Boris Kolesnikov’s rise as a corruption fighter in the Interior Ministry was unusually rapid—and ultimately fatal. Illustration by David Plunkert; Reference: Courtesy Kolesnikov Family

The line for lawyers and family members to get into Lefortovo prison starts to form around five in the morning. The building, on a quiet street just east of Moscow’s Third Ring Road, now officially belongs to the Ministry of Justice, but it’s still informally known as the prison of the F.S.B., a successor agency to the K.G.B. Early on June 16, 2014, one of the prisoners awaiting visitors was Boris Kolesnikov, a general who had been the deputy head of the Interior Ministry’s anticorruption department. Along with nearly a dozen other officers from his unit, he had been charged with entrapment and abuse of authority, running an “organized criminal organization” that illegally ensnared state bureaucrats in artificially provoked corruption schemes.

Kolesnikov’s lawyer, Sergei Chizhikov, arrived around dawn and stood in line for several hours. At 9 A.M., guards began letting in a few people at a time. By eleven, Chizhikov was still waiting. Eventually, a guard told him that his client had been taken to another site, the headquarters of the Investigative Committee—the Russian equivalent of the F.B.I.—for questioning. “Look for him there,” the guard said.

When Chizhikov finally made it to an interrogation room on the Investigative Committee’s sixth floor, he found Kolesnikov seated at a table with an investigator and two guards. Kolesnikov, who was thirty-six, was clean-shaven and dressed in a blue tracksuit. He had the muscular frame of a cop, but a smooth, youthful face and puffy cheeks.

Six weeks earlier, on May 4th, Kolesnikov had suffered a dual fracture to his skull. Prison officials claimed that he had fallen off a stool while trying to wash the small window of his cell; his family and their lawyers feared that he had been beaten. Kolesnikov hadn’t said much about his injury—he told Chizhikov and his other lawyers that he didn’t remember what happened to him, and seemed wary of going into more detail. “He chose his words very carefully, answered questions slowly, always afraid he was being watched or recorded,” Chizhikov recalled. “He wasn’t very open in conversation. He thought whatever he might say would only bring him harm.” After his head trauma, Kolesnikov became depressed and passive. At pretrial hearings in court, he was “inactive,” Chizhikov said. “They brought him in, told him to sit there, and so he sat there. He wasn’t trying to assert his rights. It was like he was indifferent to it all—O.K., something is happening, let it happen.” Kolesnikov spent two weeks in various hospitals before being sent back to his cell, but he still experienced frequent bouts of debilitating nausea and had trouble standing, even for short periods.

When Chizhikov found him in the interrogation room, Kolesnikov seemed more invigorated than he had in recent weeks, but once they started talking he said he felt sick and asked to be taken back to Lefortovo—he didn’t want to answer any questions from investigators. As they waited for a van from the prison service to return him to his cell, the chief investigator for Kolesnikov’s case, a man named Sergei Novikov, entered the room. He asked if Kolesnikov would like to talk in private. This was unusual, and against protocol; Chizhikov said that he didn’t recommend it but wouldn’t stop his client if he wanted to. Novikov and Kolesnikov stepped into the corridor. “As far as I could understand, they had some kind of agreement that Novikov was supposed to show up so the two of them could talk,” Chizhikov recalled.

A few minutes later, Novikov rushed back into the room. His face betrayed a sense of shock. “He jumped!” he said. Chizhikov didn’t understand what he meant. Novikov made a diving motion with his hand and said that Kolesnikov had hurled himself from a sixth-floor balcony and lay dead on the concrete below. He rushed off to report to his superiors.

Chizhikov, left alone, tried to collect his thoughts for what would surely be a forthcoming investigation. “I can guess they brought him to the Investigative Committee on this day so that this conversation could happen,” he told me later. “But why did it end in tragedy?” Outside, cameramen from Russia’s tabloid news outlets were photographing Kolesnikov’s body.

He was buried three days later, at Moscow’s Vostryakovsky cemetery. The Interior Ministry denied him the usual honors paid to police generals—there was no farewell salute and no military escort for the casket—but friends and colleagues pooled together money to hire a small orchestra. A number of officers from Kolesnikov’s unit told me later that they had been warned by their superiors not to show up, but some three hundred came anyway. As Kolesnikov was being lowered into his grave, they gave him the traditional officer’s sendoff: a triple shout of “Ura!” Kolesnikov’s wife, Viktoria, didn’t say much, except to offer her own view of her husband’s death to the few journalists present. “They killed him,” she said.

Boris Kolesnikov’s rise in the Interior Ministry was unusually rapid. The ministry is a sprawling federal agency with more than a million employees, whose responsibilities range from overseeing local policing to mounting high-level nationwide prosecutions. His stepfather, Ivan, who raised him from the time he was eight years old, was an officer in the Soviet-era police force and teaches criminology at Russia’s main police academy. Boris and his two brothers joined the force in the nineteen-nineties. His stepfather recalls telling them, “If I were an artist, then you would all be artists. But, seeing as I am a police officer, therefore you will all be police officers, so as to carry on the dynasty.”

On Kolesnikov’s first assignment as a detective, at a precinct in Moscow’s northern district, he was paired with another novice, Denis Sugrobov, who became his partner and friend. According to several of Sugrobov’s colleagues, it was clear from the outset that, given his talents for police work, he was destined for a stellar career in the Interior Ministry. He had a disarming smile, and was known for both his formidable investigative skills and his obsessive care in tending to the boring minutiae of drug busts and antifraud stings. “He had no equal in his thoughtfulness, his knowledge of the law, his ability to carefully and precisely document everything,” a former police investigator who worked on several organized-crime cases with Sugrobov said. Sugrobov’s wife, Maria, with whom he has five children, told me, “Youth gives a certain fervor, a sense of daring toward everything, an understanding that a person can move mountains.”

Kolesnikov and Sugrobov grew to trust each other as they handled narcotics cases in the violent gangland of late-nineties Moscow. A former police captain who supervised them during this period said, “Denis was a leader; Boris was a follower. Boris wasn’t an intellectual, and was not all that great at writing reports—but he certainly wasn’t a coward, either.” Once, during a sting operation, Kolesnikov was found out while playing the role of a drug dealer in an apartment with four suspects. They tried to attack him with knives, but he ran out onto a balcony and held them off until police officers came to his assistance.

Other than the occasional hunting trip or birthday, Sugrobov and Kolesnikov didn’t socialize much. But they were close, bound by the triumphs and anxieties of their work. Kolesnikov confided to Viktoria, “This is my second hand, my shoulder, this is a person whom I trust fully. God forbid, if something were to happen to me, this person won’t abandon you or the children.”

The former police investigator told me, “If Sugrobov was working on a case, he didn’t think about anything else.” He added, “He was careerist, in the good sense of the word.” Sugrobov was said to have a benefactor and protector in Yevgeny Shkolov, who is reputed to have served in the K.G.B. with Vladimir Putin in Dresden in the nineteen-eighties, and came to work in the Presidential administration as a powerful adviser in charge of monitoring the real-estate and business dealings of state officials. As Sugrobov took on new assignments and earned awards and promotions, so, too, did Kolesnikov. “Denis was the motor, the ideologue, the one in charge of things,” a former Interior Ministry employee told me. As for Kolesnikov, “he didn’t have Sugrobov’s connections or access—he was just his friend.”