Among the candidates’ tortuous biographies, none is so noir as that of Andrei Lugovoy, who is wanted by Britain on suspicion of slipping radioactive poison into a dissident’s tea. (Sergei L. Loiko / Los Angeles Times)
Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov is one of Russia’s last die-hard liberals. A local boy from Sochi who rose to prominence as a deputy prime minister in the freewheeling 1990s, Nemtsov was reduced to the status of well-informed gadfly as Putin consolidated power. (Sergei L. Loiko / Los Angeles Times)
Alexander Lebedev, the former KGB officer who enriched himself to the status of billionaire oligarch and is now a casual critic of the Kremlin, owns a media empire that includes Russia’s feisty Novaya Gazeta and London’s Evening Standard newspapers. (Sergei L. Loiko / Los Angeles Times)
