(C) Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
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The Brutal Killing Of A Reporter Who Probed Putin's Past [1]
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Date: 2024-10
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)
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 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.
Aleksei Domnin in 1995 (Courtesy photo)
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."
The 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.
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