Thread by @CarlSchreck

🧵Here's the final installment of our series on Putin in the 90s. It's about a journalist who dug into Putin's past for an article titled “Lieutenant Colonel Putin Illegally Heads Up FSB” - and was beaten to death a week after publication: rferl.org/a/putin-journa…

A thread:

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You've likely never heard of Anatoly Levin-Utkin. Maybe you came across his name in lists by media-watchdogs (like @pressfreedom) of journalists killed in Russia. But there's virtually no public information about him beyond those little snippets: cpj.org/data/people/an…

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Levin-Utkin was an editor with Yuridichesky Peterburg Segodnya ("Legal Petersburg Today"), a startup paper that investigated corruption. Here's what's now the only known photo of him available online after we published it today (other than his obit pic we also published).

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Levin-Utkin was a crack researcher -- an old-school OSINT type whose boss, Aleksei Domnin (seen below), would dispatch him to work his connections at St. Pete libraries to dig on whatever subject they were investigating.

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The last investigations Levin-Utkin worked on looked at corruption in the Russian customs service & the cutthroat banking sector. And, of course, the profile of Putin, who'd been named FSB chief by Boris Yeltsin in July 98 & was unknown to the broader Russian public.

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So on Aug. 12, 1998, Levin-Utkin's paper published what it managed to dig up about the new FSB chief. It was published under the headline “Lieutenant Colonel Putin Illegally Heads Up FSB.”

Now, a few words about the article...

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It was among the first in the Russian articles digging into Putin's bio after his FSB appointment. No real bombshells, but it alluded to Putin's scandals, including his shady barter deals that led to calls for his firing. (Background here: rferl.org/a/putin-corrup…)

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The article also claimed that according to internal FSB rules, Putin couldn't legally become FSB chief because he was only a lieutenant colonel, not a general. (We found no evidence supporting this claim.)

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The article was written under the pseudonymous byline "A. Kirilenko," and according to Levin-Utkin's boss Aleksei Domnin (now a musician and DJ), Levin-Utkin didn't write the article but rather contributed research.

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Whatever the Putin profile's journalistic merits (or lack thereof), Domnin says it triggered a reaction from Putin's circle. He says he met with a Putin associate who inquired about the paper's financing. Also, the associate allegedly didn't like the photo they used:

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The alleged Putin associate did, in fact, work with the Petersburg branch of the Our Home Is Russia party that Putin led in 1995. But he denied the meeting happened, though Domnin gave a pretty detailed account:

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Eight days after the issue with Putin's profile was published, a neighbor found Levin-Utkin unconscious near the elevator in his apartment building. He'd been savagely beaten with a metal bar & what a doctor later called an apparent "deliberate" killing.

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Levin-Utkin died four days later, on August 24, 1998. He'd turned 41 just a week earlier and was survived by his wife.

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Whoever beat Levin-Utkin to death also took his briefcase with materials for the newspaper's next issue, as well as some cash and his documents. Publicly, police said it looked like a robbery. His colleagues believed it was connected to his work.

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Levin-Utkin's newspaper published his obituary a month later (see below). "We loved him, as one can only love very good, wonderful people," they wrote.

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Levin-Utkin's murder remains unsolved. There's a good chance we'll never really know for sure why this quiet, reserved, erudite man was brutally beaten to death. Russian journalists have been killed for all kinds of reasons. But his story deserved to be told.

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We called Levin-Utkin's widow, and despite the contemporaneous press accounts, recollections of his colleagues, & the obit his paper published, she claimed her late husband had not worked for Yuridichesky Peterburg Segodnya. She told us not to call back.

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You can read our report about the murder of Anatoly Levin-Utkin in Russian @CurrentTimeTv (currenttime.tv/a/biografia-pu…) & @SvobodaRadio (svoboda.org/a/kto-ubil-avt…)

It would not have been possible without the brilliant reporting of my colleague Andrei @Soshnikoff.

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Our entire investigative project on Putin/1990s here: rferl.org/a/putin-corrup…
Huge props to colleagues @Soshnikoff, @kromark, @pustota, @kbenyumov, @sgutterman, @graficn, @michaelageev, @tolkunkg, @OlgaBeshley, @CoalsonR, @rayfurlong, & many others for making it happen.

/END