A corrupt enemy in Russia

Max Hastings:

In Moscow shortly after 9/11 a clever Russian academic told me: "Don't believe all that stuff Putin is dishing out about how sorry we all are about what has happened. A lot of people here are thrilled to see the Americans get a kicking." A few months ago I heard a cluster of diplomats lament the difficulties of doing business with the Russians. "They still see negotiation in the old cold-war way, as a zero-sum game," said one. "If the west wants something, it must be bad for Moscow."

Few of us today want to see the Russians as enemies. We admire their music and literature, sympathise with their appalling history and, a few years ago, delighted in their emergence from the sour, brooding seclusion in which they languished for most of the 20th century.

It is precisely because we feel goodwill towards them that there is something of the bitterness of rejected courtship in our response to their recent behaviour, of which the apparent murder of Alexander Litvinenko is a bleak manifestation.

Why, having tasted freedom and democracy, should they wish to return to the murderous practices of Stalinism? How can they acquiesce in Putin's restoration of tyranny? Here is a nation suddenly granted wealth which might enable its people to become prosperous social democrats like us.

Instead, to our bewilderment, Russia is institutionalising a state gangster culture which promises repression and ultimate economic failure for itself, fear and alienation from the rest of the world. We hear of few Russians at home or abroad who have achieved wealth through honest toil. Instead, the tools of success in Putin's universe are corruption, violence, vice and licensed theft on a colossal scale.

"Complex feelings of insecurity, of envy and resentment towards Europe ... define the Russian national consciousness," wrote Orlando Figes, the outstanding British historian of the country. Underpinning all Putin's dealings with the outside world is a demand for respect, a rage at perceived western condescension. This is shared by his people, in a fashion which goes far to explain why so many support his policies.

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I suppose insecurity may be a motive for murder, but it really does not explain enough. The explanation given the Russians by Putin's media is even more bazaar according to Opinion Journal.

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Russian television has given an explanation for the murder of Litvinenko as surrealistic as any offered by the Soviets during the Cold War. It attributed his death to intrigues in the entourage of the exiled Russian oligarch, Boris Berezovsky. An announcer on the evening news said Litvinenko was "a pawn in a game whose significance he did not understand."

Mr. Berezovsky, however, had no reason to kill Litvinenko, whose views he shared and whom he had helped since his arrival in the U.K. in 2000. In November 1998, Litvinenko revealed a plot to kill Mr. Berezovsky who, at the time, was the deputy head of the Russian security council. The evidence points instead to Litvinenko having been murdered by the FSB, which, together with the other "force ministries," has become the dominant political force in Russia today.

The FSB has always had a strong interest in Vladimir Putin's critics abroad. In December 2001, a Russian police official, in announcing a warrant for Mr. Berezovsky's arrest, said, "We know what he eats for breakfast, where he has lunch and where he buys his groceries." This was followed up in September 2003 with an unsuccessful attempt to kill Mr. Berezovsky with a needle camouflaged as a pen. The British reacted by granting Mr. Berezovsky political asylum. In 2004, a stranger threw a Molotov cocktail at Litvinenko and Akhmed Zakaev, the London representative of the separatist government of Chechnya, as they stood on the street near Litvinenko's residence. Besides a history of tracking Mr. Putin's opponents, the FSB could have been encouraged to kill Litvinenko because in June the Russian State Duma passed a law allowing the president to authorize attacks by the FSB on "terrorists" in foreign countries. In fact, the Russian intelligence services do not need a law to attack persons they regard as terrorists abroad. On Feb. 13, 2004, the former Chechen president, Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, was killed and his 12-year-old son seriously injured when a bomb attached by Russian agents ripped apart their SUV. The new law, however, gives a seal of legitimacy to such operations and guarantees that those who carried them out will not be disowned or forgotten in the event of failure (or possibly even prosecuted in a post-Putin democratic dispensation).

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It makes you wonder why they even deny the killing. There is much more with more mysterious murders and deaths of opponents. It is time to look into the Russian heart and see what future murders lurk there.