Murder and Russian Politics

What follows is an excerpt from this week's Economist article of Russia. To read the whole article, which in my opinion is one of the best articles on the state of play in Russian politics, click on the post title above.

The Litvinenko affair

Murder most opaque

Dec 13th 2006 | MOSCOW
From The Economist print edition

What a poisoned Russian agent tells us about the way that Russia is governed

THE flamboyant Russian community in London has until recently been regarded by the city's natives with wry amusement. The tycoons and tax refugees at its centre have boosted the price of high-end property, imported expensive soccer players along with their befurred wives and provided useful fodder for gossip columnists. Then Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned.

Never in his life was Litvinenko as important as he has become in death. He was not really a spy, as he has been described, but worked for domestic units of the FSB, one of the KGB's post-Soviet successors. He has been labelled a defector; but few people took the information he brought out of Russia when he fled to Britain seriously. He had always been a pawn in other people's power struggles, and even as a pawn his utility was declining....

... Another theory mooted in Russia is that the sudden spate of mysterious killings—which has claimed others besides Litvinenko and Politkovskaya—is part of the ongoing power struggle inside the Kremlin, in advance of Mr Putin's putative departure from office in 2008. The aim, it is variously said, is to undermine one or other of his possible successors or somehow to force Mr Putin to stay on, which some who have profited during his presidency would sorely like him to do. Whoever is anointed by Mr Putin as his successor will surely “win” the election in 2008; the real competition, it is argued, is occurring now, between Kremlin factions. This idea sees Litvinenko's murder as a symptom of a basic flaw in Mr Putin's quasi-authoritarian system of government: the transfer of power, as mandated by the constitution, is tricky and perilous....

... During a tsar-like televised phone-in with his people in October, Mr Putin made a little-noticed but revealing remark. He was asked, in a periphrastic way, about a tasteless joke he had made in relation to allegations of rape against Moshe Katsav, Israel's president. It was wrong, Mr Putin said, for the issue of women's rights to be used as a weapon in political squabbles. In other words, he assumed that the allegations had an ulterior motive—as they would have had in Russia. This points to the problem at the bottom of Russia's increasingly bitter ties with the West: the Russians' deep conviction that the rest of the world works as Russia does, and that all politics and diplomacy are as cynical and self-interested as Russia's own.

The row over Mr Berezovsky is another example of this way of thinking. Some Russians simply refuse to believe that in Britain extradition cases are decided by the courts, rather than by the government. Likewise, some in the Kremlin were angry that Litvinenko's deathbed accusations managed to penetrate his police guard to be broadcast: they apparently assumed that protection meant arrest.

Try to be nice to the snoopers

The Russians now have a chance to repair their reputation, reassure the world about the security of their nuclear installations (a nagging worry since the Soviet Union's collapse) and prove that law in Russia is more than a political instrument. Russia's qualms at hosting foreign detectives bent on questioning current and former spooks are understandable; any country would feel much the same. But the Russians could, short of compromising state security, offer total co-operation with the British inquiry. Condoleezza Rice, America's secretary of state, urged them this week to do just that.

Both the British and the Russians are trying to appear conciliatory. Yet the co-operation has been tightly circumscribed from the start. As well as being permitted to question their interviewees only via Russian officers, the Scotland Yard detectives seem unlikely to be given access to any serving FSB men. The Russians, meanwhile, have begun their own investigation into Litvinenko's death and what they say is Mr Kovtun's own poisoning, and want to question people in London. That could in theory bolster the British efforts—or it could result in obfuscation, and be used to advance old grievances.

It would not be fair to conclude from any of this that the Kremlin is guilty as charged. But it all amounts to yet another sign that the hopes entertained in the West about Mr Putin when he first took office—that he actually meant what he then said about democracy, and that under his rule Russia could conceivably become a “normal” country—were misplaced. There have been many such signs, from barbarity in the north Caucasus to harassment of foreign oil firms and meddlesome foreign policy. But perhaps none has publicised the murk and cruelty of life in Russia so effectively as the mysterious death of an unimportant man.