CORRECTION APPENDED

When Alexander Litvinenko’s agony ended in death on Nov. 26 [see correction below], the press’s imagination immediately came to life. Perfectly time-pegged to the revival of the James Bond franchise, the renegade KGB spy was silenced forever with an obscure poison on British soil: What more could a news or opinion writer ask for? All eyes are now on the dodgy Kremlin. Beyond a doubt, there are numerous criticisms to be made of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. But, considering this murder’s context, doesn’t it sound like too linear a plot, a too obvious conspiracy theory?

In 1962, the year of Litvinenko’s birth, the Cold War reached its climax. JFK and Krushchev came very close to igniting a nuclear Apocalypse during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a couple of months before Alexander was born in a remote Russian village. After making a good impression with the intelligentsia at the Ministry of Internal Affairs, he moved up in Soviet bureaucracy. In 1988, as dissent became pronounced all throughout Eastern Europe, Litvinenko joined the infamous KGB, the counter-intelligence agency and symbol of Soviet realpolitick in the West.

The Soviet Empire crumbled in 1991 along with the Berlin Wall, but Litvinenko’s career did not suffer. Actually, he even received a better position at the KGB’s successor, the Federal Security Service (FSB), and specialized in infiltrating organized crime syndicates, which proliferated in the post-perestroika Russia. After serving a nine-month sentence for “abuse of power” in 1999, Litvinenko pulled off a spectacular escape from Russia that took him to the United Kingdom via Turkey. His renegade life had begun.

As soon as he landed in London loaded with two decades of Russian intelligence information, he became an ardent critic of Vladimir Putin’s administration. He decried the Kremlin’s autocratic tendencies, provided interesting information about Pope John Paul II’s attempted assassination in 1981, and was even quoted saying that a leftist Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi was the “KGB’s man in Italy” during the Cold War. Suffice to say, this left him with a long list of enemies.

Most famously, Litvinenko wrote Blowing Up Russia, which claimed FSB agents had actually planned the 1999 Moscow apartment bombings that killed over two hundred civilians and lead to the second Chechen war. Supposedly, the Kremlin had handcrafted a causus belli sacrificing hundreds of Russian civilians in order to invade Chechnya and prevent its independence. I wonder how many friends he had left at the FSB after such a thesis.

But even for the renegade spy, Nov. 1 was a busy day. An official British citizen since the previous month, he met with former KGB contacts and an Italian informant for sushi and tea. Apparently, he was looking into the recent murder of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who had been a fervent critic of the Kremlin’s actions in Chechnya. Litvinenko fell ill soon thereafter, and less than three weeks later he died of poisoning at the intensive care unit of the University College Hospital in London. His renegade life might have ended but the media frenzy had just begun.

But this story’s mise en scène seems far too obvious. After all, Litvinenko was poisoned with Polonium 210, which is 250 million times more toxic than cyanide. In order to get this obscure substance experts said one needs access to a nuclear laboratory. And the only reference to it as a weapon was found in a 1994 paper only published in, you guessed it, Russian. But even more importantly, why would the quite professional Russian secret services murder someone slowly, giving them over three weeks to blame them, and do it with a substance that could only point in their direction?

The Western media has been too lenient with Putin’s administration for far too long. But instead of condemning, say, Anna Politkovskaya’s death, the Chechen campaign, or even the Kremlin’s nuclear dealings with Iran, the media has made its criticism on the basis of irrational and sensationalistic fantasy scenarios. As comparisons with the luckier spy James Bond flooded in, The London Times’ Edward Lucas recommended the West got ready for a new Cold War. The Financial Times’ John Thornhill nostalgically remembered Churchill calling for Europe’s union against Russia, while The Daily Telegraph opined the West was losing patience with Putin. And of course, The Sun—a scandal-mongering tabloid—titled Litvinenko’s poisoning: “From Russia, with Lunch.”

Russia democracy is just a façade, its media is co-opted on a daily basis, and its military campaign in Chechnya is rife with human right abuses. But despite Litvinenko’s letter, which openly blamed Putin, and a Kremlin’s defensive response—“The allegations are nothing but nonsense”— this plot seems far too linear. We need to criticize Russia for the more important reasons, without going bonkers about a dead spy before we have more evidence.

Litvinenko had myriad enemies, and the Kremlin was definitely topping the list. But either Putin has lost the art of subtlety, or the West is actually facing a scarier prospect: Russian leadership is losing even more control over its intelligence services. If that’s the case, then it’s indeed worthy to quote Dame Judi Dench in the latest Bond: “Christ, I miss the Cold War.”


Pierpaolo Barbieri ’09, a Crimson editorial editor, is a history concentrator in Eliot House.

CORRECTION: The November 30 op-ed, "A Plot Too Linear," mistakenly identified the death of Alexander Litvinenko as occurring on November 26, 2006. Actually, Litvinenko died on November 23, 2006. The Crimson regrets this error.