Rasputin's Shadow Read Free

glowing profiles about him in
The
New York Times
, listening to his rousing speeches on YouTube, watching as the protest marches he’d led grew and grew until the unheard-of started to happen, until tens of thousands of angry, fed-up Russians of all ages and means braved freezing temperatures and menacing riot police and started congregating in Bolotnaya Square and elsewhere in the capital to hear his words and shout out their agreement and express their having had enough of being treated like mindless serfs.
    And if listening to his words wasn’t exhilarating enough, if seeing those crowds back in the home country didn’t make his heart thunder, what made it all the more rapturous was that this inspirational leader, this exceptional and courageous man, this savior of saviors, was none other than the son of Leo’s own brother. His nephew, and apart from him, the last surviving member of his family.
    The family that he had all but obliterated himself.
    The screen cut back to footage of his nephew’s last speech, footage that Sokolov suddenly found almost unbearable to watch. Looking at the young man’s poised features and the irresistible energy he radiated, Sokolov couldn’t help but imagine how that would have changed after he’d been arrested, couldn’t block out the horrors that he knew had befallen the man. As he had so many times since the news of his death had broken, he couldn’t avoid picturing his nephew—that beautiful, shining beacon of a man—thrown in some dark hole at Lefortovo Prison, the bland, mustard-colored detention center close to the center of Moscow where enemies of the state had been incarcerated since the days of the tsars. He knew all about its sordid past, about how dissidents held there were force-fed through their nostrils to get them to be more compliant. He knew about its dungeons and its “psychological cells,” the ones with the black walls, the solitary twenty-five-watt bulb switched on 24/7 and the constant, maddening vibration that roared in from the neighboring hydrodynamics institute with such vigor that you couldn’t even set a cup on a table without it skittering off. He also knew about its monstrous meat grinder, the one they used to pulp the bodies of its victims before they were sluiced into the city’s sewers. Alexander Solzhenitsyn had been imprisoned there, as had another Alexander, the ex–KGB agent Litvinenko, who’d been given a chain-smoking informer for a cell-mate during his incarceration there—a thoughtful little gift from his former employers, given how much he couldn’t stand cigarettes—before being murdered by way of polonium-laced tea after running off to London following his release.
    The death of Sokolov’s nephew hadn’t been anywhere near as sophisticated. But, Sokolov knew, it was undoubtedly far more painful.
    Undoubtedly.
    He shut his eyes in a futile attempt to block out the wrenching images of what he knew they would have done to him in there, but the images kept coming. He knew what these men were capable of; he knew it well and fully and in all of its gory, inhuman detail, and he knew they wouldn’t have spared his nephew any of it, not when a decision had been taken high up, not when they needed to get rid of a major thorn in their side, not when they wanted to set an example.
    The screen shifted to another point of view, this one coming from somewhere much closer to the rundown Astoria bar Sokolov was slouched in. It showed a protest demonstration that was currently under way in Manhattan, outside the Russian consulate. Hundreds of demonstrators, waving signs, shaking fists, attaching bouquets of flowers and tributes to the gates of adjacent buildings—the whole scene watched over by New York’s finest and a small army of news crews.
    The screen then cut away to show other, similar, demonstrations taking place outside Russian embassies and consulates around the world before returning to the one in Manhattan.
    Sokolov stared at the