fugitive peace

I met Badri Patarkatsishvili, who mysteriously died today in Surrey, in 2002. He had decided to grant me and a journalist from the Financial Times his first interview in a year and a half. We went to his house in Tbilisi, an enormous palace on a hill, where were shown into the garden—or rather gardens; there were several of them lumped together, each in a different style (Japanese, tropical, English country, and so on). I think we picked a spot under a gazebo, and sat waiting for Patarkatsishvili, who duly arrived in a golf buggy which he manoeuvred gingerly in between the bushes.

He talked a lot about the need to mend relations with Russia (this was before the Rose Revolution, when Eduard Shevardnadze was still in power, but things had already deteriorated badly), and how to promote Georgian economic development, hinting that he was the ideal person for foreign investors to deal with if they wanted to do business in Georgia.

I’ve posted the (unedited) interview notes here, but unfortunately they don’t give many clues as to why he was killed, if indeed he was killed. He was a close ally of Boris Berezovsky, the oligarch who fled the country after a showdown with Vladimir Putin. When we met him he had already decided Russia was too hot for him too and had moved to Georgia. But in Georgia he stood against Mikheil Saakashvili for president, was under investigation for plotting to overthrow the government, and reportedly left in November to spend time at his homes in Israel and England. One of the people who worked for him was Andrei Lugovoy, the man Britain accuses of murdering Alexander Litvinenko, the former KGB man who was poisoned with polonium-210 in London. Lugovoy, however, would now appear to be under the protection of the Kremlin, which accuses Berezovsky of having Litvinenko killed to besmirch Putin.

Confused? What it adds up to is that, like a lot of people who have suddenly disappeared from the Russian scene, Patarkatsishvili had no shortage of enemies, and so his death will probably remain a mystery. Sergei Dorenko, a former TV journalist who worked for Berezovsky’s television channel, ORT, before it was shut down, has posted some recollections of him (Russian). He also says that a friend of his spoke to Patarkatsishvili yesterday at 7pm London time, and he was full of beans. By 11pm he was dead.