LONDON—Nikolai Glushkov, a Russian émigré, lived alone in a weather-beaten row house in South London with an aging dog and a cat named Braveheart. It was the waning days of March, and he was readying himself for something big.
The one-time finance director of Russia’s flagship airline, he was preparing for a trial in a London court. He told friends it would prove his innocence of longstanding financial charges by Russian authorities and expose Aeroflot Russian Airlines as a front for Russian security services. The case could also prove embarrassing for President Vladimir Putin, by illuminating a piece of post-Soviet history the Russian government has tried to erase.
After running out of funds to pay his own lawyers, Mr. Glushkov, 68 years old, planned to represent himself, and had amassed tomes on British law and forensic accounting. “This case was his purpose in life,” said Georgy Shuppe, a friend and former business partner. “He was not going to give up.”
On the eve of a preliminary court hearing, Mr. Glushkov stopped answering his phone. When his daughter drove to his house to investigate, she found him inside, strangled to death with a dog leash. Later that night, dozens of antiterror police cordoned off the house and began digging holes in his yard.
Nikolay Glushkov, left, sponsored a pirate treasure hunt for children in Berkshire, England, in 2009.
Photo: Elizaveta Berezovskaya
In Russia, his death was portrayed by state-controlled media as a homosexual tryst gone wrong. British police are treating it as a murder investigation. In August, they posted video footage of a black van seen near his home the night he was strangled, asking anyone with information to get in contact.
Mr. Glushkov’s death has sent a strong message to Russia’s émigré community. He was part of a trio of once-powerful Russians who, after amassing fortunes during Russian privatizations, helped build the political system that brought Mr. Putin to the presidency. After falling out of favor, the trio fled to England and tried to mount opposition to their former protégé, only to see their efforts disrupted by untimely deaths and costly litigation.
Their leader, Boris Berezovsky, was found hanged in a bathroom of his house in Berkshire, England, in 2013, in a death that was initially called a suicide but now police are investigating anew. Mr. Berezovsky’s longtime security assistant, former Russian security officer Alexander Litvinenko, was killed in 2006 by a fatal dose of the radioactive isotope polonium-210, a murder the U.K. blamed on Russia. Another partner, Badri Patarkatsishvili, died of a heart attack in 2008, in what police have deemed natural causes.
Mr. Glushkov, Mr. Berezovsky’s right-hand man, was the last alive.
His death happened one week after the nerve gas poisonings of a former Russian spy and his daughter in Salisbury, England—an attack the British and American governments have pinned on two alleged Russian agents. The Kremlin denied any involvement in this and other assassination attempts and the men say they were innocent tourists.
The central issue in the Glushkov case was Aeroflot’s claim that the Russian and his partners, after gaining a foothold in Aeroflot management during privatizations, looted $120 million from the company.
In written statements, Aeroflot spokesman Andrey Sogrin said Aeroflot “is not today, nor was it ever, a ‘paymaster for Russia’s security services.’ ”
He called Mr. Glushkov a “fraudster” who was convicted in Russia “of an elaborate scheme to divert huge sums of Aeroflot’s foreign currency into the Swiss bank accounts of companies he controlled.”
Mr. Sogrin said that Aeroflot had nothing to do with his death, adding that “if he had lived” Mr. Glushkov “would have faced a substantial civil judgment in England, as well.”
Mr. Glushkov maintained that Aeroflot’s claim against him was absurd and that the entire case, which wound its way through the Chancery Division of London High Court for years, was a pretext for Russian authorities to harass him.
The pretrial court filings, including a 51-page witness statement viewed by The Wall Street Journal, show he intended to respond by reopening chapters of 20-year-old Russian history that are sensitive for the Kremlin and Russia’s security services.
Over the years, the Kremlin has reshaped the story of Mr. Putin’s rise to power, stressing his role as a disciplined KGB careerist who rescued the country from oligarchic billionaires who looted the national wealth after the Soviet Union collapsed.
Through government-controlled news outlets and film documentaries, Moscow has largely erased suggestions that Mr. Putin was helped to power by anyone more powerful than himself—such as Mr. Berezovsky, Mr. Glushkov’s business partner, who helped promote Mr. Putin and knew him personally.
A former mathematician, Mr. Berezovsky built a fortune in the final years of the Soviet Union through an auto dealership called Logovaz, and used his wealth to amass political power. After the country’s dissolution in 1991, he gained control of Soviet-era industries through tainted privatization auctions and political influence, amassing a financial empire that spanned automobiles, oil, media, and Aeroflot, the national airline. He set up his Moscow headquarters in a Tsarist-era palace known as the Logovaz mansion, where high-level government officials waited to meet him in the anterooms.
In 1996 Mr. Berezovsky teamed up with other oligarchs to bankroll the successful campaign of incumbent President Boris Yeltsin so he could face down a challenge from Russian communists. In 1999, when Mr. Yeltsin anointed Mr. Putin as his successor, Mr. Berezovsky and his allies helped vault him from virtual obscurity to national prominence by providing fawning coverage of his presidential campaign on ORT, the television network Mr. Berezovsky once controlled, and cobbling together a political party, Unity, which served as Mr. Putin’s springboard.
Rivals accused Mr. Berezovsky of funding his political projects by siphoning billions of dollars from companies he gained control of during privatization, a charge Mr. Berezovsky denied. Through most of the 1990s, Mr. Glushkov was known as Mr. Berezovsky’s right-hand man in managing these enterprises, including the country’s largest auto maker, AvtoVAZ, and the national airline, Aeroflot.
Mr. Putin soured on the oligarchs as he built the top-down political system that he dominates today, joining forces with security-service allies to take over key businesses. Maria Litvinenko, widow of Alexander Litvinenko, who was poisoned by polonium in London in 2006, said in an interview her husband believed Mr. Berezovsky’s takeover of Aeroflot ultimately destroyed him and his allies because he made so many enemies in the security establishment....MUCH MORE
