House Editorial: From Russia with love
Calling James Bond: the bear is back — or may have never left
Posted on November 30, 2006

It sounds like the plot of an upcoming “James Bond” movie: a former KGB agent living under political asylum in London dies from ingesting what was later discovered to be a radioactive substance. Enter Daniel Craig, an Aston Martin and a martini glass to save the day.

But sometimes truth is stranger — and in this case, more ominous — than fiction.

Alexander Litvinenko had fled to England with his family in 2000 to escape state persecution for blowing the whistle against the FSB, the ideological successor of the KGB. Living in London under political asylum, he became an outspoken critic of Putin’s increasingly antidemocratic and totalitarian regime.

This October, Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian investigative journalist who had circumvented Putin’s control of the media and printed damning reports of human rights violations in Chechnya, was found shot dead in her Moscow apartment building. Litvinenko had begun investigating her death from London when, after a series of meetings on Nov. 1, he suddenly fell ill.

After being misdiagnosed multiple times and dismissed when suggesting poison, his condition worsened dramatically, eventually leading to his painful and prolonged death a week ago. The killer: polonium-210, a deadly radioactive isotope that nuclear experts claim requires the capacities of a nuclear weapons state.

In a statement by Litvinenko, released posthumously, blame was laid squarely at the feet of Vladimir Putin, who was naturally quick to deny any involvement. But this latest tale of murder and intrigue is only the latest of disturbing signs and signals that the Soviet regime is still very much with us. Rather than dying at the end of the Cold War, it increasingly appears that Moscow has merely hid totalitarianism behind a progressive mask.

Freedom of the press, for example, was only beginning to bloom when Putin ripped it from the ground. The brave handful of journalists who skirt the extensive state control of the media have a bad habit of winding up dead; Politkovskaya is not the first Russian journalist in very recent memory to be gunned down, and she certainly will not be the last.

Putin’s increasingly autocratic state control over Russia’s “free economy,” particularly in energy markets, is also cause for concern. Europe is heavily dependent on fuel coming from Russia, which Russia is more than happy to use as a bargaining chip. A price war between the Kremlin and the Ukraine at the end of last year prompted Russia to shut down its natural gas deliveries on New Year’s Day and effectively brought much of western Europe to their collective knees.

And lest we forget, Moscow’s involvement in the death of Litvinenko — a naturalized British citizen under political protection — is tantamount to an act of war. Killing spies on foreign soil used to be business as usual for the Soviets; it is distinctly less becoming for a Russia maintaining the auspices of a democracy. We can only hope Litvinenko’s parting words will prove true: “The howl of protest from around the world will reverberate, Mr. Putin, in your ears for the rest of your life.”

Time to gas up the Aston.