Marina Litvinenko's Memoir Reclaims Sasha from the Poisoned Icon

Twenty years after Alexander Litvinenko died from polonium poisoning in a London hospital, his widow Marina has published her own account of the murder and its long aftermath. Her memoir, A Life in Fragments, is co-written with Emily Fairbairn. It arrives as both a love letter and a continuation of a fight.

One photograph defined the case. It shows Litvinenko in intensive care in November 2006, gaze defiant, weeks after visitors from Moscow poisoned his tea with radioactive polonium. A public inquiry later concluded that Putin had "probably" approved the hit, carried out by two assassins Marina's account implicitly dismisses as clownish. The deathbed image ran in newspapers worldwide. It became the emblem of a paranoid KGB state that silenced its critics abroad.

Litvinenko himself had predicted worse. He told British detectives he was the target of a vengeful mafia state, and warned that Putin, if unchecked, would start a war in which millions would die. The warning now reads as prophecy.

Who is the book's real Litvinenko?

Marina's central act is reclamation. She strips away the tragic iconography and restores a husband. Not Litvinenko the doomed dissident, but Sasha: a loving partner, a softie father, an incorrigible optimist who always saw the best in people.

She also refuses the role assigned to her. She describes the word widow as reductive. "I never felt comfortable with it," she says. Instead she continued her husband's battles. Her chief opponent was the Kremlin, which covered up the crime and celebrated its operatives. One of the killers, Andrey Lugovoy, became a parliamentary deputy and a fixture on state television.

A second adversary was closer to home. David Cameron's coalition government fought her at every step. Justice secretary Chris Grayling refused her legal aid. Home secretary Theresa May turned down her request for a public inquiry, arguing it might harm international relations — in plain terms, annoy Moscow. May relented only after a Russian missile downed Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine, killing all on board. The reviewer's verdict on that policy: grubby and short-sighted.

What does the murder look like from inside the marriage?

The book's most powerful material is intimate. The evening after Litvinenko met Lugovoy and his accomplice Dmitry Kovtun at the Millennium hotel, he fell violently ill. "Marina, I don't feel good. Maybe I've been poisoned," he told her. Hospital doctors diagnosed a stomach bug. It took three agonising weeks before the British establishment realised he had ingested what the narrative calls a small nuclear bomb.

An MI6 contact, "Martin", rushed belatedly to his bedside. Marina opposed the deathbed photograph and the accompanying statement accusing Putin of murder. She later conceded the image worked. "Sasha's hard gaze seemed to say, I will never be silenced," she writes.

After his death, doctors allowed her 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. Then came the bureaucracy. An officious woman telephoned demanding council tax. "My house is radioactive and the subject of an ongoing police inquiry," Marina replied. "I'm afraid the bill is still overdue," the official answered.

How did a factory worker's daughter become a campaigner?

Marina grew up in Moscow, the daughter of factory workers. As a child she questioned her teachers and authority. Her mother Zinaida begged her to toe the line — a survival tactic in the USSR. "I had a childish belief in truth and fairness," Marina recalls. A talented dancer, she trained at a KGB club, where she watched Disney and Charlie Chaplin films forbidden to ordinary citizens.

She met Sasha at her 31st birthday party. He was "boyishly handsome", with high cheekbones and "full, almost feminine lips". He told her he was an "oper" — an operative detective working organised crime. They married, and spent idyllic summers with their son Anatoly at a dacha near Moscow.

The crisis came in 1997. The FSB, the KGB's domestic successor, ordered Litvinenko to kill the oligarch Boris Berezovsky. He refused, tipped off his intended victim, and held a press conference denouncing the illegal order. "Doing the right thing was his driving force," Marina writes. Putin, the FSB's new boss, singled him out. Litvinenko was suspended and jailed in Lefortovo prison. The couple wrote daily letters, maintaining an "invisible thread". In 2000 he fled Russia; reunited in Turkey, the family escaped to London.

Safety proved illusory. After political asylum was granted, Sasha "bounced off the walls of our flat", exclaiming "we're safe". Former colleagues rang from Moscow with a warning: "Remember what happened to Trotsky." Russian diplomats buzzed their front door. The door was later hit with a petrol bomb.

What came after?

In 2013 Berezovsky was found hanged at his ex-wife's Berkshire mansion. Marina does not accept the police finding of suicide. That same evening her apartment was burgled. The thief took Sasha's old laptop, hidden at the back of a cupboard, and Marina's computer holding files on the polonium investigation.

Further blows followed. She found a new companion, Alexei, a brilliant Russian chemist in Berlin — a romance of two adults, low on expectations, rich in talk of Sasha. He died of cancer diagnosed in 2018. Her gravely ill mother urged her to seek Putin's forgiveness and return home. Marina refused: the regime would trap her in Russia and use her as propaganda. She could not attend her parents' funerals. A friend retrieved childhood photographs from her mother's untouched flat, seemingly left as "bait".

The book closes on Marina's own voice, unbroken. She was in western Ukraine in 2022 when Russia sent in its army. She calls Putin a "tyrant on a par with Stalin" and predicts his habit of silencing critics will fail. "Sasha might be gone but his voice lives on in me. His fight is my fight," she writes. The memoir stands as proof that the fight continues.