In Russia, people shrug at Litvinenko’s death
The poisoning of the spy in London is not a big story in Moscow, writes Rachel Polonsky. People are too obedient or too frightened to trouble themselves with the truth
Moscow
To endure the city’s traffic, I school myself in detached contemplation of the dramas of dominance and submission on show in the streets. My quietism almost failed me the other day, however, when a Land Cruiser cut in front of me in the rain as I drove down Nikitskaya towards the Kremlin. The blazon on the vinyl cover of its spare wheel shone through the muddy spray: an outsize sword and shield, coat-of-arms of the KGB, set with the goatee-bearded profile of ‘iron’ Feliks Dzerzhinsky, first head of its predecessor, the Cheka. The KGB is chic; so is its successor organisation, the FSB.
Fifteen years after his statue was removed by crane from Lubyanka Square to the cheers of a revelling crowd, Dzerzhinsky stands tall. Civil life is frozen in his shadow. The FSB, from which almost the entire Kremlin elite is drawn, now employs tens of thousands of people: genial polyglots who cultivate foreign investors and diplomats; smooth-talking ‘political technologists’; masters in the arts of hi-tech surveillance, and brutal-looking men who drive around in black Volgas, wearing cheap suits and pointy shoes. President Putin is a fluent apotheosis of all these security-service types.
‘We stand for organised terror,’ Dzerzhinsky proclaimed in 1918, a few months after the founding of the Cheka. President Putin would not put it like that. For him, it seems, the security services — from the Cheka through the OGPU, NKVD and KGB to the current FSB — stand for a unique vouchsafement of continuity in Russian history. ‘Epochs succeeded one another, stereotypes got shattered and political views changed, but the security of the Fatherland ... and the protection of its citizens have always remained the principal objectives of your work,’ the President told his former colleagues a couple of years ago on what is fondly known as Chekists’ Day: ‘Yours is responsible, sophisticated work requiring supreme professional competence, personal integrity and courage.’ The muted reaction here to the poisoning of Aleksandr Litvinenko is a symptom of the cult of the FSB, whose essence is secrecy. The story featured briefly in the pantomime dramaturgy of the evening news, in which the President who knows everything chides his failing ministers; Nato devilishly encircles Russia; fearful poisons from abroad (in the form of Georgian mineral water, Polish meat and Latvian sprats) are repelled at the borders of the Motherland by brave operatives of the customs service, and the usual suspects are always guilty.
Those who believe that the FSB is an incorruptible bastion of heroic Russian patriotism can obediently accept that things are being taken care of in ways they need not comprehend (but in which they may, of course, assist with the odd denunciation). The most soothing option is to half believe what one is told by the smiling diktors who read the news on Channel One: every bad thing that happens is somehow the work of the hated exiles in London bent on destabilising Russia, or of foreign powers with the same intent. The traditional image of the British as stock villains in tales of espionage and conspiracy (which served Soviet paranoia from the Civil War to the Show Trials of the 1930s) has been vividly revived in the past year. Farcical scenes of an alleged British agent in a woollen hat kicking an electronic rock in a Moscow park were followed by a macho speech by President Putin in the Lubyanka where, flanked by ex-KGB comrades from the Kremlin, he congratulated the ‘lads’ in counter-intelligence and sneered at MI6.
Those who believe that the FSB combines political repression with an organised crime racket are often disinclined to take an interest. They tended to shrug when they heard about Litvinenko. ‘It’s just a dirty spy story’; ‘a traitor is a traitor’; ‘he was too petty for the Kremlin to bother with’; ‘the FSB would have done a more professional job’; ‘you can buy polonium 210 at the market’; ‘the nuclear installations are impeccably secured’; ‘what can we know?’ Whatever the truth, in other words, scores are being settled; none of it is public business. As a Russian friend observed recently, this country is the triumph of postmodernism. Simple people believe anything. Everyone else is persuaded that there is no truth at all, only power and PR. The best one can hope for is ‘stability’. All ‘information’ is assumed to be staged and paid for; every public utterance serves someone’s low material interests. To protest against the pervasive cynicism that is the engine of power here is ‘naive’ or ‘romantic’. This induces either a paranoia in which everything seems linked; or a numbness in which nothing seems to matter. After tragedies like the hostage sieges at Dubrovka or Beslan, intrigue follows intrigue towards a vanishing point where the victims and their stories are so hidden that it seems as though nothing really happened at all. Outside the intelligentsia, few people even registered the death of Anna Politkovskaya. ‘She got in someone’s way, I guess,’ was a typical response.
In the face of all this, ordinary people concentrate on private loves, on art or faith, cosmetics, sex, drink or light entertainment, and most on the struggle to survive. At last summer’s graduation ceremony at my children’s school, which valiantly tries to open what Russians call ‘perspectives’ for its pupils, the teachers addressed the graduating class with good wishes for the future. ‘Maintain your distance,’ the history teacher said. ‘Be true to yourselves and resist propaganda ... it is so powerful.’ The Russian system of what the scholar Andrew Wilson calls ‘virtual politics’ can only survive if the elite is united. In the surge of killings over the past few months — culminating in the Litvinenko murder — some see an end to Putinist ‘stability’ slouching into view. In the absence of any genuine political life, the vertical power structure cannot withstand the problem of the presidential succession in 2008, when Putin has promised he will abide by the constitution and step down.
Perhaps these never-to-be-solved killings who really believes we will ever discover the truth about Litvinenko? — are all part of the war over succession within the Kremlin. When Litvinenko first announced that he had been poisoned, he told journalists that he had documents relating to the death of Politkovskaya which he would pass on to Novaya Gazeta, the bi-weekly investigative newspaper for which she worked. Since then, Novaya Gazeta has scarcely alluded to Litvinenko. His death is mentioned in passing in an editorial in the current issue headlined ‘The Party of the Third Term’, in which Novaya Gazeta speculates that a hidden political faction close to power is planning ‘new and terrible’ events that will break the illusion of stability, and ‘rouse society’ into a pitch of anxiety about life after Putin, while simultaneously alienating the West so thoroughly that he has nothing to lose by abandoning the constitution.
On its website, Novaya Gazeta announced that the day after Litvinenko’s death two of its reporters had received death threats. The newspaper has already lost three. Life is precious. Who still wants to know the truth?
Previous page
