay awake for two or three days.
You call someone like that a workhorse.
We were friends.
I was at his wedding.
To Marina.
Sasha never made enemies from the start.
He was a very open person.
Most people noticed this, but not everyone appreciated it.
Some people even tried to abuse his openness.
When Sasha noticed this, he changed completely.
He'd withdraw into himself.
He'd become totally uncompromising.
And people who expected to use him would hit a concrete wall,
instead of the friendly guy they'd first met.
"How can that be?
"Just a minute ago he seemed so docile and easy to manipulate."
But they got quite the opposite of what they expected.
And that infuriated them, and they'd start to hate him.
And from that moment on they would start calling him "enemy".
Right, today's the 20th of April, Monday. It's night time.
1:20 am.
The first assignment I received in the department was to find a guy
who had worked in the force before, a lieutenant colonel
with the funny name of Trepashkin.
I was to catch him,
because he had sued the director of the FSB.
I had to make him shut up.
I was to apply physical pressure. That means, beat him up,
plant an illegal gun or grenade or something,
report him to the police...
And have them find weapons...
Or maybe just liquidate him altogether.
(Putin on radio) The dictatorship of the law
is the only type of dictatorship we shall surrender to.
My first conflict in the 90s was with today's FSB director Patrushev.
I rounded up a gang that laundered money,
murdered people, consisted of war lords.
At some point I had finally managed to get them,
but then the problems really started.
There was that classic chain of protection
that gangsters always have
whether in the FSB,
the military intelligence, or in the police.
I was told to drop the case.
I said, "Why? These are criminals, we have to indict them.
"I won't drop it!"
Trepashkin knew something and they were afraid he'd reveal it in court.
That was the first assignment in the new department
that I found really suspicious.
We ended up avoiding it, and never completed it.
At the concluding session of 1997...
At the very end of 1997...
My boss Kamyshnikov came to me and said, "You must kill Berezovsky."
I found out that earlier,
Kamyshnikov had been investigating some terrorists.
But he had contacted them and tipped them off
that the FSB was investigating them and was hot on their trail.
There were documents...
You mean Kamyshnikov leaked secret information...
To terrorists!
He committed betrayal.
So the man connected to terrorists
tells me to kill Berezovsky!
So a certain hypothesis can be put forward...
The better the opportunities
a political system offers its members, the citizens,
the more efficient such a system is.
But...
the citizens must accept, voluntarily, certain limitations of free will.
A transition from a totalitarian system
to a liberal one
can only take place when enough of its citizens
learn to accept certain inner limitations of free will.
Perhaps the transition from external limitations to inner ones.
Exactly!
Inefficient systems force external limitations.
(Officer Ponkin) He said, "If it was required to, erm, whack..."
"To kill," he said.
Yes, to kill.
He said,
"Could you then help us?"
- To kill me? - Of course you!
It wouldn't be me, would it?
He went on about it for 20 minutes.
"You do things like that, don't you?" He asked.
(Officer Shebalin) And then he asked Sasha, "Could you do it?"
And then a long pause.
What a price humans have to pay for knowledge.
How hard it is to rise above the common wisdom...
Is it even more difficult for Russians, would you say?
I know what you mean.
The Russian mentality is that of slaves.
That's why the system of forced limitations is so welcome.
So why then am I advocating liberalism in Russia?
Am I contradicting myself,
advocating freedom for the Russians, going against the nation's character?
So, is Russia ready, which means
her people ready to take the responsibility of freedom?
I think they are ready.
Because once the tyrannical dictate was lifted,
millions of entrepreneurs appeared,
a myriad of independent politicians and journalists appeared...
Russia turned out fully prepared
for this crucial, historical step!
We only needed to move forward
and consolidate that freedom.
And so my main conflict with the authorities today
is about individual independence.
All those stupidities, media controls, "vertical power"
have one result.
Destruction of freedom in the minds of Russia's citizens.
It's impossible for the director to be on the top without support.
Maybe the president himself isn't in on it.
All I know is,
there are several political leaders who are in on it,
and they are giving orders to our bosses.
So corruption is maintained from the top?
Yes, they are in on it.
- There is protection on the top? - Yes.
Sergei Dorenko interviewed us.
We made a deal that the tape
would only be made public in case of death.
Initially Litvinenko took the tape.
Some time later,
I demanded from Litvinenko that he hand over the tape to me,
thinking there was only one copy.
And so the bastard waited until I'd left to go on holiday.
I went on holiday...
sometime at the end of October or beginning of November.
I arrived at my parents' place in Ukraine.
We're sitting at the table, drinking tea...
and then I see myself on TV.
That very press conference, or rather, that very interview.
The very interview that was filmed eight months earlier
is there on the TV screen.
I met the FSB officers from Alexander Gusak's department in April 1998.
I realise that a state security officer should not speak on TV.
But the moment has come.
I have never been afraid to put my life in danger,
but I do fear for the lives of my wife and child.
Still, even if they were to kill me, my wife and my child,
if these people aren't stopped,
things will get even worse than at the time of Stalin's purges.
I realised that the power in the FSB
was seized by cynics who are capable of anything.
I saw what sort of people got to the top.
Putin was the director at the time.
I could no longer keep silent.
They pleaded with me
to drop the charges.
They even offered me a higher position.
It even got comical. They'd say,
"Sasha, why are you getting all wound up?
"Find yourself a few shops and extort money from them
"like everybody else.
"You'll have your five or six K a month from that,
"you'll be fine.
"If you can't find any shops by yourself, we'll do it for you!"
The deputy head of our department shouted at me,
using four-letter words,
because I refused to finish off
"the Jew who robbed half the country!"
It was a revolt! The whole department rebelled.
The most secret department
in the entire FSB revolted.
All FSB was transfixed, watching what would happen next.
Never in the history of any secret service did a unit rebel.
Let alone a secret one that was created specifically to murder people.
At the press conference, he was the leader, but there were others.
What was their motivation?
They were afraid they'd be forced to kill people.
So they were motivated by morals, too?
No, just fear!
Because if you get into the killing business,
you might end up dead yourself.
If you cross that line, you become defenceless yourself.
That's what motivated them, not ideas.
It was something else.
In essence,
what those people did back in 1998
was an extraordinarily courageous deed.
They refused
to carry out a criminal order explicitly given to them,
a crime they were ordered to commit.
They went against the system.
We rose together,
shoulder to shoulder,
and I am grateful to them.
Six officers, some with up to 25 years of service, stood up
and said, "Enough is enough, we cannot carry on living like this."
But instead of listening to and looking into the allegations,
the state started to persecute them.
The Russian Federation has instituted criminal proceedings against him,
because of abuse of his position, specifically,
beating up citizens while they were in detention
and theft of explosives.
All the incidents in this case have already been investigated previously.
No substance for indictment was found.
A unique case in legal history.
Having heard a verdict of not guilty, the free man is arrested again.
Attention! Federal Security Service!
Everybody, please stay calm!
(Judge) The court hearing isn't over yet!
Will the Federal Security Service please behave!
Having lost the first court case,
the military prosecution and the FSB
bring new charges against them,
using dubious methods of collecting evidence.
I've worked for the FSB for six years.
As an agent.
My controller was,
and still is today,
Litvinenko.
Sasha.
I love and respect him.
He's being accused
of such horrendous things
that I want to shut my eyes.
I'm shocked.
He was and is a real human being.
And at this moment I'm lost.
They're trying to get me to testify.
I'd be an accessory, so that he'll go to jail.
How can I put a guy behind bars who... well, who created my life?
My God! He gave me my life.
Not money-wise or anything...
He said, "Roma, take a normal route.
"Normal. Don't be a thug or a nobody."
And now I'm wanted by the Solntsevo gang and so on...
Everybody's out to get me. I'm hiding from the state and also from thugs.
So what do I do now?
I don't know.
I'm all alone.
Now what? My life is over.
The FSB has fallen as low as it gets.
It is outing undercover agents
of the rebellious FSB officers
unless the agents testify against the rebels.
Alexander Gusak was also arrested on suspicion of murder.
I was under investigation for four years.
I cooperated fully,
and I wasn't convicted.
You understand?
Some Russian citizens
sincerely believe
that special services must kill.
I talked about it with a lot of my friends
who are intelligent people.
They say, "Sasha, what's all the fuss about the FSB killing people?"
What do I think of Alexander Valterovich Litvinenko?
He's just scum.
I don't blame them for it. They can't help it.
They were like soldiers
who stood up and went against the tanks.
Some of them stumbled. Can you blame them for it?
The FSB showed all the strength it could muster. All its might.
The whole complex range of measures
that KGB's political Directorate had excelled at were used again -
discrediting tactics, undermining reputations,
blackmail, threats,
fabricating evidence, phoney criminal charges...
The FSB used every possible means of subversion against its own officers.
And some of them got crushed.
One officer came to the press conference wearing a black mask.
He returned to the FSB to escape imprisonment.
He approached me
and suggested I drop my investigation into the Moscow bombings
and work against Litvinenko,
in which case, I would be left well alone.
When the FSB came to Judge Kravchenko,
who presided at the first trial against me
and ended up acquitting me,
he threw them out.
But they said, "Acquit that bastard and you're next!"
So they sacked that judge,
and appointed a loyal one.
They just point to somebody like me and go,
"Give him three years.
"We need him proclaimed guilty, even probation would do."
He got three years on probation.
They tell me I betrayed the system.
There was no need to flee.
They say, "You're a traitor, we'll kill you anyway."
To them I'm an enemy.
I chose to flee.
Why? Because I had a little son
whom they threatened to kill, too.
I looked at my six-year-old son and I thought, "What about him?
"His life hasn't even begun yet."
I thought, "Whatever happens to me, I have got to save this child!"
Trepashkin, stand up!
You want to make a statement? Proceed.
Litvinenko was forced to leave the country, not as a defector,
but to save his life.
I can confirm that. He had to escape abroad.
After that, the authorities went on to "liquidate" their critics.
They came after me, too.
As a lawyer, I represented
the survivors of the Moscow 1999 bombings.
When I refused to help prepare the murder of Litvinenko
and continued my work on the bombings,
they planted some cartridges in my apartment, arrested me,
and cynically told me it was standard practice.
To every court in Russia, an active reserve officer of the FSB is attached,
as if he's in the legal profession
and influences the judges
so they'll pass the "correct" verdict.
But does he have power over the judges?
No, not officially, but he has his ways.
He says to a judge,
"There's this person that we want to see behind bars."
The judge answers, "But there's nothing against him."
The FSB guy says, "The chief himself wants this person locked up.
"The chief never forgets a favour. You have no flat? We'll get you a flat.
"And there's a judge in a better area who will be retiring soon,
"you could be the one to succeed him."
And so our judge starts thinking.
He earns peanuts,
his wife is always nagging him about it,
his mother-in-law lives with them,
it's terribly crowded,
three people in every room...
So the judge writes "guilty" and that's it.
The judge is labelled loyal. He's theirs.
He can do anything. He takes bribes.
Then the FSB guy shows him a report of him taking bribes and says,
"Look, seeing that you're loyal to us, "we will forget about this."
And the FSB guy tears up the report.
The FSB claimed I passed Litvinenko state secrets via the Internet.
Litvinenko knew no secrets!
Everyone realises I don't know any secrets.
The only secrets I know are about organised crime and corruption
and they can't legally be considered state secrets.
Even if I wanted to work for British Intelligence,
I have nothing to tell them!
How can I be a traitor to my country?
Why are they so angry with me?
Because I have spoken about the one thing that is important, holy to them.
One officer said to me, "You can out all our agents, to hell with them.
"We'll recruit new ones. But you did one deadly thing.
"You made public our system of earning money!
"Do you want us to use the underground?"
That is why they hate me so much!
Sasha told me just recently, "I can have any information.
"Even from those people who call me enemy, a traitor."
- Really? - Yes.
No problem at all.
- Absolutely any information. - Because everything's for sale?
Yes, everything's for sale. Things like hating the enemy or patriotism
are all just for TV.
We won't sleep
until we have destroyed this nest of terrorism here.
Otherwise, our houses will be blown up,
there will be Mafia everywhere,
racketeering, people will be abducting and selling people...
Our commander, Captain Safarov, and his sergeant
were selling ammunition
for vodka and hash to the Chechens.
Weapons were going like hot cakes.
Everything was for sale.
Even PTURs.
- What are they? - Anti-tank rockets.
The officers sold out whole units.
An officer would get money.
- From whom? - The Chechens.
Then he'd send the unit where it would be destroyed.
The FSB was particularly vile. For instance...
Say the Chechens needed some people, Russian soldiers, to do some job.
They'd say to the commanding officers,
"We'll give you 2,000 bucks,
"you give us two men."
The officers would have two soldiers stuffed into a jeep and taken away.
That's what the FSB did. It sold Russian soldiers as slaves.
There are no traitors in the army.
We hope there are no traitors in the government.
This one supports us,
the Acting President trusts us and we pursue his goal.
There were funny incidents, like some soldiers saying
to Chechen women, "Give us 300 to 500 roubles
"and we won't rape you."
This, you know...
Such a level of moral degradation!
Well, if you did come to rape...
- It's sheer cynicism. - Yes. What does it mean?
500 roubles and you're not horny any more?
From my perspective as a woman, that's a bit... extreme, so to speak.
For instance, today one of my articles has come out.
On a subject I consider to be a sensation,
and of very great importance.
One of the terrorists who hijacked the Nord Ost musical walked out
and now works at Putin's administration.
To us that's... well...
of the utmost importance.
Because it changes the whole perception of what's going on in this country.
While I was writing the article, I really felt nauseous.
It was like...
falling into a cesspool
full of shit.
We thought we'd make it public and there'd be an uproar.
I mean, society must finally see...
So you see, today's Monday.
Our newspaper hit the stands early this morning. It's late afternoon now!
Nobody really cares.
We were all so upset!
But, in fact, it was a manipulated terror attack!
The government knows perfectly well
there won't be any protests regarding this affair, no meetings, nothing!
They'd be in no danger of any such thing whatsoever!
That's why I'm certain they're looking down on us in our torment
from the safe heights of the Kremlin mountain, thinking,
"Go on, hop to it!
"If need be, we'll bump you off, if not, you'll live."
Do you have the Novaya Gazeta?
The Novaya Gazeta?
You haven't got the Novaya Gazeta?
Sorry?
I've heard about this book. What is it?
- It's bullshit! - Really?
That's what we say in Russia. Bullshit.
But there must be something in it.
We don't know a thing about our history.
When you say bullshit, you mean it isn't true?
No, on the contrary. I wouldn't be buying it otherwise.
- Then why do you call it bullshit? - It's the Russian way!
Everything that's really interesting is called bullshit.
Didn't Litvinenko send his love to me?
Yes, of course he did.
A journalist who criticises the president is killed in a stairwell,
another one killed and another -
look for the killers in a special services unit specialising in that.
He told me that he was
extremely interested
in the 1999 bombings in Moscow,
and that he was going to write a lot about them.
It is very sad that Artyom Borovik is no longer with us.
What do you say to those Russian people
who might agree with you and, indeed,
understand on a rational level what you're saying in your book,
although on an emotional level,
they can't understand that a Russian man
deposits sacks of explosives in a Russian apartment block
and kills his own countrymen?
I tell you, according to the polls, more than 60 percent of all Russians
believe that the FSB blew up these buildings.
The FSB's only argument is, "We didn't blow up those buildings,
"because we simply couldn't have."
That's all.
But if you look at the history of the KGB and the FSB,
you'll see that the main occupation of those organisations
has been terrorism.
Andropov, for instance,
was a professional terrorist his whole life.
If you have an organisation like this
with such a terrorist legacy,
and a terrorist attack like this takes place, forgive me,
but who would you suspect?
Some say they couldn't have done it.
Hang on, who couldn't have done it?
Putin and FSB chief Patrushev couldn't?
I have studied Patrushev's activities.
Let me tell you, he has left a trail of crime behind him.
Putin, too, has left a trail of crime behind him.
Putin was the subject of an investigation into drug trafficking.
Sorry, but when and where?
Until he was elected President in 2000.
Relevant documents connect him to the Columbian drug syndicate.
Him personally, or in relation to someone else?
He was a consultant for a company
whose vice president
was arrested by the German police for laundering Colombian money...
The Litvinenko case raises some questions.
Journalist Jürgen Roth,
an expert author of books on the Russian mafia.
Welcome to the show.
When the premises of the SPAG
here in the Frankfurt area were searched around lunch time,
well, the offices were searched all day,
but around lunch time the Chancellor's office was informed
and that same day
the Russian Interior Ministry was tipped off about the search,
which is strange.
Even before the search took place
the public prosecutor's office in Frankfurt tried to suppress the case.
What was on their mind was that Putin was central to this whole affair.
The prosecutor investigating the case didn't get any help.
It all started with a report about money laundering in Liechtenstein.
In this report by the BND, the Federal Intelligence Service,
there was a note about the SPAG company laundering money
for a Russian criminal organization called Tambovskaya.
And so Public Prosecutor Kirkpatrick opened an investigation.
Soon after that it was confirmed that money laundering was taking place,
that the Tambovskaya connection existed
and that Putin might be involved.
When the company was founded, Putin was on the board of directors
for half a year in 1993.
After that, he was on the advisory board until 2000.
During that time,
he was in St Petersburg and also already director of the FSB.
So he was on the advisory board of SPAG while he was director of the FSB.
Now, I'm familiar with the workings of the FSB.
If someone somewhere as much as farted,
he got a written report about it.
And it's hardly plausible that Putin was not informed about all this,
about what was going on with SPAG's money,
and that the people behind it all were criminals, classic mafiosi.
He was under investigation for accepting large sums of drug money,
which is undisputed.
That was ascertained?
It was ascertained by the courts in Liechtenstein.
You can also track
his long-term intelligence connections to Germany, to Dresden.
I've got a list of all the intelligence officers
from the GDR era and Putin is on it.
Even back then, he kept close connections with the entire intelligence community
involved in dirty business.
The East German?
The GDR intelligence service. Stasi.
Corruption and things?
Not only corruption. Corruption...
That's a matter of course. No one even discusses that any more.
It's more to do with spying and destruction.
"How do I destroy a political opponent?"
Shortly after I gave the interview on Radio Liberty,
publications appeared that accused me of slandering our president,
not to mention that Putin was caught stealing metal assignments and funds
in the early '90s in St Petersburg.
Someone made a bloody great fortune!
...as a result of this disappearance, the city of Leningrad
will not receive food rations appointed to them
with a value of 11.5 million dollars.
In those days, that was a lot of money.
Poor people of Leningrad!
This is the second siege of Leningrad.
I wasn't idle during the war.
I was chief engineer
of the Leningrad defence constructions.
And now the Germans, of all people, are feeding me!
If you only knew what kind of life we live! Soon after the war was over,
only two years after that terrible siege life was back to normal!
The ration cards were abolished.
And that so soon after the terrible war.
And now, there's no war, no flood, no earthquake...
Yet we're turned into beggars.
Why?
All our lives we've studied, worked hard...
This canteen was opened
by the Würzburg and Bamberg Maltese Cross Foundations,
not the St Petersburg Mayor's office.
Just give me a pill to finish me off.
Who is Putin?
We are told, "Wait till he's President, then you'll know."
Imagine someone becoming Prime Minister in Britain,
with people asking, "Is he a thief, or isn't he?"
The real issue here is human morality.
In the Soviet Union there were two ideologies.
Communist and criminal.
In 1991, the communist ideology died, the criminal remained.
You just do as you are told! Do you understand Russian?
Why are you so rude?
France is not a country like any other.
Faced with the risk of a clash of civilisations...
Putin's regime
is a regime of oligarchs who own Russia in its entirety,
who sell their oil themselves making huge profits
while 50 percent of the population
lives below the accepted poverty line.
So it's a regime of profiteers. But you may call it what you like.
Of the many types of capitalism,
this is one of the worst, if it's capitalism.
If it's socialism, it's also very ugly.
So it's...
It's not socialism.
It isn't socialism.
Well, it does have many socialist characteristics.
There is the power of the police, the power of the army,
the absence of freedom of expression.
Virtually totalitarian.
I also think that there are rich men
who have become strong supporters of public freedom,
that's to say, the rights of man, social security and so on,
who find themselves in deepest Siberia.
I mean Khodorovsky.
So I think it's necessary to support both the unemployed who demand food
and the capitalists like Khodorovsky, who may be called a capitalist,
but he is also for freedom.
On the other hand, we must condemn
all those who suppress and prohibit the freedom of expression.
In my opinion, Russia has gone back to something it had under the tsars,
well, always, although,
at some points the possibility of real reforms existed, efforts for reform,
but under the tsars, under communism and today
it was and is an autocracy.
What your Putin calls "vertical power."
That's the way things are now.
In my opinion, that's dangerous.
Not only for the Chechens who are being massacred,
without anyone being allowed to say how awful it is,
and not only for Russia that is being stifled,
but also for the West.
Jacques Chirac awarded Putin France's highest order,
the Legion of Honour.
With great interest the Russian president studies the order...
No Russian citizen has ever received such an honour.
According to a statement by the Elysée Palace regarding these images,
it was, I quote, "an entirely private ceremony."
So not at all official. That's why there were no cameras present,
neither for the Elysée, nor from the Elysée's photographers.
But as you can see,
there are images after all, which the Russians saw on TV
and we can see what happened.
The Elysée has explained to us that Putin brought a private cameraman,
and they also said the film was meant for Putin's archive.
You know, France,
among the elite, has always suffered from the morbid influence
of a Russian mirage.
Later it was a Soviet mirage, but it had been a Russian mirage.
In the beginning, the French salons of the 18th century
were full of admiration for Catherine II
and before that Peter the Great.
Peter the Great was received by the French Académie just like Putin now.
Together with Bernard-Henry Lévy and Philippe Sollers I wrote a petition
to say it was shameful.
But there is indeed a kind of
innocent and inane admiration, that is to say ignorant admiration,
for a state that asserts itself as rational and western in its appearance.
So what about Chechnya?
That's the scandal!
But even Voltaire knew
that Peter the Great had killed his son under torture.
But he tried to hide this fact. There were also some
partisans of Russia at the time of the philosophers, like Diderot,
but he went to see Russia and though he could no longer protest openly,
since he was paid by Catherine II,
he left some papers in his drawer.
When Catherine read them, she was appalled. What did he write?
He wrote, "The Russia of Catherine II has rotted before it ripened."
Instead of ripening, it has rotted.
I'd say it's not just the leaders.
There is something widespread, a widespread malady that exists.
When Hermann Broch, the great Austrian writer,
was asked in 1945, "So you think all Germans were fascists, Nazis?"
He said no. "So?"
He said, "Listen,
"there are Nazis, and then there are those who let them come to power,
"who stood by and let it happen."
And that includes all Europeans, without exception.
There is, then, a crime of indifference
that is even more fundamental,
because it is the condition that permits the Nazi crime.
The Nazi crime itself was committed by the Nazis
and part of the population of Germany
and also of Europe, but only a part.
Yet the crime of indifference
that first authorised the Nazis to take power,
and later to wield it in the known way,
that is a general crime
committed by the Europeans, the leaders and also the population.
The crime of indifference consists of closing one's eyes
when criminal behaviour begins.
Here lies my beloved.
She was killed in the 1999 bombing in Moscow.
That was an act of terror.
I swear to you that I will do everything I can so that
no more Russians will be killed
by those terrorists from the Caucasus.
Russians ahead!
Death to the Reds!
Kill the Jews, save Russia!
Aim at the Jew, fire!
Our time has come!
Russia belongs to the Russians!
Russia for the Russians!
Hail, Russia!
This is our city!
(Kasparov) End this corrupt,
criminal power that's only based on fear, menace and lies!
Russia without Putin!
This is our city!
How wonderful our Soviet people are!
What are you doing?
Murderers!
Scum!
... this city is protecting me
And, dear God,
Don't ever let me hurt it
How can a normal person accept that he was poisoned intentionally?
In London, of all places!
He knew very well that he might be attacked.
And he knew of the existence of hit lists,
lists of people who were to be shot, and he talked about it.
But you can talk about it, and still not accept it.
And even though Anna Politkovskaya had already been killed,
he thought it could only happen over there in Russia,
not in England.
That's why he was more worried about others than about himself.
On the second day,
Sasha said, "Marina, I was poisoned."
And obviously, like any mentally balanced person would,
I resisted the idea at first.
You didn't believe it.
It's not that I didn't believe it, Andrei, I just couldn't accept it.
I couldn't accept it.
And then we both were left guessing.
A 50-50 chance? 60-40?
We just tried to push that away from us,
because if you accept that you have been poisoned,
you realise that something terrible has happened.
And you may not have the strength to fight it.
If there's a chance it was something else,
you might get strength from that...
And even when we talked to the doctors for the first time,
on the fifth day or so,
we did tell them that Sasha wasn't an ordinary patient,
that he had been granted political asylum,
that there were people who wanted to gag him,
even by doing something like this.
But we didn't claim to know anything for certain, we were just asking,
requesting them to check to find out the truth.
We didn't start screaming straight away, "He's been poisoned!"
It was too terrifying.
Litvinenko was too small a fish. He didn't really do any serious damage.
In early November, Litvinenko fell ill
after a meeting with former FSB officers Lugovoi and Kovtun.
Lugovoi is now accused
of having poisoned Litvinenko by putting polonium 210 into his tea.
He denies it.
When I saw our names in the press, I said right away, "Here I am!
"I am Andrei Lugovoi, and I'm here in Moscow."
We wrote a statement, we still have a copy.
Two days later they saw us at the British embassy.
We handed them our statements, in which we summarised
the train of events and in which we offered our total cooperation.
And that was it. Nothing happened.
Now we are sitting here in Moscow,
waiting until anyone shows an interest.
But no one does.
That's why there's a question mark over who is cooperating with whom.
A big question mark.
It makes one wonder about many other things,
about what did and what didn't happen and whether anything really happened.
Polonium is...
a substance that emits alpha radiation.
Gamma and beta have a high velocity, alpha a low one.
So when you get polonium on your hands, your skin or on your clothes
its radiation cannot pass the skin.
That's why it can't do any harm, because it can't get into the body.
And so, from that point of view, polonium 210 is safe.
(Kovtun) Exactly.
Despite the fact that we have a lot of experience in Russia,
after all, our country is a major nuclear power,
there are no statistics about polonium.
It's still something exotic.
- Tea! - Take this cup.
- Tea! - Yes.
If you were to contaminate its surface with polonium
and I were to pick it up,
I'd have polonium all over my hands.
- Would you like some tea? - Oh no, thanks.
He had been baptised in the Orthodox church
and he was a Christian all his life.
And only last year, he travelled to Israel
where he visited the Church of the Holy Sepulchre
and all the holy sites at Easter.
He was really, really inspired by all that.
And what happened was not illogical.
He came to embrace another religion, Islam.
And I don't want to juxtapose the two beliefs,
because they didn't contradict each other,
it was just a second revelation.
And it was something that millions, billions,
I don't know how many believe.
Originally Muslims didn't oppose other monotheistic religions.
They even insisted on solidarity with Jewish and Christian believers.
Right, they do not oppose them, many Muslims told me so.
So there is no conflict there.
No. As for those who accuse him of betraying his faith,
these people have no faith themselves, I think.
They're just trying to set people against each other.
They don't want people to unite.
But Sasha did.
Sasha opened his eyes.
"Papa, sit down," he said.
I sat down.
"Papa,
"I have to tell you something important."
He was already in such a grave state,
but he suddenly brightened up and said,
"I have to tell you something important. I've become a Muslim."
I just sat there.
I'd brought two little icons from home to give to him.
Here they are.
- You brought them from home? - Yes.
My sister wanted me to give them to Sasha...
God is one and the same, isn't He?
That's why I think it was Sasha's mission on earth
to reconcile the Christians and the Muslims,
and to expose this cruel and terrorist regime
of Putin and his FSB helpers.
Mr Litvinenko is, unfortunately, not Lazarus.
And it is regrettable
that such a tragic event as the death of a person
is being used for political provocations.
What political provocations? What are you talking about?
Just tell me one thing, please.
Where did the polonium 210 come from?
That's all.