A Life in Fragments by Marina Litvinenko review – intimate testimony of Putin’s poisonous regime

Among the many images of violence that define Putin's chilly reign, one stands out: the photo of Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko in intensive care, taken in November 2006. After meeting visitors from Moscow, they poisoned his tea with radioactive polonium. A public inquiry concluded that Putin had "probably" approved the hit, sending two assassins to carry it out.

The London deathbed picture featured in newspapers worldwide, symbolizing post-millennial Russia as a cruel place ruled by a paranoid KGB tsar. Litvinenko warned that unchecked Putin would start a war in which millions would die. Twenty years later, his wife Marina has told her own story in a memoir co-written with Emily Fairbairn.

Her book is a moving act of reclamation, bringing her dead husband back to life not as a tragic figure but as "Sasha": a loving partner, softie dad and incorrigible optimist who always saw the best in people. Throughout, she rejects the label of widow, calling it reductive, and instead continues her husband's battles against the Kremlin.

British Government Resistance

A more surprising adversary was David Cameron's coalition government. Justice secretary Chris Grayling refused Marina legal aid, while home secretary Theresa May turned down her request for a public inquiry, citing potential harm to international relations with Moscow. The policy was "grubby and short-sighted," Marina writes.

May only relented after a Russian missile downed Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine, killing all on board. Giving evidence at the 2015 inquiry, Marina described her husband's awful cancer-like decline. The evening after meeting Lugovoy and his accomplice Dmitry Kovtun at the Millennium hotel, Litvinenko fell violently ill, telling her: "Marina, I don't feel good. Maybe I've been poisoned."

Life Under Threat

After his death, doctors allowed Marina to touch his body. "I was able to kiss him and touch his skin with my bare hand. Despite all the medicine, he smelt like Sasha," she records. Amid her grief, bureaucratic absurdity continued when an "officious woman" demanded council tax payment despite her radioactive home being under police investigation.

Marina grew up in Moscow as the daughter of factory workers, with a childhood habit of questioning authority that her mother Zinaida warned against in Soviet Russia. A talented dancer, she took lessons at a KGB club where she watched Disney and Charlie Chaplin movies prohibited for ordinary citizens.

She met Sasha at her 31st birthday party, describing him as "boyishly handsome" with high cheekbones and "full, almost feminine lips." He was an FSB operative investigating organized crime when they fell in love and married. In 1997, crisis came when he was ordered to kill oligarch Boris Berezovsky but refused, tipping off his victim and holding a press conference.

Ongoing Struggles

Putin, then FSB boss, singled out Litvinenko for punishment, suspending and incarcerating him in Lefortovo prison. After escaping to London in 2000, they received political asylum but weren't safe. Former colleagues warned: "Remember what happened to Trotsky," and their home was later hit with a petrol bomb.

Putin's pursuit continued even after Litvinenko's death. In 2013, Berezovsky was found hanged at his Berkshire mansion, though Marina doesn't believe he killed himself. The same evening, her apartment was burgled, with Sasha's old laptop and her computer containing polonium investigation files stolen.

Marina found new love with Alexei, a Russian chemist in Berlin, but their romance ended when he died of terminal cancer in 2018. During this period, her mother was gravely ill, urging Marina to ask Putin for forgiveness and return home, which was impossible as the regime would likely use her as a propaganda pawn.

Marina emerges from the memoir as plucky and dogged with an unerring sense of right and wrong. In western Ukraine in 2022 when Russia invaded, she believes Putin is a "tyrant on a par with Stalin" whose habit of silencing critics will ultimately fail. "Sasha might be gone but his voice lives on in me. His fight is my fight," she writes.