Luke Dunstan

The Bangkok Post, 26 January 2008
BOOK REVIEW

Life and death under Putin

Two murdered critics of the Russian leader paint similar pictures of life in modern Russia

LUKE DUNSTAN

Russian President Vladimir Putin is Time magazine’s person of the year for 2007. The magazine points out that the title is not an honour (Putin’s predecessor Stalin was named in 1939 and 1942) but a “clear-eyed recognition of the world as it is” and “ultimately about leadership – bold, Earth-changing leadership”. Putin, says Time’s managing editor Richard Stengel, “has put his country back on the map – he is not a democrat, he is not a paragon of free speech. He stands, above all, for stability – stability before freedom, stability before choice, stability in a country that has hardly seen it for 100 years.”

Putin’s pursuit of “stability” is the driving force behind many of the events detailed in two recently published books. It is likely that his agenda, and those who carry it out, is also responsible for the two prominent murders the books are associated with.

Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya was shot dead in the lift of her apartment building on October 7, 2006. A Russian Diary is the book she was preparing for publication shortly before she was killed. Alexander Litvinenko was an ex-KGB and -FSB (successor to the KGB) agent and a critic of the Putin regime. He was poisoned on November 1, 2006 in an attack which, by the time of his death on November 23, had become an international news sensation. The Litvinenko File: The True Story of a Death Foretold by Alexander Sixsmith is an account of Litvinenko’s life and death and an attempt to identify who killed him.

The two books have numerous crossover points and commonalities. Litvinenko and Politkovskaya knew each other through Politkovskaya’s meetings with London-based enemies of Putin, a group unofficially headed by Litvinenko’s former boss, exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky. In September 2004, while flying to Beslan to cover the infamous school siege, Politkovskaya was poisoned and almost died. (Litvinenko subsequently implored Politkovskaya to leave Russia. After her death, and before he was poisoned, Litvinenko claimed Putin had personally sanctioned Politkovskaya’s assassination.)

Following each of their murders, the Kremlin denied involvement by separately describing both Politkovskaya and Litvinenko as “not worth killing”.

Covering similar ground, and touching on some of the same events, the two books present a similar picture of modern Russia with the only real difference being the scale of the image offered. As it ultimately has a single-issue focus, that is, examining who killed Litvinenko, The Litvinenko File extracts only enough current and background material to offer possible answers to this question. This turns out to be a lot of information on contemporary Russia, very little of which is positive. Compared to the sweeping reportage of A Russian Diary, however, The Litvinenko File offers just a snapshot, albeit a well-focused one, of Russia under Putin. Sixsmith’s backdrop is but a soil sample from the field of muck Politkovskaya tramps knee-deep in.

The breadth of Politkovskaya’s reportage is almost overwhelming, not factually – where her astute and confident tone guides naturally – but emotionally, in the scope, detail and holistic presentation of perpetually worsening injustice.

But appreciation of scale is not to detract from the quality piece of investigative journalism that is The Litvinenko File. Complex but consistently accessible, Sixsmith has written a compelling account that deftly negotiates a myriad of possibilities and claims surrounding Litvinenko’s murder. The book’s title is a reference to this complexity; the actual Litvinenko file is the information MI5 had on the Russian exile that apparently left Deputy Assistant Commissioner Peter Clarke, who headed Scotland Yard’s investigation, “flabbergasted” at the range of Litvinenko’s activities that could have provided a motive for murder.

Through his own investigation into what that file would’ve contained, Sixsmith also finds himself “amazed at the life he [Litvinenko] led, the risks he took and the enemies he made with such ease and apparent insouciance”.

“I ended my research more surprised he lasted as long as he did than that he eventually fell victim to the assassins who sought him out in London,” he writes.

Dedicated, loyal and probably not corrupt, at least by Russian standards, Litvinenko began making enemies through his effectiveness as a KGB and later an FSB agent, tracking illegal weapons sales. In this role and especially his next posting in Chechyna, it is most likely that Litvinenko’s work involved bloodying his hands. His dedication saw him promoted to a specialist FSB division fighting organised crime, which essentially turned out to be a hit squad. Disenchanted not by the work itself but by the corruption endemic in his unit, Litvinenko finally broke rank when ordered to kill Berezovsky, who at the time was the richest and probably the most powerful man in Russia. Berezovsky held sway with President Yeltsin, so when Litvinenko and a few other FSB agents told him of the plot on his life he had the FSB restructured and a new head installed, a young up-and-comer named Vladimir Putin.

Following what turned out to be a disastrous attempt to call Putin to heel (Berezovsky had Litvinenko go public on FSB corruption, the single act mostly likely to have sealed his fate), Putin’s star rose while Berezovsky’s waned. In line for the presidency, Putin began to move against his former benefactor and friend. Litvinenko, after being jailed and threatened, fled to London with Berezovsky’s help in late 2000. Berezovsky soon followed, leading (and by most estimates, losing) a “bitter propaganda campaign” against Putin ever since.

Over 65 concise chapters, Sixsmith evaluates the potential suspects raised in Litvinenko’s murder including Putin, the FSB, business associates – real or alleged – of Litvinenko and the Kremlin’s favourite suspect: The anti-Putin e’migre’s, headed by Berezovsky. Whenever the list starts to feel overpopulated, Sixsmith returns to step-by-step coverage of the UK police investigation where names are gradually struck off. As anyone who followed the case will know, its most exotic element, the use of the radioactive isotope polonium-210 as a poison, became the police’s strongest lead, since polonium leaves a radioactive trail wherever it goes. This trail leaves little doubt as to who murdered Litvinenko. On whose orders they did it Sixsmith makes an informed evaluation taking into account FSB/KGB culture, the sycophantic and permissive mood of Russia’s security agencies under Putin and a law passed by the Duma on July 14, 2006, permitting the assassination, in Russia or abroad, of “extremists”, which 13 days later was expanded to include anyone “libellously critical of the Russian authorities”.

From the viewpoint of Russian officialdom this description would fit Politkovskaya. The late journalist was intensely critical of the Putin regime as well as the FSB and military and their adjuncts, especially in her reporting from Chechnya and the Caucasus region.

In A Russian Diary, which is made up of reportage and notes written between December 2003 and August 2005, Politkovskaya catalogues a litany of rights abuses, democratic rollbacks and examples of both state and public indifference that she ultimately describes as the “re-Stalinisation” of Russia. Though her reports cover bureaucratic and political cronyism, the subjugation of the judiciary, the removal or corruption of democratic systems and many murders, disappearances and instances of torture carried out by the armed forces, one constant is total fearlessness on the part of the state. The authorities know that their victims are without recourse, but what Politkovskaya laments more than the impunity handed them under Putin is the acquiescence afforded by the general population, those who aren’t victims.

“Anyone who hasn’t been hit in the pocket has nothing to say,” she writes.

Politkovskaya’s tone of incensed desperation with the scale of both the state’s offences and the public’s indifference would be draining were it not for her big-picture analysis. As she details the poverty of pensioners and war veterans, the stonewalling of victims of (non-state) terror or the wholesale destruction of Chechyan society, A Russian Diary can seem as a book of dispatches from Dystopia. While it far from lightens the mood, Politkovskaya’s contextualising of each report as part of an increasingly dismal state of state affairs in Russia gives some meaning to the loss and pain she records.

What rings clearest from A Russian Diary, and is also made clear in The Litvinenko File, is that Putin’s legacy should not be headed “stability”. While he has brought order to Russia, induced economic growth and is liked by the majority of Russians, it is nonetheless the type of stability and what he has done to achieve it that he should be judged by. And while his leadership may be “bold” and “Earth-changing”, his legacy, as detailed in these two books, should really be that of a despot who has sanctioned widespread violence and terror and fostered a fascist culture.